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As pressure continues to build on Nepal’s Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli to step down, he has only two options: either establish his majority support in party’s standing committee and parliamentary party, or quit. Another, albeit less likely scenario, is continuation of Oli as PM if he publicly acknowledges his mistakes, and assures the rival Pushpa Kamal Dahal-Madhav Kumar Nepal faction that those mistakes won’t be repeated.

In the nine-member NCP secretariat, the top party organ that oversees the party’s regular functioning, PM Oli is already in a minority. He is also unsure about his ability to garner majority support in the 45-member standing committee and the 174-member parliamentary party. This is why he is delaying the standing committee meeting. Oli says he is busy preparing the new policy and program and the budget. But he was nonetheless forced to call the party’s secretariat meeting on the evening of April 29. The meeting witnessed heated exchanges, with majority members demanding his resignation from the posts of PM and party chair.  

PM Oli is trying to secure the support of majority lawmakers of the party. In the federal lower house, the ruling NCP has 174 lawmakers. Of them, 78 are in Oli’s favor, 53 in Dahal’s, and 43 in Nepal’s. To establish majority support, Oli needs 88 lawmakers. In order to do so, Oli is reportedly offering ministerial positions to the lawmakers close to Dahal and Nepal.  

If Oli refuses to resign even after failing to gain the support of majority lawmakers in the party, the rival faction is likely to register a no-confidence motion in the parliament against the PM. In this scenario, he will lose his post, as opposition parties are sure to vote against him. However, both Dahal and Nepal are reluctant to opt for this course as it could ultimately lead to the party’s split. The two are of the view that Oli should be removed from the PM’s chair by keeping the party intact. So their first priority is forcing him to resign by pushing him into a minority in vital party committees.

Hemmed in

PM Oli has warned of grave consequences. With President Bidhya Devi Bhandari firmly on his side, he can threaten with mid-term elections or a state of emergency. However, the constitution does not allow PM to announce mid-term elections, says constitutional expert Dr. Bipin Adhikari. “Mid-term elections can happen only if the federal lower house cannot elect new prime minister on repeated attempts. The constitution has envisaged a full-term of parliament,” Adhikari says.

With limited options, the PM has adopted a strategy of divide and conquer, and buying time to weaken the rival faction. In the party’s secretariat meeting, Oli dropped a bombshell when he proposed making Bamdev Gautam, someone who is not even a member of parliament, as prime minister.

“The proposal of Gautam as prime minister has come with the intent of fomenting divisions. As this is not a feasible proposal, it could easily backfire on Oli,” says NCP leader Haribol Gajurel, a confidante of co-chair Dahal. “It is not in PM Oli’s nature to realize his mistakes, and the new proposal will further complicate things,” he says. In the secretariat meeting, Gautam, however, supported Oli’s proposal even while Nepal and Dahal abstained.

The constitution allows only a member of the federal lower house to be the prime minister. Oli has for long been neglecting party secretariat’s decision to appoint Gautam to the federal upper house, and to clear his way to the PM’s chair by amending the constitution. Now Oli has made a sudden volte-face. Nonetheless, amending the constitution won’t be easy as the ruling party is short of the required two-thirds majority in the lower house. “It is just a time-buying tactic,” argues Gajurel.

In the April 29 secretariat meeting, PM Oli also proposed the elevation of senior leader Nepal to the post of third party co-chair. Earlier, through his close confidants, PM Oli had offered some ministerial and chief ministerial positions to leaders close to Nepal. Similarly, Oli has assured Nepal of his support for the latter’s bid for party chairmanship in the party’s next general convention. Yet the ongoing corona crisis will make it nearly impossible to hold the general convention by the scheduled late-April 2021 date. Nepal knows this all too well.

The secretariat is again meeting on May 2 to take a final call on the standing committee. However, according to leaders, Oli wants to push it back as he currently does not command a majority in the committee.

Towards denouement

Both the NCP factions are in the middle of separate signature campaigns to prove their majorities in the parliamentary party. If the rival faction succeeds in securing majority support, Oli will have to resign. “It will be better for the prime minister to heed public opinion and step down. He has become highly unpopular following his pair of mistimed ordinances,” said Gajurel.

The long-standing rift in the ruling party had reached a climax when Oli issued two ordinances, one related to making splits in Nepali political parties easier, another related to minimizing the role of main opposition party in the constitutional council, a body tasked with making vital appointments to various constitutional bodies. Oli didn’t consult anyone beyond his small coterie on these ordinances.

Oli withdrew the ordinances after considerable backlash from in and outside the ruling party. Yet many party leaders reckoned he had already gone too far. In the past two and half years, Dahal and Nepal have been unhappy with what they saw as Oli’s ‘monopoly’ in the government and the party.

