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Four years ago, the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) did not exist. Today, it is forming Nepal’s government. That alone should make every traditional political party stop and ask itself a very uncomfortable question: what went so wrong?

The March 5 election results were not merely a surprise. They were a rebuke, delivered quietly through the ballot box by millions of Nepalese voters who had run out of patience. RSP's landslide victory is historic not because a new party won, but because it signals something deeper: the collapse of public faith in the political establishment that has governed this country since the democratic revolution of 1990.

The weight of 35 years

To understand why RSP won, you have to understand what Nepali Congress, CPN-UML, and the Maoist Centre have come to represent in the minds of ordinary voters. These parties have had every opportunity. They have held power repeatedly. They have made promises repeatedly. And repeatedly, voters have watched corruption scandals unfold, unemployment persist, public services stay broken, and governments formed through deals that had nothing to do with governance and everything to do with political survival.

The Sept 2025 GenZ protests tried to force accountability through the streets. Young people came out in tens of thousands, angry and organized, demanding change. The response from the old guard was predictable: consolidate, maneuver, and wait for the storm to pass. Many of those same leaders tightened their grip on their party structures and assumed they would outlast the anger.

They misread the room. When the protest could not dislodge them, voters took matters into their own hands on election day. Quietly, and in massive numbers, they chose someone else.

The Balen factor

RSP’s strategic decision to align with Kathmandu’s popular mayor, Balen Shah, and present him as the incoming Prime Minister just weeks before the election was arguably the most consequential political move of this election cycle. It gave RSP something it badly needed: a face, a story, and a reason to vote.

Balen ran a campaign unlike anything Nepal had seen before. He traveled the country in a caravan-style tour, appearing in constituency after constituency, not as a party boss but as something closer to a movement. His interactions with the media remained minimal. His public statements were carefully measured. Yet none of that seemed to matter. What voters saw was someone different. Someone who had actually done something as Kathmandu’s mayor, and who carried himself with a quiet credibility that felt foreign in a political landscape dominated by familiar faces making familiar promises.

This is important to understand: many voters who cast a ballot for RSP could not name their local RSP candidate. Many had only a vague sense of the party’s actual policy platform. What they knew was Balen, and what Balen represented—the possibility, however uncertain, that things could be done differently. In a country exhausted by broken promises, that possibility was enough.

History has a pattern

Nepal’s political history follows a recognizable rhythm. The party that captures the energy of a major political turning point tends to win the election that follows. Nepali Congress led the government after the 1990 democratic movement. The Maoists swept to power after the peace process ended the decade-long armed conflict. Madhes-based parties rose in 2008 on the back of a powerful identity movement. UML and the Maoists dominated in 2017 after steering the promulgation of the new federal constitution.

RSP has now repeated this pattern. Whatever one thinks of the GenZ protests, RSP absorbed their energy and their symbolism. They carried the sentiment of that movement into the election. And history, as it tends to do, rewarded them for it.

The harder question

But winning is the easy part. Governing is not. RSP now inherits a country with a fractured economy, deeply entrenched patronage networks, a public service in disrepair, and a geopolitical position that requires careful navigation between India, China and the West. The very expectations that swept RSP to power are now its greatest liability. Voters did not just want RSP to win. They wanted someone to actually fix things. The mandate is real, but so is the weight of it.

Several questions will define RSP’s tenure before it even properly begins. Can the party hold together its internal dynamics—particularly the relationship between the party leadership and whoever leads the government—without fracturing under the pressure of real decisions? Will it have the discipline to focus on long-term governance rather than the temptation of short-term popularity through high-profile corruption investigations? And perhaps most critically: will it fall into the same patterns of compromise politics that eroded the credibility of every government before it?

There is also the question of capacity. RSP is a four-year-old party. It does not have the deep bench of experienced administrators and policymakers that comes with decades in politics. This is, in some ways, part of its appeal. But governing a country is not the same as campaigning through one. The distance between the promise of change and the delivery of it has destroyed many political careers in Nepal. RSP is about to find out how wide that distance really is.

