Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli who had been under pressure from his detractors in the ruling Nepal Communist Party to withdraw a controversial ordinance on Sunday morning recommended dissolution of Parliament. The recommendation was cleared at an emergency meeting of the cabinet convened by PM Oli on Sunday morning.
Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli on Sunday morning recommended dissolution of Nepal’s Parliament (AFP)
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“Today’s Cabinet meeting decided to recommend the President to dissolve the Parliament,” said Barshaman Pun, energy minister in PM Oli’s cabinet announced in Kathmandu after the meeting.
The surprise move comes at a time PM Oli was under intense pressure from the rival factions of the NCP led by former prime ministers Pushpa Kamal Dahal better known by his nom de guerre Prachanda and Madhav Nepal.
PM Oli had last evening met President Bidya Devi Bhandari at her official residence ‘Shital Niwas’, one of the many meetings that he held on Saturday as he tried to convince his rivals to back down.
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The dissolution of parliament - he will continue to head the interim government - is seen as a precursor to a split in the party that had been piling pressure on him to withdraw an ordinance that his government had issued on Tuesday to give himself power to make crucial appointments.
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The dissolution of parliament - he will continue to head the interim government - is seen as a precursor to a split in the party that had been piling pressure on him to withdraw an ordinance that his government had issued on Tuesday to give himself power to make crucial appointments.
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On Wednesday, the party’s standing committee had passed a resolution that asked PM Oli to withdraw the ordinance. He had agreed to comply at the committee’s meeting but later had other thoughts.
On Saturday, PM Oli drove down to Prachanda’s house for one more attempt to reconcile their differences, offering to withdraw the ordinance if the political document that was sharply critical of him was also withdrawn. People familiar with the matter said PM Oli told Prachanda that they needed to work together and find a way out of the crisis. But Prachanda did not budge.
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PM Oli took the call soon after. He is learnt to have sounded out Home minister Ram Bahadur Thapa, who is seen to be close to Prachanda, and sought his support in dissolving the House.
At his meeting with President Bhandari that continued till midnight, Nepal watchers said PM Oli was advised against taking such a drastic action. But PM Oli had made up his mind.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
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