The act of voting carefully

If enough voters insist on substance over slogans, they can force politics to change.

Each election cycle in Nepal feels increasingly familiar. We hear the same promises, see the same performative outrage and end with the same disappointment. What is most troubling is not the repetition itself, but what we have quietly stopped expecting from politics. We have accepted that elections are won through agitation rather than argument, that campaigns succeed by provoking emotion instead of persuading voters, and that anger can substitute for an economic roadmap. Somewhere along the way, we have normalised the idea that citizens should be mobilised, not convinced.