Revamping Nepali Congress

Nepal needs a strong Congress party, a historically moderate, left-of-centre democratic force.

The Nepali Congress formally fractured on Wednesday, an inevitable consequence of the grand old party being treated as no more than a vehicle to fulfil one man’s political ambition. For a decade, Sher Bahadur Deuba steered the organisation with arbitrariness, where his personal greed for power and a stubborn refusal to heed the winds of change superseded democratic principles. By resisting the Gen Z movement’s urgent calls for reform, Deuba has effectively traded the party’s unity for the interests of his inner circle. This third split in the party’s history since 1950 is a damning indictment of a leader who, most recently, chose to sack his general secretaries without even the basic courtesy of a request for clarification.