New Delhi: With Nepal Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal deciding to go for a confidence vote in the country's parliament on Friday – the fifth time since he assumed office in December 2022 – the question arises as to what a yet another new dispensation in Kathmandu would mean for South Asia in general and India in particular.
This is because, unlike the four times earlier when he had passed confidence votes in the House of Representatives, this time Dahal stands to lose after the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML), a partner in the Left coalition government that he is heading, decided to ditch him and sewed up a partnership with the Nepali Congress to form a new coalition government in the Himalayan nation.
Dahal is going for the floor test after accusing CPN-UML leader and former Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli of hatching a conspiracy to topple the current government.
"Oli betrayed me for no reason," the Kathmandu Post quoted Dahal as saying during a parliamentary committee meeting of his Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist Centre (CPN-Maoist Centre) on Wednesday. “We came to know that the Nepali Congress and the UML were inching towards a political deal but Oli lied to me several times about it."
Following a series of swift political developments over the last week of June and the beginning of this month, Sher Bahadur Deuba, former Prime Minister and president of the Nepali Congress, and Oli signed an agreement on the intervening night of July 1 and 2 to form a new coalition government in Kathmandu. According to the deal, Oli, and then Deuba, will serve as prime ministers on a rotational basis during the three-and-a-half-year tenure left of the present government.
Following this, the CPN-UML asked Dahal to step down from office on July 3 as per Article 76 (2) of the country's constitution. According to Article 76 (2), the President shall appoint as the prime minister a member of the House who can command a majority with the support of two or more parties.
However, a meeting of office-bearers of the CPN-Maoist Centre decided that Dahal would not step down and instead go for a vote of confidence in the House of Representatives. According to Article 100 (2) of the constitution, if the political party the prime minister represents is divided or a political party in the coalition withdraws its support, the prime minister shall table a motion in the House of Representatives for a vote of confidence within 30 days. This basically gave Dahal just a month more to continue in office. However, Dahal opted to go for a floor test as early as July 12, much ahead of the 30-day deadline he has in hand.
The latest development is the culmination of the ever-changing political landscape of Nepal. It is worth mentioning that the Nepali Congress was earlier part of the Dahal-led coalition at the centre. However, in March this year, the CPN-Maoist Centre severed all ties with the Nepali Congress and invited the CPN-UML to join the coalition. The other initial partners in this new coalition were the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) and the Janata Samajbadi Party (JSP). However, the Janata Samajbadi Party withdrew support to the coalition in May this year citing differences with the CPN-Maoist Centre.
Meanwhile, both Dahal and Oli were reportedly unhappy with the new arrangement. Dahal was cited as acknowledging that the current ad hoc politics in the country was unsustainable and stating that he could do precious little but keep shuffling ministers. That Oli too was not satisfied with the arrangement became evident when he described the annual budget presented by the government as a "Maoist budget".
All this led to mistrust between the CPN-UML and the CPN-Maoist Centre. According to Pradeep Gyawali, deputy general secretary of the CPN-UML, Dahal was in touch with the Nepali Congress for over the last month or so to form a national consensus government. This became a major cause of mistrust between the CPN-UML and the CPN-Maoist Centre. However, when the Nepali Congress rejected Dahal's proposal, the CPN-UML decided to take things in its own hands.
"The UML and the Congress started talking and decided to move ahead together for political stability and democratic exercise," a Post report quoted Gyawali as saying. On June 29, Oli and Deuba held a closed-door meeting. On July 1, Oli held a separate meeting with Dahal. Following this, Oli and Deuba sealed the deal.
Though Dahal has decided to go for a floor test, the numbers do not stack up in his favour at all. Of the 275-member House of Representatives, the Nepali Congress is the largest party with 88 seats. The CPN-UML has 79 seats while Dahal’s CPN-Maoist Centre is the third largest party with 32 seats. The RSP and the JSP have 21 and five seats respectively.
After Dahal decided not to step down, the CPN-UML's ministers in the coalition government tendered their resignations. The RSP ministers in the government met Dahal to tender their resignations too. However, Dahal pleaded with them not to do so and sought their support during Friday’s floor test.
However, according to the latest reports in Nepal’s media, the RSP has decided not to support Dahal during the floor test. Meanwhile, the CPN-UML has issued a whip to all its members in the House of Representatives to mandatorily attend the session of the lower house scheduled for July 12 and to vote against Dahal.
In the interregnum between the time when CPN-UML and the Nepali Congress reached the deal and now, Dahal tried his best to ensure that Oli does not become prime minister again. He tried to play factions within the Nepali Congress against each other. He approached Shekhar Koirala, who leads a faction within the Nepali Congress that is opposed to Deuba, to form a government under Article 76 (3) of the constitution.
According to Article 76 (3) of the constitution, the parliamentary party leader of the largest party in the House of Representatives will be appointed the prime minister. This would have paved the way for Deuba to be the prime minister by virtue of being the parliamentary party leader of the largest party in the lower house. However, Koirala did not have the numbers with him and reportedly told Dahal that it was too late for such a scenario to evolve.
Dahal, according to a source familiar with politics in Nepal, knows that he will go to jail for war crime charges during the Maoist revolution if Oli becomes prime minister. Oli, the source pointed out, had many a time earlier made it clear that, given a chance, he would obliterate Maoists completely from the politics of Nepal. The CPN-Maoist Centre, led by Dahal (also known by his nom de guerre Prachanda), has been instrumental in creating political instability in Nepal since 2008 when monarchy ended and especially since 2015 when a new constitution was adopted.
Since the end of monarchy in 2008, no government in Nepal had lasted a full term. In fact, most of the governments did not even last more than a year. Government instability in Nepal has been a source of concern for the South Asian region in general and India in particular since it has a wide bilateral agenda with the Himalayan nation. Now, with the two largest parties coming together to form a government, there are signs that there will be a stable regime in place which will be a source of relief for New Delhi.
