On 8 September 2025, the Republic of Nepal turned its guns on its own children. Young Nepalis marched into the streets of Kathmandu armed with nothing heavier than their phones and their hope. They demanded only to be heard. Before nightfall, the state they had been taught to love answered them with live rounds.
On that same day I resigned my seat in Parliament, the only Member of Parliament to do so. I broke ranks alone. No party ordered it, no faction planned it, and no ally stood at my shoulder when I signed. A parliament that cannot defend the children who elect it has surrendered its command, and I refused to stand in its line one hour longer. The next day, my private home was put to the torch. I record that fact as a soldier records a wound: without complaint, and without retreat.
A parliament that cannot defend the children who elect it has surrendered its command. I refused to stand in its line one hour longer.
I did not enlist in public life to collect a rank. I came to build a nation. I built hotels when the tourists had fled. I built a protection system for the porters who carry the Himalaya on their backs. And I led rescue missions into the high villages for mothers fighting for their lives in childbirth, in places no ministry could find on a map. That work saved mothers the state had abandoned, and it forced the state itself to change its policy. That is my record of service, and I carry it the way a veteran carries his campaign ribbons.
Yet the old garrisons of the Nepali Congress encircled me, closed their gates and held me outside the walls. Neither the old guard nor the so-called reformers ever recognised the noble purpose behind that work. I do not petition them for recognition now. I write because Nepal has reached the decisive battle of its history, and a man who has paid the price of conscience in fire has earned the right to issue a plain report from the front.
Here is that report. The age of political shepherds is over. The age of builders has begun. To understand the campaign ahead, we must study the commanders who won theirs: Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Lee Kuan Yew, King Mahendra, and now, in our own capital and our own time, Prime Minister Balendra Shah.
In 1987, standing before a Conservative family rally at Wembley, Margaret Thatcher reached back to Winston Churchill. She reminded her country that Churchill had understood the danger of weakness and appeasement better than anyone, and then she quoted his final great warning to the House of Commons in 1955:
"Be careful above all things not to let go of the atomic weapon until you are sure, and more than sure, that other means of preserving peace are in your hands." - Winston Churchill, 1955, quoted by Margaret Thatcher at Wembley, 1987
Read that sentence again, and in place of "the atomic weapon" put whatever a nation cannot afford to surrender: its sovereignty, its discipline, its rule of law, its right to defend its own children. The lesson is universal, and it is merciless. A nation that trades away its strength for a promise of peace soon discovers that no one is able to keep that promise on its behalf.
Churchill learned this lesson in the wilderness. In October 1938, while all of Britain was cheering the Munich Agreement as "peace for our time," he rose in the Commons and told his countrymen the truth they least wanted to hear:
"We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat." - Winston Churchill, House of Commons, October 1938
He was mocked, isolated and dismissed by his own party. Within a year he was proven right, and within two he was Prime Minister, offering his people nothing but "blood, toil, tears and sweat" and swearing on their behalf that "we shall never surrender." Years later, at Harvard in 1943, he distilled the whole burden of leadership into six words: "The price of greatness is responsibility."
Thatcher inherited that spirit and carried it into an age of decline. Britain in 1979 was called the sick man of Europe, and her own party was full of gentlemen who wished only to manage that decline politely. When they urged her to retreat in 1980, she answered them in a single line that still rings across the decades:
"You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning." - Margaret Thatcher, Conservative Party Conference, 1980
A year later, she gave the most honest definition of consensus politics ever spoken. Consensus, she said, is "the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies" in pursuit of something in which no one believes but to which no one objects.
That sentence is the diagnosis of Nepal's last thirty-five years. Our parties built consensus endlessly, among themselves and for themselves, and abandoned every principle along the way. The lesson of the Grocer's Daughter and the old warrior is therefore simple: when a nation's survival and dignity are in question, leadership must strike like thunder. Consensus is a tool for running a party; it has never been a method for saving a country.
In 1965, Singapore was a swamp port with no water of its own, no army, no natural resources and a population divided by race and language. Lee Kuan Yew wept on television on the day it was expelled from Malaysia. A generation later, he titled his memoir From Third World to First, and no one in the world could quarrel with the title.
How did he do it? He told us himself, in Manila in 1992, to an audience that did not enjoy hearing it:
"I do not believe that democracy necessarily leads to development. I believe that what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy." - Lee Kuan Yew, Manila, 1992
He went on to warn that the exuberance of democracy, when it is not anchored by discipline, breeds the disorderly conduct that is the sworn enemy of development.
