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As desirable as they were, the two recent mergers between political parties were both artificial constructs and duly broke down in time. The Nepal Communist Party had been formed after the merger between the CPN-UML and CPN (Maoist Center). As was suspected then, and as time would bear it out, at the heart of the merger was a power-sharing agreement between KP Oli and Pushpa Kamal Dahal. The deal was to split the government’s five-year term and for each to run the country for two and half years. Again, as feared, the merger carried out without an ideological meeting of minds unraveled, dashing the ho­pe of a stable and prosperous Nepal. 

Another desirable unity happened between the Rastriya Janata Party Nepal (RJPN) and the Samajbadi Party, Nepal, further consolidating national politics. The two main Madhesi outfits completed a midnight merger to prevent PM Oli from ‘stealing’ some Samajbadi MPs to strengthen his hold on the government. The merger had supposedly forestalled the attempt of anti-Madhesi forces to dilute core Madhesi agendas and again proven that the country’s main identity-based forces could work together. That would have been wonderful. In reality, the two sets of leaders were bitterly divided over portfolio allocation right from the start. Oli successfully dangled the carrot of plump ministries before some of them, and they hungrily devoured the bait.   

In return for its support, PM Oli has vowed to fulfill some demands of the breakaway Janata Samajbadi Party Nepal (JSPN) faction, for instance, by releasing its jailed lawmaker Resham Chaudhary. The citizenship law was also amended to make it easier for children of Nepali mothers and foreign fathers to get citizenship, a longstanding Madhesi demand. Yet these gestures fall short of the substantive constitutional amendments mainstream Madhesi parties have sought over the years. 

Again, the Mahanta Thakur faction breaking away and joining the Oli government may be pure electoral calculation. Thakur & co believe aligning with Oli and getting to use state resources to back their electoral campaigns will result in favorable poll outcomes. Likewise, the faction under Upendra Yadav and Baburam Bhattarai will be confident of their ability to mount a potent challenge to the Oli-Thakur alliance in Tarai-Madhes. Their pitch? Why, Thakur sold out to an ‘anti-Madhesi’ Oli at India’s behest! 

A likely outcome of these alliances between national and regional parties will be national issues figuring prominently in future elections in Madhes and beyond, at all three levels. It could also reduce the influence of the more extreme kinds of identity politics. On the downside, without clear ideological demarcation between the choices on offer, elections could again lead to divided mandates and unstable governments. 

With at least another six months to go for the national elections, there is ample time for further political developments. But if the current alignments hold, working under India’s close watch, neither Oli nor Thakur will be able to call all the shots. Nepali political actors have been notorious for seeking India’s support to get to and stay in the government. But an unabashed south-tilt can also be a huge liability in the long run.

Even when Nepal-China relations were supposedly at their warmest following the UML-Maoist merger, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli understood the limits of his engagement with the northern neighbor. However much he admired Chinese President Xi Jinping, he had little to learn from the leader of the biggest single-party system in the world. They presided over two completely different polities, and Oli could never dream of amassing in Nepal even a fraction of Xi’s untrammeled powers in China. So, he looked south for inspiration. 

Narendra Modi had risen from the rock bottom of the Indian society to become perhaps its strongest elected leader ever. He had in the process displayed the extreme effectiveness of cold-blooded majoritarian politics. In budding sub-continental democracies, the secret to getting and staying in power, he had shown, was to consistently stoke the egos of their religious or ethnic majorities. A strong external enemy always came in handy as well. For Modi, it has always been Pakistan; for blockade-time Oli, India was the perfect foil against which to accentuate his nationalist credentials. 

Oli keenly watched Modi subvert state institutions and accrue power for the PMO, and followed suit. Meanwhile, in Nepal, the Chinese were getting unhappy with the Nepali prime minister who was stalling on BRI projects and cozying up to the yanks. As his distance with Beijing increased, and he found himself cornered by the pro-China faction in his own party, Oli realized only India could now salvage his political career and started sending overtures to New Delhi. 

To prove his earnestness, the supposedly communist head of government visited temples and toyed with the idea of a greater political alliance with the royalists. The goal was also to consolidate the Hindu vote bank. There was another uncanny similarity between the Indian and Nepali leaders. Both sought to downplay the Covid-19 pandemic and to peddle bogus cures. Similar political calculations drove Oli and Modi.

If the Covid-19 was not a big deal, the Indian prime minister could train his focus on winning West Bengal, the big price that had eluded the BJP. Oli, too, after assuring his brethren that corona could be cured by no more than guava leaf-gargle, set about preserving his chair by playing fast and loose with the constitution. 

The BJP leadership started paying heed as there seemed to be no other way of doing away with the ‘pro-China’ communist government. Oli also offered them a possibility, if somewhat remote, of the restoration of the Hindu state. But there was little it could do about it so long as the communist unity remained intact. Oli offered it a convenient backdoor. 

Thank god Nepal is not India where Modi has successfully cowed civil society and silenced mainstream media. The sheer diversity of the Nepali society protects against that as does, paradoxically, the geopolitical rivalry here between India and China: If one set of political and social actors are close to India, another set is invariably closer to China. Nor is Hinduism as big a binding force in Nepal as it is in India. 

