I remember an incident 20 years ago when King Gyanendra, after assuming executive power, held municipal elections to establish the legitimacy of the coup he had staged a year earlier. I was with a fleet of Associated Press crew members on a mission to meet the newly elected mayor and deputy mayor of one of the municipalities in Kavre district to report their reactions after the elections, which had been boycotted by all pro-democracy forces and the Maoists alike. The elected officials were confined and guarded by police in a house a few hundred meters east of the District Police Office, as Maoist threats of physical action had intensified.
We climbed to the second or third floor amid attempts by plainclothes police personnel on the ground floor to stop us. A tall white person (khaire, in colloquial Nepali terms) led the crew. Junior policemen could not stop him as he spoke in English. By the time instructions from senior officers arrived, we had already completed an ambush video interview with the mayor-elect. The last question the AP journalist asked—and I translated—was how the mayor felt after being elected by the people but confined to the district headquarters. Even after repeated reframing of the question in Nepali, he did not have a clear answer. I tried to explain to my AP colleague that the mayor-elect seemed to be in an “awkward” or “dilemmatic” state, but I was asked to translate exactly what the mayor had said. The literal English translation was that the mayor-elect was feeling “how-how,” which made little or no sense to a native English speaker.
This is typical in Nepali culture. When someone offers us tea or coffee, we say, “Both work,” or “Either,” or “Whatever,” and ultimately make our choice by saying, “Me too,” if others opt for hot lemon honey with ginger. We feel “how-how” in many circumstances in our personal and social lives. We do not see things in black and white; we prefer to keep some grey areas. It can be good or bad—or both—and often reflects a failure to form a clear opinion, whether the question concerns life, well-being, or development. It is, in some sense, a serious ontological defect. The same applies to our voting choices. When even an elected mayor cannot clearly articulate whether he feels good or bad, how can we expect voters to explain why they support one candidate and not another?
I see reasonless voters dominating street conversations, often instigated by politically motivated YouTubers during the current highly mediatized election campaigns. “We voted for this party eight times, and now we will try a new one. Ultimately, no one has done anything for us.” This is among the most common responses on social media. In essence, someone doing something for a voter becomes the person of his or her choice.
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There is little space for a “why” question when choices stem from the belief that the new is automatically better than the old—like clothes—rather than from logic, programmes, plans, credibility, reputation, or background. Belief is a unique product of the human mind. Belief is born in the graveyard of logic. When voting choices are based on belief rather than logic, elections become rituals or cultural events instead of politically significant decision-making processes or forums for informed citizen engagement. This is why I prefer a sociological, rather than purely political, lens to understand Nepal’s elections.
When theory does not work—when the structure of government, the purpose of elections, the positions and behaviours of political parties, and their policy stances fail to attract voter interest, and mass hysteria instead controls people’s minds—there is little point in discussing elections solely through political science frameworks. It makes more sense to study how mass hysteria is periodically produced in Nepal to dismantle political institutions, culture, and processes, only for a new system to be tested until another hysteria germinates.
I recall the mutual demonization between Congress and Communists in the early 1990s. Social relationships were defined by ideological positions. In some cases, only Congress supporters attended the funeral of a Congress supporter, and only Communists attended the wedding procession of a Communist supporter. Institutions were shaped accordingly; some were captured by Communists and others by Congress. Despite multiple rounds of leadership competition, universities, community forestry groups, NGOs, and cooperatives still reflect leadership structures rooted in the 1990s Congress-Communist divide.
Later, the Maoists became influential, dividing society into pro- and anti-Maoist camps. The Madhesh uprising led to armed groups mushrooming as a combined byproduct of the Maoist and Madhesh movements, dividing society along Madheshi versus Pahadi lines. CK Raut’s rise further divided Madhesh into pro- and anti-establishment groups. Now, new parties—often blamed for hijacking the Gen Z movement—have used effective rhetoric to introduce an old-versus-new divide. Families themselves are divided, with older parents and younger children occupying opposing political spaces.
Interestingly, these divisions remain largely at the societal level. At the political level, all parties—old and new alike—have shared power and resources, and we cannot rule out the possibility of a UML-RSP coalition in the new parliament. Rabi, Balen, Kulman, and Harka are perceived as new, though some resemble old wine in new bottles. A common feature among them is that each has collaborated with the others in one form or another. They have exercised political power in their drive to control resources. Thus, fiercely contested elections have not drawn a line that prevents their future political co-seating, but the way they fought on social media has made co-existence in society somewhat uncomfortable. Thousands of Nepalis will shy away from meeting their close relatives if they behave as they do online. The hatred they spew on social media platforms will continue haunting them for many years to come. A gentleman who used filthy slang against a celebrity female candidate in Kathmandu has already reached hundreds or thousands of his relatives, neighbours, and colleagues. How will he face this candidate in the future? Does he believe his language went unnoticed by his mother-in-law, sister-in-law, daughter, or wife?
When members of society behave as asocial animals—expressing abhorrence during routine political events like elections and searching for loopholes to tear society apart while hiding in the dark—this is not merely political. Something is wrong at the societal and mental levels. We have never treated this as an issue of the brain, mind, cognitive behaviour, or habit. Instead, we repeatedly try to solve socio-cognitive problems by changing political structures. We never ask whether our mental model itself has defects.
A phrase used by the famous psychologist and author of Toward a Psychology of Being, Abraham Maslow, is often quoted to depict the habit of using the same tool to fix every problem: “For the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” This reflects an issue with our mental model. Our leaders habitually shift blame to the political system, and we, the voters, habitually follow them. We rarely question leaders’ habits; instead, we keep changing political systems to conceal their weaknesses. Elections rarely become moments of informed choice over representatives, policies, and practices.
The political Gaijatra—where we eat, drink, worship an idol, stage comedies, ridicule opponents, and take out a procession—is different from what political science is normally supposed to address. The collective habit of all of us is a social electoral habit. When my individual choice aligns with a larger social choice, people vote for those who are likely to win, often after bargaining or blackmailing for individual gains. The sanctity of “true representation” either disappears in short-term transactions or remains buried under mass hysteria.
The author is a governance, political process and peacebuilding professional with expertise in democratic institutions, electoral dynamics and conflict transformation.