Mark this well, because my critics will twist it. I am a democrat. I resigned my seat in defence of the citizen's right to speak, and I do not argue for less democracy in Nepal. I argue for the correct order of construction. Lee Kuan Yew took a raw nation and made it a good nation by laying three stones in their proper sequence. The first stone was discipline: a clean administration, punctual services, honest courts and a state that keeps its word. Upon that he laid the second stone, development, meaning housing, water, roads, schools and jobs that ordinary people could touch with their own hands. Only then did he set the third stone, a democracy that delivers, whose ballots are respected because its government performs, rather than a democracy of slogans and rotating chairs.
Nepal reversed that order. We declared ourselves a democracy, then a republic, then a federation, and forgot to build the discipline that holds any of it up. We bought the roof before we poured the foundation, and we have been surprised every year since that the roof keeps falling on our heads.
When I look at our history, I recognise only a handful of men as leaders of the nation rather than managers of a party: Prithvi Narayan Shah, who unified it; Bhimsen Thapa, who defended it; Jung Bahadur Rana, who stabilised it; and King Mahendra, who modernised it. After Mahendra, I see political shepherds. I do not see nation-builders.
Historians will fight over his politics for another century. His ledger of construction stands like a fortress wall. Under Mahendra, Nepal took its seat at the United Nations in 1955 and stepped onto the world stage as a sovereign actor rather than a buffer. He settled the northern boundary with China, including the line across Sagarmatha, and gave Nepal a diplomacy that spoke for itself to both its giant neighbours. His new Muluki Ain of 1963 ended the legal sanction of caste hierarchy and declared all citizens equal before the law. His Land Reform Act of 1964 attacked feudal landholding. And he began the East–West Highway that still carries his name, binding the plains of the east to the plains of the west for the first time in our history.
Mahendra understood something the party politicians who followed him never learned. A nation is not held together by speeches; it is held together by roads, by laws and by the felt presence of a state that builds. His era spoke of a system suited to Nepal's own soil. Strip away the politics of that slogan and the truth inside it remains: Nepal must build with its own hands, on its own ground, to its own measure, instead of importing ideologies from Moscow, Beijing or anywhere else and forcing them onto mountains they were never designed for.
A nation is not held together by speeches. It is held together by roads, by laws, and by the felt presence of a state that builds.
History will judge the Nepali Congress and Nepal's communist parties together, because they governed together, failed together and fell together.
Begin with the Nepali Congress, which was once a great party. B.P. Koirala gave it a soul, and Ganesh Man Singh gave it a spine. But a party is not a heritage building to be preserved under glass, and over three decades the Congress became a machine for rotating ministries among the same families and the same faces. Sher Bahadur Deuba held the prime ministership five times; ask any Nepali what he built in those five terms, and watch them search for an answer. The Congress platforms became barren fields, with no seed planted and no vision for the next generation, only actors in masks reciting the liturgy of 1990 to an audience that had long since stopped listening.
The communist parties did worse, because they promised more. The Maoist insurgency cost this country roughly seventeen thousand lives in the name of a people's revolution, and when its commander finally entered Singha Durbar, the revolution turned out to be a reservation for a new elite. The UML, for its part, spoke the language of nationalism while running a patronage machine as old as any court. K.P. Sharma Oli and Pushpa Kamal Dahal passed the prime minister's chair between them as if it were a family heirloom, and the Congress was content to hold their coats in exchange for its share of the spoils.
The result of this grand bargain is written in our airports. More than a thousand young Nepalis leave every day to sweat in the Gulf, in Malaysia and in Europe, and roughly a quarter of our economy is money they send home.
The old parties did not build an economy. They exported one, and lived off the remittance.
Then, on 8 September 2025, the alliance of the old houses banned the very platforms on which the young generation lived, and when the young came out to protest, nineteen of them were killed in a single day in the capital. That was the moment the old order lost its moral right to govern. It did not lose it to a foreign plot or a street mob. It lost it to its own children, whose blood was spilled by a government formed by the Congress and the UML together.
The ballot in March 2026 completed the verdict. The people gave the Rastriya Swatantra Party and Balendra Shah nearly a two-thirds majority. That was not a swing. That was a burial.
