Super-spreader Special Session of Nepal’s Parliament

No symptom of Nepal’s current malaise could be more symbolic than a prime minister seeking a confidence vote in a crowded Parliament in the middle of a raging pandemic. 

Of the 1,300 people tested last week for Monday’s House session, 27 MPs and 140 parliamentary secretariat staff came out positive. Yet it went ahead. 

Prime Minister K P Oli called the Special Session of the 271-member Lower House that he himself had dissolved in December, and which was later reinstated by the Supreme Court, to seek the vote. 

Of the 232 members present, Oli got only 93, and 124 MPs voted against him. Out of 121 of his own UML party's members, 28 from the dissident faction were not present, and 15 MPs voted not to vote. The anti-Oli faction did not join the floor test by floor crossing, but decided to keep away.

This means the Oli government has been voted out, and the ball is now in President Bidya Devi Bhandari’s court. The question is, why did Oli go into a confidence vote he knew he would lose? He neither lobbied seriously for support, nor did he seem that bothered that he lost. 

If defeat was a given, his game plan could be to get President Bhandari to let him continue while he goes through the motions of cobbling together a coalition. And if he is unsuccessful, he could use a constitutional provision to declare early elections in six months.

That plan could go awry if the NC, Maoist Centre, JSP and dissident UML can enlist enough MPs to form their own coalition. If that happens, Sher Bahadur Deuba could become prime minister for the fifth time. Monday’s session also saw JSP leaders Mahanta Thakur and Upendra Yadav taking diametrically opposing stances: one faction saying it would stay neutral, and the other voting against Oli.

The drama in Parliament was the climax (some would say anti-climax) of a long-running power struggle that pitted Oli against his erstwhile comrades Pushpa Kamal Dahal in the Nepal Communist Party (NCP) and Madhav Kumar Nepal from his own UML.

The NCP was formed out of the electoral alliance of the Maoist Centre and the UML that swept the 2017 elections with a near two-thirds majority. But a feud between Dahal and Oli for control over the party and government had paralysed statecraft, and stymied response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

When the Supreme Court ordered the NCP to be disbanded into its constituent parties in February, Oli turned to sidelining Nepal from the UML. Moderate party members had been trying to keep the UML unified by mediating between Oli and Nepal till the eleventh hour before Monday’s Special Session.

While Nepal was willing to concede as long Oli also inducted some of his own supporters into the Central Committee, Oli was adamant and refused to compromise. This led many to surmise that Oli was sticking to his strategy of going for elections if not allowed to stay on as prime minister.

The political deadlock for the past two years has been costly for Nepal. A government that came to power on a slogan of ‘prosperity and stability’ could deliver neither, and could not ensure citizens good health, either.

It bungled on Covid-19 response by not using the first lockdown last year to test, trace and quarantine adequately, and not learn from that mistake when the even bigger second wave hit in April. It was hit by repeated scandals involving procurement of test kits, medicines and vaccines.

As a result, the pandemic swept in from India, spread uncontrollably, and is currently laying waste to the country. Prime Minister Oli still seemed to be in denial, proclaiming in a CNN interview last week that the pandemic is ‘under control’ at a time when it is anything but, and even laying the blame for the scourge squarely on people not following guidelines. In fact it was the government that violated its own protocols by organising religious gatherings, lavish inaugurations and indoor political meetings in the past months.

Caretaker Prime Minister Oli failed to resolve the political crisis, and failed to respond adequately to the health crisis. The two crises are linked. Ironically, in Parliament on Monday we saw the two failures side-by-side — playing high-risk political brinkmanship by holding a high-risk mass gathering.

What kind of priority shapes a government that has declared a lockdown over 70 of the country’s 77 districts, banned all conferences and meetings, and restricted marriage parties to less than 15 people, and yet calls for a Parliament sitting? Even the PCR test last week was a spreader event despite the physical separation.

Meanwhile, Nepal has been reporting more than 8,000 new cases a day for a week now, and the number of confirmed infections is doubling every three days.  Kathmandu has been registering more than half of all new daily cases. 

Another 9,271 new Covid-19 cases were recorded on Monday, the highest daily tally. There were 139 fatalities, more than double the day before. The number of active infections is closing in on 100,000, and the total confirmed cases exceeded 400,000 on Monday.