WHEN Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli stepped down as Nepal’s prime minister on July 24th ahead of a no-confidence motion he was certain to lose, he had lasted only nine months. The next government, under his nemesis, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, a former Maoist guerrilla widely known as Prachanda (“the fierce one”) will be the ninth in eight years. But under the terms of a power-sharing deal Mr Dahal struck with the Nepali Congress, the country’s biggest party—to which neither man belongs—he is due to step down in nine months’ time.

And that is the trouble with Nepal’s politicians. They are more interested in squabbles over power than in solving problems. Poverty has sent millions of Nepalis abroad for work. The state has failed utterly to rebuild after an earthquake last year devastated mountain villages, killing 8,000 and leaving millions homeless. A new constitution has yet to be fairly implemented more than ten months after it was passed.

Some hope Mr Dahal (pictured, left, with Mr Oli) will bring stability after his predecessor’s brief but erratic rule. After all, he has experience in governing: when the Maoists laid down arms in 2006 and struck a deal with the establishment, they handily won elections for a constituent assembly under Mr Dahal’s charismatic leadership. The assembly promptly abolished the monarchy. Nepal’s diverse ethnic groups each enjoyed a proportional say in drafting a new constitution. It seemed that a new order might be taking root.


Yet the guerrillas soon found parliament trickier terrain than the bush they had left. Mr Dahal lasted just nine months. India, the powerful southern neighbour, had opposed his forces during the civil war and afterwards did its utmost behind the scenes to see him gone. Mr Dahal resigned after an army chief he had sacked was reinstated at India’s behest. Meanwhile the old order, drawn from the elite castes, regrouped and won a majority in a second constituent assembly, elected in 2013.

The constitution unexpectedly passed last September by the main parties, including the Maoists, contained a raft of retrograde provisions. The most divisive of these drew state boundaries so as to ensure that power would stay with the elites. Bloody demonstrations attended its promulgation. In particular, the marginalised Tharu and Madhesi ethnic groups who live in the populous, lowland Terai region, which runs along Nepal’s long southern border, felt the constitution gave them less representation than they had been promised. The Madhesi have strong ties with kin in northern India. With tacit Indian support, they occupied key border crossings and blockaded fuel supplies to their landlocked country.

In response, Mr Oli tilted towards China, whose swift delivery of three tankers’ worth of petrol was supposed to herald a new era. Yet the supplies dried up as the tyranny of geography asserted itself: Chinese roads reaching Nepal through remote Tibet are few and appalling. The China play was an empty one. And in time the fuel supplies from India resumed.