A verdict, not a blank cheque

The March 5 result deserves to be read for what it is: a verdict on the past, and a conditional bet on the future. Voters did not give RSP unconditional trust. They gave it a chance and it is a rare, hard-won chance born out of collective frustration and a willingness to try something new. That is not the same as loyalty, and RSP would be wise not to confuse the two.

Nepal’s old parties will not disappear. They will regroup, recalibrate, and wait. If RSP stumbles—if governance fails, if corruption appears, if the internal politics become more visible than the public service—those parties will be ready to remind voters that the alternative they chose was no better than what came before.

The GenZ generation that lit the fuse of this political moment is watching. So is the far larger group of ordinary Nepalis who quietly voted for change without quite knowing what form it would take. They have done their part. The ballot box has spoken.

Now comes the harder work, and the real test of whether this is truly a new chapter in Nepal's politics, or just another turn of the same old wheel.

March 5: A democratic fest

The promise of an election is the promise of change, a peaceful transfer of the people’s voice from the ballot box to the halls of power. For Nepal, the historic election of March 5 represented this promise in its most potent form. Yet, the path to this democratic festival was paved with tragedy, and the victory it yielded for the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) now presents a profound challenge: to translate a powerful electoral mandate into tangible, lived reality for its citizens. The question that hangs in the air is whether the echo of the ghanti (the bell, the election symbol of the RSP); the student protests that sparked this political realignment can truly move from being a symbol of agitation to a force for effective governance, ending corruption and shaping to the sustained economic development.

The election was not born of ordinary political circumstance, but from a crucible of national tragedy. On Sept 8-9 last year, students in uniform marching peacefully with a demand for effective governance and an end to corruption were met with lethal force. The image of school students in uniform, shot dead while exercising their civic voice, ignited a firestorm of grief and rage that consumed the nation. Public buildings, business houses including the hallowed halls of Singhdurbar and the Supreme Court, were set ablaze. The Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli (aka KP Sharma Oli) government collapsed, and the homes of political leaders across the spectrum were attacked. This was not a mere political crisis; it was a popular uprising against a systemic failure of governance, mayhem of corruption, a violent repudiation of a status quo that had prioritized power over people. It was from the ashes of this upheaval that Prime Minister Sushila Karki’s call for a national election emerged, not as a routine political exercise, but as a desperate bid to channel the nation’s fury into a democratic and constructive path.

Against this backdrop, the election itself became a powerful act of civic renewal. Citizens from the entire nation embraced it as a "festival of democracy," a collective affirmation of hope for an impactful future for them, their children and prosperity for future generations. The campaign trail became a magnet for this yearning, with the RSP under Rabi Lamichhane and the former mayor of Kathmandu, Balendra Shah, tapping directly into the public's desire for fundamental change. Their message was not one of transactional politics, but of a shared national prosperity: to connect people and communities to prioritize service over self-interest, and to dismantle the systems of deep-rooted corruption and phony governance. 

The result was a landslide of unprecedented proportions. The RSP’s victory—over 125 parliamentary seats and five million plus proportional votes—is more than a win; it was a seismic shift in Nepal’s political landscape of history. It signals the electorate’s decisive rejection of established, corrupt kitchen family-centric  political groups and a clear, unequivocal mandate for the reform agenda championed by  Rabi Lamichhane and Balendra Shah as the new guard. The challenge, however, is that securing a mandate and wielding power are two vastly different endeavors.

