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By Dr. Janardan Subedi

Time is an amazing thing. No one knows where it came from or where it is going. It was there, it is there, and it will be there. We arrived somewhere in the middle, glanced at the clock, misunderstood it completely, and decided to reorganize the state while arguing about who wasted the last decade.

Nepal’s recent politics does not unfold in time. It performs against it. Every political moment insists on urgency. Every failure pleads for patience. Every compromise claims inevitability. Time listens politely, offers no commentary, and continues moving forward without waiting for press conferences.

In democratic theory, time disciplines power. Elections impose limits. Constitutions slow impulse. Memory exposes contradiction. In Nepal, time has been reduced to stage lighting. It illuminates the speaker, flatters the performance, and shifts scenes before anyone can verify what was promised in the last act.

What remains is not governance but choreography.

Coalition politics has become a nightly rehearsal where ideological rivals discover sudden compatibility the moment arithmetic demands it. Yesterday’s existential threat becomes today’s indispensable partner. This transformation is defended as pragmatism, a word now used to excuse everything except consistency.

Compromise, in itself, is not the problem. Compromise is the essence of plural politics. The problem arises when compromise demands historical erasure and moral contortion, when yesterday’s condemnation is reframed as today’s misunderstanding. In such a system, political language loses meaning, and trust becomes a disposable asset.

A functioning political system remembers what it said yesterday, even when it chooses differently today. Nepal’s system forgets publicly and remembers selectively. History is treated like a wardrobe. Certain moments are worn ceremonially. Others are quietly folded away, never to be mentioned unless strategically useful. Accountability is declared important, just not now, and rarely here.

Time remembers anyway.

For more than two decades, warnings were issued about unchecked dependency, the substitution of moral posturing for strategic judgment, and the gradual erosion of sovereign decision-making. These warnings were dismissed, often ridiculed, as outdated or alarmist. Aid was confused with alignment. Approval was mistaken for autonomy. Sovereignty was recited as a slogan while being quietly negotiated away through conditional partnerships and borrowed legitimacy.

The language of morality became a convenient cover for the absence of strategy. Good intentions were mistaken for good policy. External validation became a substitute for internal coherence. Over time, this produced a politics more responsive to international applause than domestic consequence. National judgment eroded quietly, structurally, and cumulatively, creating vulnerabilities that were invisible until crises forced recognition.

Today, external powers no longer conceal their assessments. Their concerns reflect realities that domestic politics refused to confront. The consequences are no longer abstract. They are structural. Strategic space has narrowed. Choices have become constrained. Compromises now arrive not as options but as necessities, often explained after the fact as responsible statecraft.

This is what denial looks like when it matures.

The theatrical nature of politics deepens precisely when substance thins. Press conferences multiply as institutions weaken. Outrage fills the space where outcomes were supposed to be. The louder the performance, the more invisible the result. Satire becomes unavoidable because seriousness has been monopolized by spectacle. Theatrics now substitute for governance, urgency replaces planning, and spectacle masks inertia.

Every crisis is declared unprecedented. Every resolution is framed as historic. Yet daily life remains stubbornly unchanged. Prices rise without explanation. Youth leave without farewell. Public services decay without apology. The republic survives, but belief becomes conditional, cautious, and transactional.

Citizens are not confused. They recognize the script. They anticipate alliances before announcements. They quote speeches before they end. Fatigue replaces surprise. Participation continues, but conviction thins.

Young people, in particular, experience politics not as a collective project but as background noise. They inherit a state obsessed with its past and indifferent to their future. Their political education is not shaped by hope but by pattern recognition. Exit becomes rational, not ideological but geographic. Airports absorb what institutions fail to hold.

Time records this quietly, through empty classrooms, remittance statistics, and villages populated more by memory than presence.

From an analytical standpoint, Nepal suffers from temporal dissonance. Political institutions operate on slow, personality-driven, factional timelines. Society operates on accelerated, transparent, consequence-driven time. When politics cannot keep pace with lived reality, it compensates with performance, symbolism, and perpetual urgency. The result is a system that looks active while being structurally inert.

In dismantling its old order, Nepal removed not only an authority but a stabilizing architecture of continuity. The monarchy, whatever its historical failures and contradictions, functioned as an institution positioned outside routine factional bargaining. It was insulated from electoral volatility, coalition arithmetic, and the need for constant external validation. It did not govern daily politics, but it imposed temporal limits on them. It existed as a reference point that politics had to move around, not endlessly renegotiate.

This is not nostalgia. It is institutional analysis.

The monarchy represented ideology rather than sentiment. An ideology of continuity, restraint, and sovereign coherence. Its presence constrained ambition by forcing political actors to operate within a longer horizon than election cycles and media outrage. It reduced incentives for permanent rehearsal, constant crisis manufacture, and moral improvisation. Its removal did not democratize time. It fragmented it.

What followed was not deeper democracy, but intensified politicization.

Every institutional space became contested. Every role became transactional. Every constitutional ambiguity became an opportunity. Authority dispersed into factions, each seeking legitimacy through performance, alliance, or external endorsement rather than institutional depth. In place of one stabilizing constraint, Nepal accumulated multiple unstable centers of power, none authoritative enough to discipline time, ambition, or dependency.

Defenders of the current order argue that instability is part of democratic transition, that learning takes time, that patience is required. This argument once held weight. Repetition has emptied it. Learning requires memory. Transition requires direction. What Nepal increasingly displays is circulation, not movement, noise rather than progress.

Governments fall without consequence. Alliances shift without explanation. Laws change without clarity. Moral outrage is abundant. Institutional responsibility is scarce.

The extraordinary has become routine. This is how erosion happens. Not through coups, but through exhaustion.

Time is not Nepal’s enemy. It is its most honest referee.

A functioning political system does not fear time. It uses it. It allows memory to discipline ambition. It allows process to restrain ego. It understands that legitimacy is built slowly and lost quickly. Most importantly, it accepts that performance cannot substitute for delivery indefinitely.

Nepal does not need louder actors. It needs quieter institutions. Fewer midnight deals. More durable commitments. Less historical self-congratulation. More present accountability. Less obsession with validation, more investment in coherence.

This is not a call to restore the past. It is a demand to confront what was lost, why it mattered, and what was never replaced.

Time was there before this republic. It will be there after these leaders. The question is whether this moment will be remembered as a period of endless rehearsal, or as the moment when the performance finally stopped and governing began.

Time is still watching. The curtain has not fallen yet.