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Deuba's Sukedhara declaration and Gagan Thapa's careful semantics are two signatures on the same contract, and neither faction seems to have read what it costs
KATHMANDU: In classical literature, a Faustian bargain occurs when a protagonist sells his foundational soul to the devil in exchange for immediate power, only to realise too late that the transaction guarantees his ruin. For the Nepali Congress, that soul was hard won in 2006. It was the constitutional commitment to a secular, pluralistic republic, a promise of state neutrality written into the founding document of a country made up of dozens of ethnicities and faiths. Today, battered by an election defeat that stripped it of relevance and paralysed by an internal feud that has left it unable to agree on much of anything, Nepal’s oldest democratic party is signing its own devil’s pact. By surrendering its secular principles to chase majoritarian Hindu sentiment, Congress is betting that short term electoral survival can be purchased with identity politics, seemingly unaware that normalising religious nationalism tends to consume the very democratic centre it claims to protect.
National gathering of the Nepali Congress dissident faction, where the party endorsed Sanatan religion as part of its future political policy.
This trade is no longer confined to meeting rooms and policy papers. It is playing out as live political theatre. The scene in Sukedhara, where senior Congress leaders visibly clashed on stage over whether to insert language protecting Sanatan tradition into the party’s closing resolution, exposed the raw desperation driving Deuba’s old guard. But watching only the stage drama misses the larger picture. While Deuba’s camp shouts its Hindu identity into a live microphone, Gagan Thapa’s reformist wing reaches for the same outcome through polished constitutional argument about the state’s duty toward religion. Different costumes, different scripts, but both factions are walking toward the same signature line, the one that strips secularism out of the centre of Nepal’s democratic framework in exchange for votes it cannot otherwise win.
Every bargain with the devil has fine print nobody reads carefully enough and Sukedhara had its own version. As organisers prepared the closing declaration of the dissident faction’s three day gathering, a note reached Deuba asking him to state, plainly, where he stood on a Hindu state. Congress leader Shankar Bhandari, who runs the Sanatan Hindu Rashtra Campaign , had pressed for that clarification, and the resulting exchange reportedly led Prakash Sharan Mahat to agree that language on establishing a Sanatan Hindu state should be included. Bimalendra Nidhi rose from his chair to object, arguing that the constitution Congress itself had helped promulgate should not be contradicted in the party’s own resolutions. What followed was a visible exchange of words between Nidhi and Mahat on stage, prompted by a five point declaration that departed from an earlier twenty point draft circulated before the event, with the religious language added only at the last moment and endorsed regardless of the objection.
Political analysts have already offered a blunter reading of the motive, suggesting the Hindu line may reflect Deuba’s search for personal and political security rather than any deep conviction, since religion never seemed to matter much to him as a leader before this moment.
The final text avoided the words Hindu Rashtra. Instead it framed Nepal’s long standing religious and cultural traditions as part of the national identity and pledged the party to protecting Hindu, Buddhist, Kirat and nature based faiths alongside religious freedom, tolerance and social harmony. That is the kind of clause a lawyer drafts when the client wants the benefit of a claim without the liability of stating it outright. It can be read as gentle cultural preservation by one audience and as the first formal step toward reclaiming Hindu Rashtra by another, and that ambiguity is not an accident. It is the whole point of the deal.
Deuba’s own words on stage carried the same careful hedge. He described himself as personally Hindu, someone who had undergone the sacred thread ceremony, married according to Hindu ritual, and worshipped regularly at Pashupatinath, while insisting that what the country as a whole decides on religion rests with the people and that religious freedom must extend to everyone. It reads like a man trying to keep one foot inside the contract and one foot out of it, aware that whatever he signs in Sukedhara will still need to survive scrutiny in analysts’ courts and in front of Nepal’s non Hindu minorities.
Political analysts have already offered a blunter reading of the motive, suggesting the Hindu line may reflect Deuba’s search for personal and political security rather than any deep conviction, since religion never seemed to matter much to him as a leader before this moment. It may be noted that Hindu nationalist currents from across the border have shaped the timing. Faust never believed in the devil either, until the contract was in front of him and the ink was already dry.
Two signatures on the same contract
It would be convenient to treat this as one faction’s opportunism and leave it there, Deuba’s tired old guard reaching for a familiar trick as it loses ground to a younger rival. That story lets Gagan Thapa’s side off far too easily.
Thapa has said openly that during the drafting of the 2015 constitution, his own written position on the drafting committee was that the word secularism should not appear at all, that the document should instead enshrine religious freedom, and that the eventual inclusion of secularism was a compromise forced on him by others in the process. That is not a footnote about legislative drafting. It is the president of Nepali Congress, elected to lead the party into its next chapter, revealing that he has held for over a decade the position that the very word secular was itself a mistake.