Let no one mistake that burial for a temporary setback. The Nepali Congress will not come back, and it must not come back. Neither must the UML, the Maoist Centre, or any of the old faces who governed this country by rotation for thirty-five years. Their return would not be a restoration of democracy. It would be a restoration of the very system that exported our youth, plundered our rivers and fired on our children. If the old parties and the old faces return to power, they will ruin Nepal a second time, and this time there may be no generation left at home to rise against them.
The old parties must not come back. Their return would not restore democracy; it would restore the system that fired on our children.
Ronald Reagan was a Democrat for most of his adult life. He campaigned for Franklin Roosevelt and for Harry Truman, and he led a union. Then, in 1962, he registered as a Republican and explained the decision in a sentence that has outlived the decades:
"I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The party left me." - Ronald Reagan
Eighteen years later, the man his old party had lost became one of the most consequential presidents in American history.
I understand that sentence in my bones. I did not abandon the Nepali Congress. The Congress abandoned the ideals that drew a young Gorkhali to it in the first place: equal citizenship, democratic partnership with nations that live democratic values, and an economy that builds rather than begs. I sat with Sher Bahadur Deuba and with Gagan Kumar Thapa, and I told them directly that the Congress was no longer a machine for victory. They heard me. They did not listen.
So I broke camp. I will not attend the conventions of either camp, because this is not a factional choice. It is a categorical one. A political party's leadership is built by a collective. A nation's sovereignty is not. When a country's survival and dignity are at stake, a leader cannot wait for every faction to finish negotiating its share.
I march in the footsteps of Prithvi Narayan Shah leaving Gorkha. He did not abandon his home. He recognised that a small kingdom could not remain isolated if a nation was to be born. I left the Congress for the same reason: not to abandon anyone, but because a nation cannot be born inside a party office. If my face is seen at a Congress gathering, it is for old friendship and childhood memory, never again for the machinery.
Hear this: a corrupt politician is made by his office and dissolves without his title, whereas I was made by my work. I built institutions, fed the hungry, sheltered the displaced and planted seeds in Himalayan soil. A medal without a story is only metal that rusts. My story does not need their medal.
On 2 October 2026, the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure registered the Building Act 2083 at the Federal Parliament Secretariat. The next morning, Prime Minister Balendra Shah announced its purpose in a single promise:
The right to housing will be guaranteed to every Nepali citizen. - Prime Minister Balendra Shah, announcing the Building Act 2083, 3 October 2026 (paraphrased)
For thirty-five years our politicians promised rights. This bill writes one into law and attaches a budget to it.
Consider what it proposes. For the poorest families, it offers a housing grant of Rs 75,000, of which Rs 50,000 comes from the federal government and Rs 25,000 from the provinces. For every citizen building a first home, it provides riverbed and other natural construction materials free of charge, on the condition that the house follows the government's approved designs and safety standards. For communities living on the edge of disaster, it places a legal obligation on the state to move unsafe settlements to safe ground and to build new homes for the families who live there. And for the middle class, it introduces safe, earthquake-resistant smart homes of 900 to 1,300 square feet, priced between Rs 2 million and Rs 7.5 million and financed through concessional loans and monthly instalments.
This is Lee Kuan Yew's sequence in Nepali form. Singapore's Housing and Development Board turned a nation of squatters into a nation of homeowners, and homeownership turned residents into citizens with a stake in order and stability. A family that owns a safe home does not burn the street. It defends it.
A family that owns a safe home does not burn the street. It defends it.
It is also a housing law brought by a Prime Minister who is a structural engineer by training, and it shows. After the earthquake of 2015 and the floods of this year, every Nepali knows that an unsafe house is not shelter; it is a grave waiting for a date. By tying free materials and subsidies to approved designs, the bill does what no lecture on building codes ever achieved: it makes safety the cheapest choice for the poorest family. That is discipline built into development, exactly as Lee Kuan Yew taught.
I salute this bill's vision without reservation. But every campaign is won or lost on its supply lines, and this one has three flanks that must be held. Relocation must come with real land, real titles and real consent, or it will repeat the anger that met earlier squatter clearances. Subsidies must reach the family, not the contractor or the local middleman. And the materials promised free must not become a new channel for the river-mining syndicates that have plundered our riverbeds for decades. If the government holds those three flanks, the Building Act 2083 can become the most important social legislation since the Muluki Ain of 1963.
Here is my battlefield assessment. The Nepali Congress cannot supersede Balendra Shah. The communist parties cannot supersede him. Even the ambitious men inside his own Rastriya Swatantra Party cannot supersede him. He can be stopped only if external forces, working through internal hands, are allowed to make him fail.
