RSP’s women leaders on what it took to reach a majority

Fifty-one of 99 elected seats now held by women — but the party's own leaders say the harder battle is for power at the top, not just numbers.

When the Rastriya Swatantra Party’s organisers walked on stage at an internal orientation, Anushka Shrestha counted them without meaning to. Roughly seventy men. Two women. “That made me feel woke,” she says now, sitting in the party that has brought nearly 51 percent of women into its Central Committee. Even with the best intentions in the room, she says, allies would say things like, “Let’s not think of gender now. Let’s just bring the best up.” “That’s exactly what equity isn’t,” she says. “Equity is about pulling things up so that they are equitable.”