The most immediate and formidable obstacle confronting the RSP is not a political opposition, but the deep-seated inertia and corruption within Nepal’s bureaucracy. This administrative machinery, long accustomed to serving the interests of the old political order, is now expected to implement the radical reforms of the government system currently operating. Many bureaucrats, with fixed loyalties to political groups, the electorate just repudiated, view the new leadership with suspicion, if not with outright hostility. Their mastery lies not in public service delivery, but in navigating and exploiting legal loopholes, perpetuating rent-seeking behaviors, and ensuring that the status quo remains unchallenged. For the RSP, this presents a paradox: their government must govern through a system they were elected to dismantle. Mobilizing the lethargic and often obstructive apparatus to improve public services, from administrative, health and education to infrastructure and market access will be the first true test of their governing capability in the Singhdurbar. Failure to do so risks rendering their electoral promises hollow and eroding the very public trust that swept them into office.

This form of bureaucratic resistance is compounded by profound structural weaknesses in Nepal’s economic governance. The nation’s fiscal health tells a story of chronic mismanagement. For years, the bulk of the national budget has been consumed by recurrent expenditures, salaries, pensions, and administrative costs, while capital investment, the lifeblood of development and job creation, has languished. The figures are stark: between the fiscal year of 2019-20 and 2023-24, ratio of expenditure on total recurrent averaged 70.36 percent of the total budget spending went to recurring costs, while a mere  of 16.67 percent allocated for capital expenditures and a 12.97 percent went for debt servicing in the reporting period of five years averaged. This imbalance starves the economy of the infrastructure and productive capacity it desperately needs financing. Furthermore, a banking system that is prohibitively expensive for small and medium-sized enterprises, a private sector often more focused on tax evasion than innovation, and a monetary policy that has historically favored a few large corporate houses all conspire to stifle broad-based economic growth. Compounding these issues is a burgeoning public debt, now approaching 46 percent of GDP. For the RSP,  the task is not merely to tweak the system, but to fundamentally re-engineer it. First, the RSP government must overhaul the Ministry of Finance, transforming it from a passive administrator of routine into a strategic engine for resource generation and investment. The RSP must create a financial ecosystem that rewards entrepreneurship and productivity, not rent-seeking and evasion.

The path to reform also runs through the marble halls of the judiciary and the complex architecture of fiscal federalism. For the average citizen, the promise of justice remains a distant dream, mired in a court system known for interminable delays and prohibitive costs. Without meaningful judicial reform, the RSP’s pledge of accountability will ring hollow. What’s more, the promise of federalism, now over a decade old, has largely evaporated into poor performance and misaligned incentives. Subnational governments, rather than becoming vibrant centers of local governance, have often devolved into parking lots for party pawns and resting places for bureaucrats awaiting their retirement, contributing little to the development of their federal polity. The RSP’s inception mandate is not to get bogged down in the complex Constitutional Amendments Affairs, but to focus on this practical, improving ground-level dysfunction. From the very first day in office, citizens expect to see a difference and change in how their government functions faster public service delivery, more efficient administration at all three tiers of government, and an end to the chronic delays and cost overruns that plague development projects, which are often themselves a form of sanctioned corruption.

From Ghanti’s echo to delivery

Ultimately, the RSP’s historic victory must transform the Ghanti’s echo from a cry of grief into a demand for impactful results that the student sacrificed for. The Ghanti has echoed with unprecedented clarity, delivering not merely a rejection of personality-driven politics and infamy patronage, but a direct mandate for meaningful reform and impactful performance. The obstacles before the RSP government are formidable: a bureaucracy resistant to change, a structurally weakened economy, and a collection of institutions that have long failed to serve the public. The RSP’s success, therefore, will not be measured by the size of their parliamentary majority, but by its capacity to overcome these deeply concreted forces. It must prove that democracy can deliver that the act of casting a ballot can translate into superior governance, cultivating inclusive microeconomic opportunity, a functioning system of justice that honors slain students. The opportunity before the RSP is as immense as the challenge it faces: to move Nepal beyond its cemented cycles of misgovernance and demonstrate that the people’s voice, even when forged in the tragedy of school student killed in uniform, can indeed shape a future where the promise of a better life is finally and faithfully kept.