The Congress is busy holding two rival conventions to decide who will inherit the ruins. The communists are still arguing over which of their elders betrayed the revolution first. Neither has offered the young generation a single idea it did not already reject at the ballot box. Opposition without ideas is not an alternative. It is a waiting room.
The real danger lies elsewhere. Every reforming government in Nepal's history has been undone the same way: not defeated in the open, but hollowed out from within. Already we see the pattern. Capable young ministers are being quietly undermined by colleagues who fear their rise. Communal tension in the Terai is being cultivated rather than calmed, to manufacture an argument that the government cannot keep order. These are not accidents. They are the old playbook of factional predation, now wearing new party colours, and too often encouraged by hands that reach across our borders.
The Prime Minister must understand that a two-thirds majority is not a fortress. It is a lease from the people, renewable only through delivery. Independent observers have already noted that the economic recovery has been slow, and that relations with India, China and the United States have been handled too insularly. Those criticisms deserve a serious answer, because a government isolated abroad becomes easy to destabilise at home. Churchill did not win alone; he won because he built the alliance that could win. Balendra Shah needs the same: confident, transparent partnerships with the democracies of the world, built on Nepal's own terms, so that no outside power finds it cheaper to break him than to work with him.
A two-thirds majority is not a fortress. It is a lease from the people, renewable only through delivery.
If he keeps faith with discipline, delivers homes, roads and jobs, and closes the doors through which outside interference walks in, no party in Nepal has the strength to replace him.
There is a species of politician that Nepal produces in abundance, and I call him the banana leader. He grows in bunches and never stands alone. He bends whichever way the wind is blowing that morning. He ripens quickly in the warmth of a ministry and rots just as quickly when the warmth is gone. Peel away the skin and you will find no spine inside, only something soft that yields to every thumb that presses on it. And like the fruit, he is imported and exported with equal ease, ready to be shipped to whichever patron at home or abroad is paying the best price that season.
The banana leader grows in bunches, bends with every wind, ripens in office and rots the moment he leaves it. Peel him, and you will find no spine.
The old parties are plantations of banana leaders, and the Nepali Congress is the oldest plantation of all. In the Congress today, everything old is announced as new. The so-called new leaders are the same men who sat in the same cabinets, voted for the same coalitions and defended the same chairs, now wearing younger slogans like borrowed clothes.
Watch how Gagan Kumar Thapa has assembled what he calls a new Congress. He has not grown a new body. He has collected the arms, the legs and every vital organ of the old one and stitched them together under a fresh name. The same faction bosses, the same district strongmen, the same financiers of patronage are all transplanted intact into the "new" party. A body built entirely from old organs is not reborn. It is the old body walking again, and it will carry every old disease with it.
A body stitched together from the old party's arms, legs and organs is not a new Congress. It is the old Congress walking again, carrying every old disease.
The deeper truth is biological, and it is merciless. A living party renews itself the way a family does: through new seed, new conception and new birth. The Nepali Congress has no seed left. Nothing new has been conceived inside it for a generation, and no child of ideas has been born. It has no youth to inherit it and no elders worth following. It is a barren house whose occupants hold conventions to argue over the furniture.
The Nepali Congress has no seed, no conception and no newborn. A party that cannot give birth to a new generation can only bury the old one.
Inside that barren house there is a group of men who are old in every habit yet insist on being called the new boys. They have discovered the language of youth the way a salesman discovers a fashionable slogan. Since September 2025 they have presented themselves at every platform as the true owners of the Gen Z movement, as if a generation that bled in the streets were a vote bank to be inherited at a convention.
I issue one challenge to these self-appointed heirs of the uprising. On 8 September 2025, while the bodies of young Nepalis still lay on the streets of Kathmandu, one Member of Parliament resigned his seat in protest. Who was he? They do not know. They have never asked. They claim to own a revolution whose single parliamentary act of conscience they cannot even name. That is not leadership of Gen Z. It is identity theft.
They claim to own the Gen Z movement, yet they cannot name the only Member of Parliament who resigned his seat on the day its children were killed. That is not leadership. It is identity theft.
The young generation is not fooled, and the March 2026 election proved it. Gen Z did not rise up to replace old banana leaders with younger ones in fresher skins. It rose up to end the plantation.
