Kathmandu, Nepal: For Nepal’s oldest democratic powerhouse, a landmark legal victory was supposed to bring peace. Instead, it has only drawn deeper battle lines. Despite a recent Supreme Court verdict meant to finally legitimize Gagan Thapa’s faction as the official leadership of the Nepali Congress, the party remains a house divided, with grassroots cadres watching in dismay as their leaders pull the party toward the brink of a historic split.
The April 17 court ruling was widely expected to heal a bruising, three-month-long feud over who truly holds the reins of the party. But the gavel could not cure the deep-seated distrust. Walk into party offices across the country today, and you will see a strange, fractured reality: parallel political programs run by rival camps, stiff body language, and leaders who refuse to sit in the same room.
On one side stands Gagan Thapa, fiercely guarding his hard-won legal mandate. For Thapa, the path forward is simple: the party must respect the voice of the special convention and the highest court in the land. He argues that unity cannot be held hostage by ultimatums or backroom deals, firmly shutting the door on demands to scrap the current central working committee. With the sting of the party's dismal performance in the March elections still fresh, Thapa insists the party needs to stop bickering, stabilize its structure, and focus on winning back a disillusioned public.
But across the aisle, the resentment is palpable. The rival faction, led by veteran leader Purna Bahadur Khadka, has launched a blistering offensive. Khadka paints a picture of a leadership that is exclusionary, cold to senior statesmen, and out of touch. His warnings have grown increasingly urgent, openly declaring that the party is "on the verge of a split." To Khadka’s camp, unity isn't just about following a court order; it's about mutual respect, which they believe is entirely missing.
The Khadka loyalists have thrown down a heavy gauntlet: dissolve the existing central committee, set up a temporary consensus body, and let former party president Sher Bahadur Deuba steer the ship into the pivotal 15th general convention. It is a bitter pill that Thapa has shown absolutely no appetite for swallowing. Beneath the lofty rhetoric about democracy, the two sides are locked in a gritty tug-of-war over the levers of party machinery—who gets to distribute active memberships, who controls the convention organizing committee, and who gets a seat at the central table.
Even the party’s traditional peacemakers are running out of answers. Respected senior leader Shekhar Koirala and Vice President Bishwa Prakash Sharma have spent weeks engaged in exhausting, back-channel diplomacy, but their efforts have yielded little more than polite stalemates. Behind the scenes, the Khadka faction is already drawing up blueprints for a separate organizational structure—a safety net should the marriage finally collapse.
As the political drama unfolds in Kathmandu, the stakes feel painfully high for ordinary citizens. Political analysts and civic leaders warn that this is not just an internal family feud. The Nepali Congress has long been viewed as the anchor of Nepal's democratic journey. A fractured Congress risks fracturing public faith in governance altogether, leaving a politically vital population feeling abandoned by the very leaders they trusted to safeguard their constitutional rights.
With both factions dug into their trenches and compromise nowhere in sight, the future of the Nepali Congress hangs precariously in the balance, leaving party faithful to wonder if one of the nation's proudest political institutions is about to break under its own weight.