The sun is just coming up in a green village in Parsa. Outside the small cooperative warehouse, farmers have already formed a long line and kept their sack since night. Some are holding old plastic sacks, others folded slips of paper that have been used too many times. No one knows if the fertilizer truck will arrive today. Still, they wait. Some walked for hours from outlying hamlets. By midday the stock’s gone again, leaving most to head home with nothing but frustration and another promise for ‘tomorrow’. It’s the same story over several years, and it hits harder than any drought.

On that same morning, an old bus heads toward Kathmandu. Young people fill the seats, looking out of the windows, quiet. They are going for coaching classes, for English lessons, or to talk to agents about work outside the country. Months later, many of them leave by plane. The fields in the village remain. The hands that worked them do not.

This is how daily life looks in much of rural Nepal. People line up for the basics. Others pack bags and leave, hoping for something better. Watching it is tiring, living through it worse.

Once again, elections are around the corner with politicians arriving in every village with their loud promises. They talk about roads, culverts, footbridges, gates, sometimes even statues in the chowk. These promises are easy to show and easy to photograph. But things that matter in the long run—science labs, agricultural research, better ways of farming—are rarely part of the conversation because these are not easy to show by cutting a ribbon within a month. Research and innovation take time.

Where are the pledges for serious money into R&D? For at least building local innovation centers or research centers at the province or district level, linking universities with actual farmer communities or small industries, bringing in better seeds or techniques that don’t depend on waiting for the next subsidy truck? Politicians talk about development like it’s all about pouring cement, as if a new highway, freebies alone will keep our kids from packing up and leaving.

Fixing potholes and handling local works is the role of ward offices and local governments. An MP’s role is at the national level: shaping laws, framing long-term policies, setting budget priorities, and deciding which sectors need investment for national development. This is where real direction is set, not in day-to-day local problem solving. Election discussions in Nepal rarely move beyond small, visible wins—contracts, local projects, things that photograph well on posters. Meanwhile, the underlying problems stay where they are. Farmers still struggle to get fertilizer, students struggle to get placed even after university degree because research, planning, and supply systems are nowhere in the priorities of any of the political parties.

Young people keep leaving. According to our national data and figures over the past few years, more than 2.5m of our people have gone abroad for work or study, and nearly 900,000 left in just the last year. Student migration has followed the same pattern. Last year alone, over 112,000 students received no-objection certificates to study overseas, almost twice the number before covid. These are not abstract figures. They show a steady loss of people who might otherwise have built their lives here.

Universities play a role in this. Most continue to focus on theory, with limited emphasis on applied research or problem-solving that could create jobs locally. In 2019-20, when countries around the world were under lockdown, universities elsewhere redirected their laboratories and research capacity toward vaccines, treatment, and public health solutions. In Nepal, political attention during that period was on something else—donations, commissions, and short-term gains. It was the time that should have pushed their mentality towards investment in science and research, but even after that public money continued to flow mainly into roads, buildings, and temples, after the end of that deadly time no one again thought about what if this happens again, who are we going to depend upon? Not only that but if the world itself fights the battle who will really be ready to invest their research and innovation into us if that is not for trial and testing?

Science and research don’t give quick photo-ops. A bridge goes up fast and gets a plaque with the politician’s name. A good R&D program might take 8-10 years to show real results—no one gets credit for the slow build. That's why manifestos chase the fast and flashy instead of the patient work that actually builds a future.

It’s time to look around the world. Countries that pour money into research pull ahead. South Korea went from dirt-poor after the war to a tech giant by pushing R&D spending to nearly five percent of GDP. Israel tops the charts at over six percent, turning itself into a startup hub that actually pulls talent back in. China didn’t grow overnight; it has ramped up massively and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty while building its own research powerhouses from physics to material science and what not. Even now, places like the UK are talking about hitting three percent for R&D, focusing on AI and green tech.

