United Nepali Congress is in everyone’s interest

The country has never needed a party with strong democratic credentials in the opposition more than it does today.

Following the Gen Z uprising last September, the Gagan Thapa-Biswha Prakash Sharma faction of the Nepali Congress courageously revolted (albeit a little too late, in the reckoning of some). It then successfully organised the Congress special general convention—just around a month before the March 5 polls. The convention unanimously picked Thapa as the new party president and the party went into the polls under his leadership. Yet the election results were nothing but disastrous for the Congress. The party shrunk from 89 seats that it had secured in the 2022 federal elections to 38 seats in the 275-member—in what was easily the party’s worst electoral performance ever. As Thapa had taken up party leadership on election-eve, he rightly accepted responsibility for the party’s drubbing and stepped down as its president. Yet the new central working committee elected by the special convention refused to accept his resignation, arguing that the electoral setback represented a collective failure of the ‘old’ Congress rather than of Thapa as its leader. In their view, the Congress brand had been greatly damaged under the previous party president Sher Bahadur Deuba—and there was only so much Thapa could do to resurrect the party’s image in the little time he had before the national elections.