Judging by personal or factional clashes in all the political parties, it may not look surprising that Surya Bahadur Thapa, former chairman of the Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP), left it, to launch his new Rastriya Janashakti Party (RJP). Nevertheless, the RPP falls in a different class, rivalled perhaps by the Rastriya Sadbhavana Party (RSP), when it comes to giving individual opportunism highest priority. During the past fifteen years of its existence, the RPP has shown little sign of developing into a political party based on certain principles and common goals. It still looks like a hodgepodge of local chieftains driven by personal interests but also by the need to act as a group in the multiparty system to win seats in elections and get power. Thapa’s new party seeks no more than to further his personal political interests in the new situation.

After giving way to a new central leadership under Pashupati Shumsher Rana, Thapa could not have hoped to represent the party to power again. The last time he became prime minister, for a fifth time, he had been handpicked not as the representative of the RPP. Thapa ignored the party and the party hounded him, and Thapa has not, therefore, forgiven the party leadership for the collapse of his government. Thapa knows that if the parliamentary polls were held now, his party would not have good prospects — indeed, his party had drawn a blank at the first general elections, when the RPP had been split at birth. Since then it has split up more than once. Even when the party was one, each faction made alliances with opposition parties to bring down the party’s prime minister if he happened to belong to a rival faction, and this tendency has remained unchanged after October 4, 2002.

Though the polls are unlikely anytime soon, many at home and particularly the international community have stressed some interim arrangement like an all-party government, e.g. to make it easier for them to continue aid to Nepal. Perhaps in any such eventuality, the importance of a separate party increases for its leaders. Deuba, for example, has personally benefited from being the leader of a separate party and hopes to do so again, whatever unfavourable judgment history may pass against him for his role in derailing democracy. As for Thapa, he cannot allow himself to play second fiddle to anybody in the RPP, nor can he retire from active politics. So he needs a new party to keep him afloat, to endorse him for any high role that time may offer. And with friends in high places in certain quarters abroad, as is widely believed, Thapa, not surprisingly, may even be hoping to make it a sixth time. And for that, RPP certainly is not the best place for him to be in.