What about Nepal? Our politicians look in a different mood from decades ago. Our government official data show R&D at around 0.3 percent of GDP back in 2010, and recent reports (including from ministers) suggest it's dropped even lower—maybe under 0.1 percent in places. Our research institutes have more administrative expenditures than the research budget. That’s why we are below the global average of about 2.6 percent. We stay stuck importing seeds, tools, medicines, expertise—always buyers, never sellers. Reports from the Ministry of Education science and Technology indicate that the National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST) spends the vast majority of its budget on ‘mandatory obligations’ like salaries and administration (recurrent expenditure), leaving very little for actual research. In FY 2021-22, for instance, the recurrent expenditure rate was 95 percent, while capital expenditure (needed for research infrastructure) lagged significantly. At Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC), the operational budget available for actual research projects is a small fraction of the total allocation, with one analysis showing ‘real investment’ in specific research components as low as 3.5 percent of the total budget.

Our best minds go abroad for better labs, better pay, better chances. They don’t come back not because they hate Nepal, but because there’s no place here to use what they’ve learned. We call it brain drain, but it’s really a failure to create the soil where talent can grow.

Imagine election promises that actually say: “We’ll aim for 1–2 percent of GDP in R&D within a decade. We promise to set up regional innovation hubs focused on agriculture, chemistry, AI, biotech, renewables. We'll pass laws to immediately link universities to startups and farms, fund real research (obviously with less administrative budget and more research budget like now) instead of just buildings." Labs could matter as much as roads—better seeds that cut fertilizer needs, new techniques that make farming pay enough to keep families on the land, skilled jobs that make staying home feel like progress. Infrastructure still matters—roads get goods to market. But without the ideas and innovation to go with them, those roads just speed up the exodus.

Nepal’s dependence on imported seeds, medicines, technologies, and expertise did not happen overnight. It is the result of years of political choices that treated self-reliance as optional. What should worry policymakers as a strategic weakness is often handled as a convenient arrangement—import today, postpone reform tomorrow. The problem is that this mindset keeps the country permanently unprepared. Every global disruption exposes how fragile this dependence really is, yet the lesson is rarely taken seriously.

At the same time, our politics still measures development by what can be seen and inaugurated. Roads, buildings, gates, statues—these are easy to explain to voters and easy to photograph. Science does not fit into this style of politics. Laboratories take years to mature. Research outcomes are uncertain. Patents and pilot projects do not offer instant visibility. So they are pushed aside, even though they shape long-term economic strength far more than another stretch of concrete. Migration adds another layer of denial. Political discussions continue to frame it as a success story of remittance inflows rather than as a warning sign that the system is failing its own people. When the exit of skilled youth is normalized, there is little pressure to build research environments that give them reasons to stay. Science funding then becomes a “nice-to-have,” not a necessity.

As new political faces seek public trust in this election, this silence matters. Real change will not come from new slogans or younger candidates repeating the same priorities. The real question is whether anyone is willing to shift the agenda—to treat science and research as matters of economic survival, strategic security, and political responsibility. Without that shift, Nepal may get new leaders, but it will remain stuck with the same future.

We voters share the blame too. We cheer for the quick fixes, the inaugurations, the handouts. Politicians know the game well and they give us what we reward. If we keep settling for short-term bandaids and freebees, we’ll keep getting them.

As a GenZ in science, I think it’s time to ask for more. Demand manifests that don’t only talk about happiness, freebees but talk about science labs, innovations as urgently as they talk about highways. Real progress isn't just concrete—it's breakthroughs, knowledge, people building things here instead of wiring money from thousands of miles away.

In that Parsa village tomorrow, the queue will form again, another young person will pack a bag. Whether that changes depends on what we insist our leaders promise—and what we hold them to after the votes are counted.

Nepal’s future isn’t in more statues. It’s in the ideas we dare to invest in. Let’s start demanding the kind of vision that keeps our kids home, working in labs and fields that actually thrive.

A study of the working culture of the Nepal Police shows that the institution excessively relied on a traditional coercion-centric approach of treating people through intimidation and fear-inducing tactics. There prevailed a common belief within law enforcement authorities that the greater the fear of the police in society, the more people would follow the police orders. There was a time when a visit by a police constable to a village would make villagers hide in their homes out of sheer fear. 

