Prime Minister Balendra Shah’s assurance that his government remains committed to federalism, inclusiveness, secularism and republicanism was politically necessary. After police firing in Sunsari triggered unrest across the Terai districts of Koshi and Madhesh, reassurance was expected.
Yet Nepal’s federal problem has never been a shortage of commitment. Every government since 2015 has affirmed federalism in speech while starving it in practice. Successive administrations spoke of federalism in opposition, only to recentralize once in office. A decade on, provinces still function as administrative extensions of the center, and the critical laws on police and civil service remain unenacted. Commitment is the cheapest currency in Nepali politics. The question is not whether the Prime minister means it. The question is whether meaning it is enough.
History suggests it is not. Federalism did not arrive in Nepal as a gift of enlightened leadership. It was forced. The Madhesh movement of 2007 compelled a reluctant ruling class to amend the interim constitution. Philip Mawhood’s observation fits Nepal well: federalism was adopted not as an act of elite generosity but as a strategy of political survival under pressure. British Marxist E.P. Thompson reminds us that even the seemingly powerless can unsettle the strongest political orders. The Madhesh Movement did precisely that. The unrest in Koshi and Madhesh this past week is a reminder that unresolved constitutional questions do not disappear. They merely return in new forms.
Federick Gaige observed decades ago that Nepal’s forms of government change while the same underlying economic and cultural factors keep shaping its politics. Shah monarchy, Rana oligarchy, Panchayat, parliament, republic; the machinery of centralization survived them all. A prime minister who commits to federalism is committing against the grain of the very state he heads. That takes more than assurance. It takes a program.
Begin with the constitution’s own defects. Schedule 5, listing federal powers, runs to three pages. Schedules 6, 7, 8 and 9, covering provincial powers, local powers and all concurrent powers, fit into two pages co9mbined. The constitution devotes more pages to the geometry of the national flag than to the distribution of state power. A document that describes the flag more carefully than the division of state power was always going to produce conflict. As per recent judicial data, over 280 cases remain under consideration or pending in the Supreme Court constitutional bench, a large share concerning devolution, dispute between federal units, and local-provincial jurisdictions. Several scholars in the past warned that Nepal entered federalism without a roadmap and without consensus among major parties on its basic principles. That warning has aged well.
23 border pillars swept away by Saptakoshi yet to be restored
The fiscal picture is starker still. The World Bank’s latest Fiscal Federalism Update tells the story. Provinces finance barely eleven percent of their budgets from their own sources, while more than ninety percent comes from federal transfers. Vehicle tax remains virtually the only meaningful provincial revenue stream. When your treasury depends on Kathmandu’s discretion, you are not a government. You are a branch office. As federalism scholar Anwar Shah has long argued, fiscal autonomy is not an accessory to federalism. It is its foundation.
Here is what makes the current debate dishonest. The loudest argument against federalism is that it has failed. The evidence says otherwise. The Survey of the Nepali People, the last major round of which was conducted in 2022, found 70.4 percent of Nepalis saying their local areas are improving, 57.2 percent satisfied with local government services, and local governments commanding more trust than any other tier, earned through their response to disaster and crisis response. Harder evidence has arrived since. The National Statistics Office’s latest GDP figure shows Bagmati’s share of the national economy declining, modestly but measurably, while Karnali, Sudurpaschim, Gandaki and Lumbini have all gained ground since 2018/2019. Karnali built 2015 kilometers of blacktopped roads, Sudurpaschim 550, Lumbini over 1,160. The economy is beginning to disperse beyond the Kathmandu core for the first time in our modern history. Where federalism has been allowed to work, it works.
India and Sri Lanka offer two contrasting lessons. India embraced linguistic federalism despite predictions that it would fragment the Union. Instead, devolution strengthened national integration. Sri Lanka took the opposite path, resisting meaningful devolution despite constitutional promises, and paid a devastating price in conflict. Nepal now stands between those two experiences. Federalism should not be judged by whether power has been devolved on paper, but by whether governments are willing to devolve it in practice.
Honesty also requires self-criticism. The parties that wrote this constitution, including Nepali Congress foremost among them, treated provinces as consolation prizes for leaders who lost out in Kathmandu. Chief ministers were made and unmade by central committees. Provincial assemblies became waiting rooms. If citizens see provinces as expensive and idle, the fault lies less with the structure than with those of us who ran it as a patronage annex of the center.
The Prime Minister’s words should now be measured against actions. The Constitution already provides most of the tools Nepal needs. The challenge is not drafting another blueprint, but using the one we already have. That begins with four overdue decisions.
Start by making the Inter-Provincial Council under Article 234 a functioning institution rather than a ceremonial one. Convene it with a fixed agenda, a public timetable and clear directions. It was created to resolve disputes before they reached the courts. It should be allowed to do so.
Next, complete the unfinished legal architecture of federalism. Provincial policing and the civil service framework have waited nearly a decade. A constitution cannot devolve power when the laws needed to implement it remain permanently pending.
Then give provinces meaningful fiscal authority. Governments that cannot raise revenue cannot govern. Alongside this, build the three-tier fiscal architecture scholars like Imashankar Prasad have proposed: a federal finance commission, a planning commission with a defined mandate, and provincial planning and finance commissions to manage transfers downward.
Finally. Reopen the national conversation on federalism, not to weaken it but to complete it. An independent commission representing all stakeholders should identify the constitutional, legal and administrative reforms needed to make a devolution work. As scholars of federalism have longe argued, every successful federation has had champions of decentralization. Bureaucracies rarely volunteer to surrender power. Political leadership must.
None of the reforms requires rewriting the Constitution. They require only the political will to implement it. Pradeep Giri chose not to sign the Constitution because he believed the federal compact remained incomplete. Whether one agreed with his decision or not, his dissent carried an enduring lesson: constitutions are judged less by the day they are promulgated than by the willingness of successive governments to fulfill the promises they contain. Federalism remains the Constitution’s most consequential unfinished promise.
Balendra Shah is the first prime minister from the Madheshi community. That carries expectations beyond ordinary politics. At TirhutiyaGacchi in Janakpurdham, he declared that provinces should not have to come to Kathmandu to be for their rights. There could hard have been a more fitting place to say it. Tirhutiya Gacchi has long stood in the political memory of Madhesh as a symbol of dignity, justice and self-government. The question now is whether those words will remain part of a speech or become part of the state.
Mandate depreciates. Assurances expire. Constitutions endure only when governments give life to their promises. Federalism is not one pillar among four. It is the foundation that allows the other three to stand.
(The author is a leader of the Nepali Congress and an Emmy-nominated former journalist.)