Nepali Congress President Gagan Thapa. File photo
He has said versions of this more pointedly and more recently. Speaking in Tanahun, Thapa argued that all castes, religions and languages deserve equal treatment while warning against what he called religious conversions occurring across Nepal, and stated that Congress, rather than self appointed protectors, would be the one to safeguard the country’s large Vedic Sanatan community, which he said carries real fears about threats to its faith. Strip away the boilerplate about treating every community equally, which every Nepali politician offers reflexively and what remains is a direct appeal to Hindu anxiety about religious change, delivered by the very leader positioning himself as the modern alternative to Deuba.
This is the part of the story the stage brawl in Sukedhara obscures. The theatre belongs to Deuba’s camp. The substance belongs to both. Thapa’s version comes wrapped in constitutional reasoning rather than declarations about Hindu Rashtra, but it points toward the same clause in the same contract, a Nepal where secularism is either quietly removed from the founding text or hollowed out while officially retained. One camp signs loudly on a stage. The other signs quietly in position papers about drafting history. Mephistopheles does not care which pen is used.
Why Nepali Congress went looking for a devil
Nobody sells a soul from a position of strength. Faust turns to Mephistopheles because his own knowledge, his own achievements, have stopped being enough, and Nepali Congress arrived at Sukedhara from a similarly desperate place. The Rastriya Swatantra Party, led by former Kathmandu mayor and rapper Balendra Shah, won 182 of 275 seats in the March 5 election, falling just two seats short of a two thirds majority in the first parliamentary vote following the Sushila Karki-led interim government that replaced KP Sharma Oli after Gen Z-led protests forced him from power the previous September. Congress, the country’s oldest and largest party by membership, managed only 38 seats, eighteen under first past the post and twenty through proportional representation, a result that left the country’s established parties visibly gutted. Oli lost his own seat to Shah by roughly fifty thousand votes.
Deuba’s faction is doing it loudly, timing a Sanatan declaration for maximum visibility. Thapa’s faction is doing it quietly, through constitutional argument that lands in nearly the same place
A defeat of that scale does not just cost a party power. It dismantles the assumptions its leadership built entire careers on. For decades Congress could count on its historical claim to having led the fight against the Panchayat system and the monarchy, on organisational depth in every district, and on being one half of the country’s ruling duopoly with the communist parties. RSP’s landslide made that coalition irrelevant almost overnight to an electorate, especially a young one, that voted for anti corruption messaging and generational change rather than any of the ideological battles that used to define Nepali politics.
Facing collapse like that, a party has two paths open to it. One is to rebuild slowly around policy, competence and a credible economic offer, the unglamorous work of earning relevance back. The other is to reach for whatever identity based mobilisation is on the shelf and hope it pays out faster. Congress, in both its warring wings, has chosen the second path. Deuba’s faction is doing it loudly, timing a Sanatan declaration for maximum visibility. Thapa’s faction is doing it quietly, through constitutional argument that lands in nearly the same place. Neither approach touches the actual reasons voters walked away from Congress in March, which had far more to do with cooperative fraud, corruption and stagnant wages than with the constitutional status of religion.
Every Faustian bargain eventually comes due, and the bill rarely gets sent to the man who signed the contract. It gets sent somewhere else, to someone who never saw the paperwork.
On the night of July 26, a dispute over loud music during a Hindu procession and a religious flag mounted on an electricity pole in Kaptanganj, part of Dewanganj Rural Municipality in Sunsari district, escalated into violence that left three people dead and roughly two dozen injured. A separate incident during the same unrest saw a Muslim family travelling by motorcycle attacked by a mob and beaten while security forces stood nearby. The violence spread from Sunsari into wider Madhesh Province, with curfews eventually covering parts of Sunsari, Siraha and Dhanusha, markets shuttered, schools closed, and Prime Minister Balendra Shah facing sharp criticism for staying silent for four days before addressing the nation.
Nepal Army was deployed to diffuse communal tensions in Kaptanganj, Sunsari. File photo
Lawmakers from the region understood immediately what was at stake beyond the immediate bloodshed. One legislator urged political parties to stop using two communities that had coexisted peacefully for generations as instruments of political ambition, saying she strongly objected to attempts to divide ordinary people for political gain. That appeal, made while families in Kaptanganj were still burying their dead, is the backdrop against which Congress chose to hold a national gathering built around Sanatan identity, with one faction’s leader arguing that protecting the majority faith is a matter of state duty.
Researchers examining the Sunsari episode point to a longer pattern running along the Nepal India border, from Birgunj through Dhanusha to Sarlahi, in which organised religious assertiveness on both sides of the frontier is reshaping a belt that once absorbed this kind of friction without anyone dying over it. A national party choosing this exact moment to formally adopt Sanatan religion as part of its identity, or to argue the word secular was itself a historical error, is not signing its contract in some sealed room removed from Sunsari. It is adding a fresh clause to the same document that is already being enforced with stones and gunfire in the Tarai.
