IMAGE: KHABARHUB
ON A single day this week Nepal’s acting chief justice ordered the Supreme Court to register a petition against the government’s choice of a new chief justice. The court administration, following instructions from the judge recommended for the post, refused. By evening the acting chief justice’s authority lay in tatters and the judiciary was openly at war with itself. The country’s highest court had demonstrated a talent for miscalculation that would be impressive if it were not so destructive. Welcome to the new Nepal. Or rather, welcome to the same Nepal, only worse.
The conventional wisdom holds that the country’s chronic instability is a political problem: too many parties, too few scruples, a constitution that makes coalitions mandatory (with the current government as an exception) and betrayal profitable. Thirty-two governments since 1990, fifteen since the abolition of the monarchy in 2008, not one completing a full term. Nepal cannot govern because its politicians will not stop fighting long enough to try. That narrative is now dangerously obsolete.
What Nepal faces is no longer political instability alone. It is the accelerating erosion of state capacity itself. The difference matters. A country with fragile politics but functioning institutions can muddle through. A country whose institutions are fragmenting from within has no floor beneath its feet.
Consider what has happened since the Gen Z uprising of September 2025 brought down K.P. Sharma Oli’s government. Seventy‑seven dead, parliament set ablaze, a former chief justice installed as an interim prime minister, and then a landslide election victory for Balendra Shah, a 36‑year‑old former rapper who ran as the human wrecking ball of an exhausted political class. Mr Shah won nearly two‑thirds of parliament’s seats. His mandate was unambiguous: break the machine. Two months into his government, the machine has broken him instead.
Mr Shah governs by ordinance because he prefers to rule like an autocrat and dislikes debating his agenda in parliament. Parliament sits idle while a series of decrees rewrite the rules in his first weeks. The Supreme Court blocks two major orders in a single week—one on evictions; another banning trade unions and student politics—and then descends into the judicial civil war described above.
The prime minister, elected to smash the old order, now faces the same accusation that destroyed his predecessors: contempt for the procedures that make democracy tolerable. His supporters call it decisiveness. His critics call it the same impatience dressed in newer clothes. The darker truth is that no leader would succeed here.
Nepal’s 2015 constitution created a governance machine designed to disperse power so thoroughly that no single faction could monopolise it. Federalism, proportional representation, a powerful judiciary, an upper house, seven provincial governments, 753 local governments: each a legitimate site of democratic authority. The architects feared autocracy. They built a system with more veto points than a Soviet commissariat.
What they did not build was administrative capacity. More than half of approved local‑level civil service posts are vacant; and provincial governments operate at roughly two‑thirds staff strength. The bureaucracy, formally neutral, has been so deeply colonised by party-affiliated trade unions that many civil servants owe their careers to political patrons rather than professional competence. When governments change—which is to say, constantly—officials are transferred en masse. Institutions rarely retain experience or continuity; each administration effectively starts from scratch.
This is a failure of design. A system that disperses authority without creating accountability produces constant conflict between institutions (rather than democratic resilience), in which every actor has enough power to block and no one has enough power to act.
The Shah government’s response has been characteristic: blunt and likely to fail. Abolish the trade unions. Bypass the parliament. Pack the judiciary. Each move addresses a real problem. Each move also confirms the opposition’s charge that the government believes democracy is an inconvenience. And each move runs into the same wall: the institutions that make Nepal difficult to govern are the same institutions that make Nepal a democracy.
Nepal is not ungovernable because its politicians are unusually venal. It is structurally difficult to govern because its constitution disperses authority so widely that coherent action needs a level of trust and cooperation that three decades of instability have systematically destroyed. The institutions exist. The trust does not.
What can be done? The answer is dull and therefore unlikely. Yes, people want a corrupt bureaucracy purged. But a civil service that resets to zero with every election cannot deliver. Yes, a court that blocks the executive feels like justice. But when it governs rather than checks, nothing gets done. Yes, voters demand power flow to the provinces. But federalism without capacity just multiplies patronage. And yes, investigating past officials feels like long-overdue justice. But it’s a start, rather than a solution—without rebuilding the permanent institutions that breed corruption, the cycle repeats.
Nepal has become a state in permanent transition: always on the verge of becoming something else, yet repeatedly reverting to same old patterns. Whether it avoids that trajectory will depend on institutional repair. And on current evidence, those institutions are still looking for solutions from the very politics that weakened them. ■