Modi received an unprecedented mandate to unify India and set it on the path of sustained economic development. As did Oli. Both wasted their chance. In Nepal, the legitimacy of the new constitution is under question. Constitutional organs have been hollowed out. The bar of morality in politics has been set so low that even goondas can canter through. Again, as with Modi’s India, so with Oli’s Nepal. 

A vaccine is a vaccine. If it is approved by the World Health Organization, it is good enough. But the government appears reluctant to import more jabs from China, whose ‘Vero Cell’ vaccine recently received the WHO’s emergency use approval. Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli is wary of Chinese vaccines as his government has been trying to mend its ties with New Delhi. There is no sign that India does not want Nepal to import Chinese jabs—when India is incapable of meeting its own vaccine needs, let alone export them to Nepal. 

In fact, the civil society in India itself supports vaccine-import from China, India’s next-door neighbor that has largely controlled the Covid-19 contagion. But the Indian government is reluctant. It has allowed individual states to buy vaccines from abroad, but none of the states seems interested in importing Chinese vaccines. New Delhi has clearly instructed them to bypass China. Instead, the states have placed orders for American vaccines that need to be stored at extremely low temperatures, which might not be practical in the mostly hot-weathered India. 

That is not the whole story though. Beijing too has resisted from helping New Delhi with vaccines following their long-standing border disputes and India’s ban on Chinese apps. But that is a problem for India and China to sort out. This cannot be a reason for Nepal to abjure Chinese vaccines. The Oli government seems to have calculated that it would earn some brownie points with New Delhi by bypassing China. This is at best a naïve and at worst a criminal calculation. 

Surely, PM Oli, the person who valiantly stood against Indian bullying during the 2015-16 blockade, is more than capable of striking a new government-to-government vaccine deal with the Chinese government. China has also repeatedly showed its interest to supply vaccines and oxygen cylinders and concentrators to Nepal. Yet Nepal has shown little interest, even though people are dying for the want of oxygen and paucity of vaccines. The private sector’s limited attempts to directly buy vaccines from Chinese companies won’t be enough to meet Nepal’s needs.

Nepali political leaders have over the years tried to prolong their tenure in government by appeasing either India or China. They also frequently switch camps as and when it suits them. The assumption this time is that the Oli government’s ‘gesture of goodwill’ won’t go unnoticed in New Delhi. It is hard to believe that a foreign power will trust the government of a country that bargains with the lives of its own citizens. 

The best way KP Oli can earn the trust of his countrymen will be by getting them enough vaccines at the earliest. That will also boost his international standing. People have queued for hours for a jab of Vero Cell. Most of the unvaccinated Nepalis will be more than happy to get the same, or even Sputnik V. What is the government waiting for? 

Who will be occupying Singhadurbar in a month? No one cares. It should not be that way. If KP Oli fails as a pandemic-time prime minister, people should believe Sher Bahadur Deuba or Pushpa Kamal Dahal, the two most likely candidates to replace him, might do a better job.­ Sadly, that too is not the case. Whether Oli remains prime minister or whether Deuba replaces him, Covid-19 will continue to push the country to the brink. This lack of options is a damning indictment of our democratic process and its principal actors. 

In the US, the incoming Biden administration was able to turn around the country’s dismal Covid-19 record, successfully mobilizing the country’s health resources and persuading millions of Americans to shed their vaccine skepticism. Now most states in the US are largely corona-free. Biden’s leadership—high on action and accountability—was in stark contrast to Donald Trump’s—given to peddling pseudoscience and white nationalism. The choice between Biden and Trump could not have been starker. 

No such choice is available to us. The country will most likely have an election, sooner rather than later. But the public is in no mood to vote. In a recent Niti Foundation survey of those aged 18-40 conducted across the country, fully 44 percent had zero interest in politics, while another 40 percent expressed only ‘some’ interest. Such widespread dissatisfaction with the political class among the country’s most productive workforce is not a healthy sign for the new federal republic. As the Covid-19 crisis worsens, this skepticism will further increase. What is to be done then?

There are no easy choices. But if our political parties are committed to helping the country emerge from the corona quagmire, there is no alternative to forging a broad political consensus, the kind seen in the immediate aftermath of the 2006 Jana Andolan. Back then, the political consensus was aimed at removing the vestiges of monarchy, helping the country transition to peace, and cementing progressive changes. Arguably, the country faces an even bigger crisis today. What better time to revive that old spirit of consensual politics?

Such a consensus has become vital not just to combat corona. The democratic system itself is at risk. If a democratic government cannot deliver during a grave national crisis, do we at all need democracy, people are asking? It is up to our main political actors—CPN-UML, Nepali Congress, CPN (Maoist Center), and JSPN—to remove their skepticism by showing that they can set aside political squabbles and again work together in the national interest. Otherwise, they will leave the space open for demagogues who can justifiably blame the political class for its collective failure on corona-control. (It won’t matter that the Oli government is largely responsible for the unfolding crisis.) The legitimacy of the entire political setup will be questioned. 

Such political consensus is a long way off. But that should not stop our political actors from trying. After all, who would have thought that our querulous politicians—the same ones who had so badly debased national politics in the 1990s—could work together in the national interest? Back then, the common enemy was the autocratic monarchy; right now, it’s a deadly virus.