There was a time when a single police constable could round up 10 individuals from any village and march them straight to the District Police Office. No one dared to challenge the police by asking why they were being taken to the police station. To challenge the police was akin to tempting fate. Today, the situation has completely reversed. It is now difficult for even 10 police personnel to apprehend a single individual.  

Globalization

As time passed, the orientation of the general public and government authorities also changed with the growing maturity of democratically developed societies.  Globalization brought countries closer through democratic ideals, liberalized markets, expanded global media and technology-based governance, which fostered public awareness and institutional accountability.     

Although Nepal is a medium-sized country, it cannot afford to remain isolated from the sweeping currents of global forces. The newly emerged world order deeply influenced not only the political philosophy of Nepal but also its entire institutional architecture and strategic orientation. Functioning of the Nepal Police gradually shifted from a force-centered model to service-oriented policing approach. However, it was not an easy task to transform the mindset of security personnel, who were deeply ingrained to adopt an iron-fist approach in dealing with the public.

In the immediate aftermath of the People’s Movement II, a negative perception emerged among humanitarian activists regarding human rights violations by the security organizations. The Nepal Police immediately initiated a comprehensive security reform program with two fundamental objectives—first, to change the mindset of security personnel so that they could embrace the ethos of ‘citizen-first’ policy, second, to instill in them a clear understanding that the uniform carries a meaningful weight of public trust, which demands the highest standard of professionalism and impartiality.

Since then, the entire organization has been treading the path of transformation, determined to reshape the institutional belief system and professional behavior. Such transformation does not take place overnight but the initiation is bound to show the seeds of positive thinking among security personnel, who are constantly at the frontline, interfacing with the public.

Community policing

One of the most widely acclaimed initiatives of the Nepal Police is community policing, which is instrumental to fill up long-standing chasms between the police organization and the local communities. Not all citizens may fully realize that the regular presence of the police, acting as silent sentinels at night, creates a powerful psychological sense of security, enabling them to sleep soundly. They remain assured that someone is keeping a watch while they are in slumber. It is ironic that the public rarely notices police personnel remaining alert at all times and working around the clock to respond to untoward situations as crime does not have office hours. The police, who protect others, are often seen unprotected themselves. Long hours of standing in one place, night patrols, insufficient logistics, and the sacrifice of family life leave the police physically exhausted and mentally fatigued.

Sir Robert Peel in 1829 established the Metropolitan Police Service in London with the motto ‘the police are the public and the public are the police’, laying a moral foundation for community-oriented policing. In Nepal, this initiative originated as a partnership-based approach, which sets goals to prevent crime, solve local problems and develop mutual trust and relations between the police personnel and community. The major thrust of the program is 'policing with people, not over the people’.

Despite initiating several programs aimed at changing the behavior of police personnel and strengthening public trust, the police still have a long way to go to achieve the set goals. Because of the repeated mismanagement of crowd control, the Nepal Police has come under public scrutiny and faced criticism. The Tikapur incident of Aug 2015 and the GenZ protest of September 2025 are among the unforgettable instances that contributed to widening the trust-gap between the state and the public. 

These two painful occurrences indicate that a great deal of effort is necessary to make corrections in the days to come. Proper training of security personnel, seamless coordination among agencies, timely intelligence sharing, careful scenario building and the judicious use of self-defense tools are areas that must be given top priority at the time of handling crowds or controlling riots.

The assessment of crowd size and mood, identifying potential flashpoints and preparation of evacuation routes are essential elements of scenario building, which were missing in the above incidents.

Riots, protests, and violence can erupt out of the blue, becoming a factor of sufferings for frontline police staff. In  such a heated situation, they must keep a cool head, rein in their fears and play a decisive role by following the security protocols to  maintain effective law and order. Meanwhile, the gap between public expectations and police limitations should be bridged by delivering services with professionalism, fairness and integrity.