Nepal is heading into elections at a moment when democracy is shrinking in much of its neighbourhood, and the contrast should concentrate minds in Kathmandu. What looks like routine electoral scheduling in Nepal is, in fact, an important asset in a region where ballots are increasingly managed, muted or simply cancelled.
Pakistan is the clearest warning of what happens when the army becomes the ultimate veto player. Decades of military rule and praetorian interference have hollowed out civilian institutions, politicised the judiciary and normalised extra‑constitutional fixes. Under generals from Zia to Musharraf, the security establishment cultivated jihadist groups for regional influence in Afghanistan and Kashmir, creating the "military–madrasa–mullah" complex that now defines the country's security and ideological landscape. This regional outcome offers an important perspective for Nepal as it approaches its own elections.
The bill is now due. In the latest Global Terrorism Index, Pakistan has climbed to second place worldwide, with a 45 per cent rise in terrorism‑related deaths and attacks more than doubling in a year, driven largely by the Tehreek‑e‑Taliban Pakistan. This is not just collateral damage; it is the predictable outcome of a state that outsourced both ideology and violence to non‑state actors while strangling democratic competition. For Nepal, the message is blunt: once the security establishment decides it is the ultimate arbiter of politics, democracy becomes a façade, and the country drifts into permanent instability.
Bangladesh demonstrates another path to restricted democratic space, with a dominant political party using electoral processes to consolidate one-family control. The Awami League, under Sheikh Hasina, had established a form of dynastic rule: formal multiparty elections take place, but political competition is heavily tilted, making changes in leadership nearly unattainable.
Bangladesh demonstrates how dominant parties can shrink democratic space by turning elections into tools for consolidating one-family control. The government's crackdown on opposition before the 2024 elections underlines the danger: when electoral procedures are manipulated, genuine competition disappears. Nepal must recognise the warning- unchecked dynastic politics can convert democracy into de facto authoritarian rule.
Myanmar represents a case where a promising democratic transition was abruptly ended by military intervention. After a decade of reform, the 2021 military takeover reversed political gains, detained leadership, nullified elections, and reinstated direct rule. The country now faces civil conflict, isolation, and economic slowdown, while democratic leaders are pushed into exile or underground resistance.
Myanmar's democracy was destroyed by military intervention, leading not just to halted progress but to violence and division. For Nepal, the key warning is clear: military intervention in politics erases democratic gains and triggers setbacks in peace and development.
Set against these failures, India still offers an important positive message: a large, noisy and frequently chaotic democracy can underpin sustained economic transformation. Since the 1991 reforms, India's growth has roughly doubled compared to the dirigiste decades, with average GDP expansion around 7 per cent between 1992 and 2022 and significant reductions in poverty. This was achieved not under a single leader or party, but through competitive politics, coalition governments and alternation of power.
Yet India also offers two sharp warnings that Nepal cannot ignore. First, the erosion of internal democracy in major parties has produced a personality‑centric ruling formation and an opposition that often looks absent or paralysed. Dynastic control is not limited to one side; parties across the spectrum have prioritised family allegiance over ideological clarity or organisational merit, hollowing out internal debate and renewal.
Second, the steady weakening of checks and balances, from independent media to autonomous institutions, has led many scholars to speak of shrinking civic space and creeping authoritarianism even as elections continue on schedule. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party itself has centralised decision‑making to the point that dissent within the party is minimal, candidature is tightly controlled from the top, and the space for ideological diversity has narrowed. India thus illustrates both sides of the equation: democracy has been central to its "turbo" growth story, but the hollowing out of internal party democracy and opposition capability now threatens to undermine that very achievement.
Nepal does not live in a vacuum. Around it, one neighbour is under overt military tutelage, another under dynastic majoritarian dominance, and a third under outright junta rule. India shows that democracy can deliver growth and global relevance, but also that the democratic form may coexist with eroding substance. Against this backdrop, Nepal's most radical act is not to imitate any of them but to insist on timely, competitive and credible elections, and to clean up its own parties before they begin to resemble their regional counterparts.
Three lessons stand out. First, there can be no role for the army in political arbitration; once the barracks become a parallel power centre, as in Pakistan and Myanmar, the civilian sphere never fully recovers. Second, Nepal's parties must treat dynastic entitlement as a liability, not a birthright; Bangladesh and India show that when leadership is inherited rather than earned, opposition dies and governance decays. Third, internal democracy is not a luxury. Parties that do not tolerate dissent inside their own structures will not defend it in society when they govern.
Nepal's upcoming polls are not just another date on the calendar. They are a stress test of whether the country can resist the regional drift towards managed democracy and military or dynastic control. Holding elections on time is necessary, but it is not sufficient. The real task is harder: to ensure that when voters walk to the polling booths, they are choosing between parties that still believe in democracy inside their own walls, not just on their campaign posters.
Prof C K Peela is a geopolitical and security expert on South Asia and Asia Pacific