Oli is trying to buy time on two grounds. First, he says the rival faction should wait till the coronavirus crisis is over. Second, he argues that the government is already preparing to summon the House soon. As per constitutional provisions, the government will have to present its budget by May-end. Before that, there has to be a pre-budget parliamentary discussion and the government has to unveil its annual policies and programs.

For the head of a Nepali government with nearly two-thirds majority in the federal legislature, and effective control of six of the seven provinces, the sequence of events he set in motion on April 22 were tantamount to a political hara-kiri. The country under an unprecedented medical emergency, PM KP Oli tried to engineer a split in a Madhes-based party, which at the best was a marginal player in national politics. To this effect, the cabinet passed a pair of ordinances in the afternoon, and by the evening the President had even given them her stamp of approval. But the legal change making it easier to split national political parties backfired on the Prime Minister. Instead of the Samajbadi Party splitting and a section of it joining the federal government, as he expected, the legal change brought about the long-delayed merger between the Samajbadi Party and the RJPN, another major force in Tarai-Madhes.  

Oli’s rivals in the ruling party will use the shocking failure of this Machiavellian maneuvering of their co-chairman to question his leadership. The opposition against him had already been building in the Nepal Communist Party, largely after the mending of fences between co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal and senior leader Madhav Kumar Nepal. The ordinances would have helped Oli split the NCP and form his own party if he felt his PM’s position and party chairmanship were under threat. 

India played an instrumental role in the midnight merger. It wanted a force that could help challenge ‘pro-China’ Oli’s national premiership, and a strong outfit in Madhes under its control. Without India’s intervention, Oli’s plan to split the Samajbadi Party would probably have succeeded. 
However the merger came about, the unity of the two Madhes-based parties will solidify the Madhesi agenda. “I have been getting calls from Madhesis from every walk of life ever since the merger was announced,” says Tula Narayan Shah, an analyst of Madhesi politics who also had a dormant role in the Samajbadi Party. “They are all jubilant.” Why?

“You see, they see it as a part of the evolution of the Madhesi society from the ‘voter class’ to the ‘leader class’. The Madhesi society has been politicized, and the confidence is rising that they can finally claim leadership roles at the national level,” says Shah. Well and good, but will the merger last to warrant such enthusiasm? Shah says there is no guarantee of continued unity, given the ‘make-and-break’ history of Madhesi parties and their leader-centric politics. But he expects the unity to be intact at least until the next general elections.

Its implications on national politics will be massive. NCP co-chair Dahal, for one, is reportedly euphoric with the merger. If Oli splits the NCP or is reluctant to transfer party leadership, it clears the way for future collaboration between former Maoists, Madhesi parties and the main opposition Nepali Congress, most likely under Dahal’s leadership.   

Any way you look at it, Oli loses. He has made a career out of bold risks. His latest has failed, and he has to live with the consequences. Alas, President Bidya Devi Bhandari, who has already done great harm to her office by acting as the PMO’s rubberstamp, may not be able to come to his rescue this time.

At a time Nepal is struggling with Covid-19, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli-led government on April 20 introduced an ordinance to relax the provision of party split. The ordinance has changed some provisions of the Political Parties Act.

According to new provisions, a new party can be registered at the Election Commission with 40 percent support either in parliamentary party or in party central committee. President Bidya Devi Bhandari issued the ordinance on the cabinet’s recommendation. Earlier, there was the provision of 40 percent support both in parliamentary party as well as the central committee for party split. 

The ordinance came at a time when there is news of growing rift inside the ruling Nepal Communist Party. The NCP leaders, however, say the change won’t affect the dynamics of ruling parties.

It is unclear why government amended the law at a time the country is concentrating its efforts on fighting the coronavirus. The provision, however, makes it easy for rival factions of ruling parties to break off.

There are speculations the new ordinance is aimed at engineering a divide among Madhes-based parties. It is rumored that some members of the two main Madhesi parties—the Samajbadi Party and the Rastriya Janata Party Nepal—want to join the government.

Samajbadi leader Upendra Yadav and RJPN’s Rajendra Mahato both said that although the new ordinance was apparently brought to weaken them, the move could backfire on the ruling parties.

Oli’s decision invited criticism from his own and opposition parties. In the cabinet meeting, ministers from former Maoist party objected to the PM’s proposal. Similarly, Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali also opposed it. PM Oli, however, insisted on the proposal’s passage saying that it would not affect NCP dynamics. The main opposition Nepali Congress, in its preliminary reaction, termed the timing of the move ‘inappropriate’.

