The Questions Nepal’s Politics Keeps Avoiding

Nepal is heading toward another election with familiar rituals already underway. Parties are exploring alliances. Leaders are touring districts. Campaign messages are taking shape. Yet the most basic questions of power remain conspicuously unanswered.

- Who will lead if a party wins?

- What happens when promises fail?

- And who is answerable when governments collapse?

This silence is not accidental. It has become a strategy.

For over a decade, Nepal’s politics has operated on ambiguity. Leadership is left undefined. Coalition terms are kept private. Policy commitments are framed as aspirations rather than obligations. When governments fall, responsibility dissolves into process, partners, or circumstance.

Elections, in turn, settle numbers, not direction.

This is partly structural. Nepal’s mixed electoral system virtually ensures coalition government. Parties respond by keeping positions flexible until after votes are counted. But flexibility has gradually hardened into evasion. Precision has come to be treated as political risk.

The result is a pattern voters experience repeatedly: power rotates, faces change, coalitions reshuffle, and no one fully owns the outcome.

This pattern cuts across parties and ideologies. Job creation targets are announced without clear baselines or verification. Spending promises are made without explaining what will be cut or deferred to fund them. Protest violence is met with regret, not disclosure of who authorised force and under what authority. Foreign commitments are described in broad language, allowing leaders to reassure multiple audiences while committing to none.

What is missing from this campaign season is not debate. It is interrogation.

Questions that require dates, numbers, and consequences are seldom pursued. Media interviews move on. Public forums reward fluency over specificity. Evasion carries little cost, while clarity invites attack.

This matters most for first-time voters, many of whom are being asked to place their faith in a system they have watched fail repeatedly. They are told to choose between visions without being shown how decisions will be enforced or mistakes corrected.

Yet this election still matters. Not because it will reset Nepal overnight, but because it offers a narrow chance to change how politics is conducted.

That change will not come from better slogans or thicker documents. It will come if candidates are pressed to answer a smaller set of harder questions, and if those answers are recorded, compared, and revisited.

- Which laws will you change first, and by when?

- What will you cut to fund your promises?

- Who takes responsibility when policies fail?

- Under what condition will you step aside?

These are not hostile questions. They are governing questions.

Whether they shape this election depends less on the parties than on whether journalists, moderators, and voters insist that silence is no longer acceptable. Nepal’s politics has long survived on what it avoids saying.

The next phase begins only if that avoidance finally becomes costly.

(Journalist Shrestha is active on the WhatsApp channel nepalexplained, where he shares his views on current affairs.)