Now turn the guns on the new parties, because the banana does not care which flag flies over the field it grows in. Within the ruling coalition today there are men who have already learned the old habits faster than they learned to govern. They undermine capable young ministers who might outshine them. They whisper to foreign embassies when they should be speaking to their own voters. They treat the people's two-thirds mandate as a harvest to be divided rather than a trust to be honoured. A new party filled with old instincts is simply an old party with a new logo, and the people who voted for change will judge it more harshly than any opposition ever could.
Now I fire the shot that many think of and few dare to take. Nepal's current political system, as it stands, cannot build Nepal. It was not designed to build anything. It was designed to share power among parties, and it has performed that one function with remarkable efficiency.
Since 1990, this country has changed governments more than two dozen times. On average, a Nepali prime minister has lasted little more than a year. No serious nation in history has been built in twelve-month instalments. A hydropower project takes longer than a typical Nepali government. A highway takes longer. A generation of well-trained teachers takes far longer. Every new cabinet arrives, cancels the plans of the last one, appoints its own people to every board and commission, and leaves before a single foundation has set. We have not had thirty-five years of democracy. We have had thirty-five years of short-lived governments, and the difference is the whole story of our poverty.
No nation in history has been built in twelve-month instalments. Nepal did not have thirty-five years of democracy; it had thirty-five years of governments that never lasted long enough to build.
Now look at Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew served as prime minister from 1959 to 1990, more than thirty years of uninterrupted leadership. His party has won every general election since. Because the leadership was long, the vision could be long. A housing programme begun in the 1960s was still being expanded by the same government decades later, until the great majority of Singaporeans lived in homes the state had built and they themselves owned. An anti-corruption bureau, given real teeth and real independence, was allowed to work for a generation without being dismantled by the next coalition. A civil service was built on merit, protected from the spoils of each election, and trusted to plan in decades rather than in budget cycles.
That is what thirty years buys a nation: not one man's glory, but the time for a plan to become a country. I do not ask for a ruler for life, and I do not ask for any vote to be cancelled. Singapore's leaders earned their thirty years at the ballot box, election after election, by delivering. I ask for a Nepal in which delivery is rewarded with continuity, and in which continuity is protected from the banana leaders who would trade it away for a ministry.
This means building three things that our current system lacks. First, a thirty-year National Development Charter, passed by Parliament and binding on every government that follows, so that the highway, the hydropower plant and the housing programme survive a change of cabinet. Second, a stable executive with a fixed and secure term, so that a prime minister spends his years governing rather than defending his chair against his own coalition partners. Third, an independent anti-corruption authority and a merit-based civil service, insulated from the party machines, so that discipline outlives any single leader.
Discipline first. Development second. Democracy that delivers. And thirty years of continuity to let all three take root.
The Building Act 2083 is exactly the kind of law that will die if this system is not reformed. Its benefits will take a decade to reach every district. Its relocations will take years. Its smart homes will be built slowly, family by family, loan by loan. If the plantation of banana leaders is allowed to topple this government in two years, as it toppled every government before it, the bill will become one more beautiful document in the archive of Nepal's abandoned promises. Prime Minister Shah has begun to build. The question for every Nepali is whether we will finally give a builder the time to finish.
The campaign has its commanders and its lessons. Churchill ordered us never to surrender our strength for an empty promise of peace. Thatcher ordered us never to trade conviction for consensus, because consensus is surrender in slow motion. Lee Kuan Yew laid down the order of battle: discipline first, development second, a democracy that delivers third. Mahendra proved that a nation is held by roads and laws, not speeches. And Balendra Shah, with a single bill, has seized the high ground every government before him abandoned: a safe roof over the head of every Nepali.
Now come the orders of the day. Give the builders the thirty years that Singapore gave Lee Kuan Yew, earned at the ballot box and defended against every deserter. Bar the gates against the return of the Nepali Congress, the UML, the Maoist Centre and every old face that governed by rotation and ruled by ruin. Purge the banana leaders from every party, old and new, before they rot the harvest. Hold the three flanks of the Building Act until the last family has its roof. And close every door through which a foreign hand reaches into our politics.
I broke ranks on the day our children fell. My home was burned the next morning. I carry no party flag, command no faction and wear no title. What I carry is my record: mothers brought down alive from the mountains, porters protected, the displaced sheltered and the hungry fed. I place that record, my conscience and my service at the command of any government that chooses discipline over drift and construction over consensus.
The age of the shepherds is over. The builders are on the march. Nepal will be built, and no banana leader, old or new, will stand in the way.
Rajendra Bajgain is a Nepali entrepreneur, humanitarian and former Member of Parliament.