Nepal’s secular status did not arrive from a foreign template or an academic committee. It came from the House of Representatives’ declaration on 18 May 2006, ending two hundred years of Hindu monarchy and stripping the king of his executive powers, a decision reaffirmed by the Interim Constitution of 2007 and formally locked in when the Constituent Assembly declared Nepal a secular, federal, democratic republic on 28 May 2008, later written into Article 4 of the 2015 constitution. That sequence was not a minor clause tacked onto a longer document. It sat alongside federalism and the end of monarchy as one of the central achievements of the 2006 movement, built on the recognition that a state formally organised around Hindu monarchy had never actually been neutral toward the country’s Buddhist, Muslim, Kirat, Christian and other communities, regardless of the tolerance it claimed to extend them.
Then President Ram Baran Yadav displays the constitution, formally adopted following a decade of political infighting, in Kathmandu, Nepal, Sunday, September 20, 2015. File photo
Nepali Congress signed that settlement. It stood alongside the Maoists and other communist parties who negotiated the end of the civil war and helped write secularism into the republic’s foundation. To now have factions inside that same party arguing for a Hindu state, or for quietly deleting the word secular, is not a policy adjustment. It is Congress tearing up a page from its own founding contract, not because any new evidence suggests secularism has failed Nepal, but because electoral desperation has made majoritarian signalling look like the fastest route back into relevance. Faust did not renegotiate with Mephistopheles because his old knowledge had been disproven. He did it because he wanted power faster than study could deliver it.
Nepal is not the first democracy to discover that mainstream parties, once cornered, tend to reach for the same devil rather than resist him. The pattern shows up wherever an established political force starts losing ground to a more explicitly religious or nationalist rival.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has long faced allegations over his handling of the 2002 Gujarat riots, when he was Gujarat’s chief minister. File photo/ANI
India’s Congress party spent much of the late twentieth century watching the Bharatiya Janata Party build a national movement around the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign at Ayodhya. Rather than confronting that mobilisation directly, sections of Congress tried at various points to compete for the same religious constituency, most visibly around the Shah Bano case and the reopening of the temple gates in 1986. Congress never won back the voters it was chasing. What it won instead was the normalisation of majoritarian religious politics as a legitimate axis of national competition, ground the BJP has occupied more effectively ever since.
Turkey offers the mirror image of the same story. The secular Kemalist establishment that dominated the republic for most of the twentieth century found itself, by the early 2000s, unable to counter the AKP’s blend of religious conservatism and economic delivery. Rather than secularism absorbing or moderating the AKP over time, the AKP spent two decades dismantling the secular guardrails the military and judiciary had once enforced, rewriting the relationship between mosque and state almost entirely on its own terms.
Sri Lanka shows what happens when an entire political establishment, not just one insurgent party, signs the same contract as official strategy. Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, promoted for decades by mainstream parties competing for the same ethnic Sinhala vote, hardened over time into organised religious chauvinism that helped fuel the civil war against Tamil separatists and later found expression in anti Muslim violence led by groups like Bodu Bala Sena. That did not emerge from a fringe movement operating outside the mainstream. It emerged because mainstream Sri Lankan parties calculated, correctly in electoral terms, that competing to appear more protective of Sinhala Buddhist identity was a winning strategy, whatever it eventually cost the country’s Tamil and Muslim minorities.
The thread running through all three cases is the one visible in Sukedhara right now. Established parties under real competitive pressure rarely resist the pull of majoritarian identity politics. They calculate, often correctly in the short run, that borrowing the rhetoric costs less than confronting it. And in every case, the borrowing did not neutralise the more extreme forces making those arguments. It legitimised them, handed them the validation of mainstream acceptance, and left the political centre permanently narrower than it had been before the deal was signed.
Nepali Congress does not need a new position on religion to survive its current crisis. It needs an answer for why voters who once saw it as the guarantor of Nepal’s democratic transition chose, in March, to hand an unprecedented mandate to a three year old party. Nothing in the Sukedhara declaration answers that question, and nothing in Thapa’s careful constitutional semantics does either. What both offer instead is a shortcut, a wager that religious identity can substitute for the policy vision the party has failed to produce.
Leaders participating in the event organized by the Nepali Congress dissident faction. File photo
That wager will not be paid by Deuba or Thapa. It gets paid in places like Kaptanganj, where three families are already burying their dead over a dispute that began with a loudspeaker and a flag, in a region where lawmakers have already warned that communities who lived together for generations are being converted into instruments of political ambition. Nepal’s constitutional settlement of 2006 was built by people who understood that a state formally tied to one religion had never actually been neutral toward the rest. Watching the party most responsible for writing that settlement now argue internally over how quickly to walk away from it is not renewal. It is the very institutional exhaustion that handed RSP its landslide in the first place, and like every character who has ever signed a contract with the devil, Congress seems to believe it can walk away from the table once it has collected what it came for. Faust believed that too, right up until Mephistopheles came to collect.
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