As the federal government stumbles in its efforts to manage the Covid-19 crisis and limit its fallout, the need for the scrutiny and oversight of the national parliament is being acutely felt.

The delay in purchase of kits and logistics to fight Covid-19, the issue of people stranded in different parts of the country, the plight of Nepali migrant workers, PM KP Sharma Oli’s reported instruction to ministers and party leaders to stay away from the media, and the controversial recall and restoration of Doctor Sher Bahadur Pun from Sukraraj Hospital—are some issues that could have been credibly discussed and sorted out by an in-session parliament. Similarly, there are reports of local governments politicizing relief packages, and people in need not getting them.

“If the parliament had been sitting, it could have forced the government to address those issues without delay,” says political analyst Shyam Shrestha. It may be difficult to hold a full session of parliament due to the fear of the virus, Shrestha adds, but speakers, committee presidents and lawmakers can still play a more proactive role through videoconferences and other means. “But they seem blissfully unaware of the parliament’s crucial role in the current pandemic.”

After the imposition of the nationwide lockdown, the government had ended the parliament’s winter session. In the parliament’s absence, the only way the government can formulate urgent laws are via ordinances, a temporary measure rarely used in parliamentary democracies. Senior Advocate at Supreme Court and National Assembly member Radheshyam Adhikari thus urges the government and political parties to summon the federal parliament at the earliest.  The parliamentary procedures allow the government to call a special session of parliament during a crisis. 

“We can convene the parliament after adopting sanitary measures such as washing hands before attending meetings, disinfecting the meeting hall, and barring lawmakers who show virus symptoms,” he says.

No time to hibernate

The government shortened the parliament’s winter session even though there was no legal or constitutional obligation to do so. The 275 members of the House of Representatives and the 59 in the National Assembly are effectively on a break.

Different countries have different ways of running their parliaments during a crisis. The Inter-Parliamentary Union, a global think-thank on Parliament, offers some suggestions.

Only the parliament committees may meet; or the parliament can meet virtually using remote methods. “Many countries are changing their laws to allow the virtual functioning of parliament with a view that lockdown could be extended for long,” the union says.

In Nepal, some parliamentary committees as well as the upper house did try to meet virtually but such meetings were ineffective. Adhikari of the federal upper house says the problem is lack of sophisticated technology to keep the participants engaged. “There is thus no option to physical meetings,” he adds.

Lawmakers suggest convening parliamentary committees of House of Representative, National Assembly and Provincial Assemblies to take up pandemic-related issues. If the cabinet can meet, why can’t parliamentary committees, they ask?

Another Nepali Congress federal upper house lawmaker Prakash Pantha also thinks there should have been more effort to keep the parliament open and functional.

During the pandemic, the government needs to pass emergency bills to allow government to exercise additional powers. In the absence of the parliament, the government is free to introduce ordinances or decrees, which, often, instead of addressing underlying problems, only end up serving vested interests.

Sufficient budget and resources are needed to fight the pandemic. If the current pandemic budget is insufficient, budget needs to be transferred from other heads. For instance, the federal government wants to use the money allocated under constituency development fund, but in the parliament’s absence, it has been unable to do so.

Missing collective wisdom

“During a time of crisis, there is a tendency to justify a centralized leadership. Yet that does not mean the executive cannot make mistakes and does not need check and balance,” says Shrestha, the political analyst. “There is a need for collective wisdom right now, and it is not just about criticizing the government but also supporting its genuine efforts.”

Another important role of the parliament is to hold government accountable. Ruling Nepal Communist Party federal lower house lawmaker Birodh Khatiwada says the parliament can play an important role in monitoring government response to Covid-19. “Discussions are underway on making the parliament functional. If it cannot sit, the parliamentarians can at least monitor the work of the federal, provincial and local governments in their respective constituencies,” Khatiwada says.

Former Prime Minister and Chairman of Federal Council of Socialist Party Baburam Bhattarai, another lower house MP, is also taking the initiative to hold virtual meetings of parliamentary committees. The meeting of the Finance Committee he is a part of was scheduled for April 19, but was put off at the eleventh hour. Expressing his displeasure over the decision to cancel the meeting, Bhattarai tweeted, “Speaker, Committee chair and all concerned were positive on the virtual meeting. If there are legal issues to hold such meetings they should be resolved.”

As per constitutional provisions, the government will have to table its budget in the parliament by May-end. Before that, the president will present government policies and programs. The parties are yet to discuss the kind of constitutional crisis that will ensue if the parliament cannot meet for the budget session. Substantive anti-Covid-19 measures are apparently planned for the budget session. Yet the parliament could not be convened too soon.