Gagan | TKP Feature

kathmandupost.com · Feb 27, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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27 FEBRUARY 2026•KathmanduTwo days after the mob burned his house down, Gagan Thapa sat in a friend’s living room and did something most other politicians don’t have the courage to do. He turned on his phone, looked into the camera, and said sorry.It was September 11, 2025. Kathmandu was still smouldering. The army had taken over the streets. Government buildings, police stations, and the homes of political leaders bore a post-apocalyptic look – smoke still rising from the beams of Singha Durbar, the air over the already polluted valley too hazardous to breathe. Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli had resigned. Young Nepalis took to Discord servers to debate whether to dissolve the constitution entirely. A truce, hastily brokered by the army, was taking shape to appoint a caretaker prime minister.Thapa was visibly shaken. His hands trembled. “I apologise for the deaths of the 19 individuals who were killed on September 8,” he said, “although I was not directly involved in this.”In an interview with the Post earlier this month, he said he felt like his job was to bring everyone together instead of taking sides. “We needed to open channels of conversation, with all humility,” he said.Thapa’s decision to post the apology video was calibrated, but it also felt genuine. That combination is what has defined Thapa’s three-decade career in Nepali politics. He is a man who understood, earlier than almost anyone in the Nepali Congress, that the monarchy had to go. He pushed for republicanism when his own party president called him a royalist for it. He spent time in detention on sedition charges and came out more popular. He aimed to reform the health ministry in ways his predecessors hadn’t and then waited, patiently, for the moment when the party would finally be his.Gagan Thapa's apology video, posted on September 11, 2025.That moment, it turns out, required a violent revolt.Now, a week before the March 5 elections, 49-year-old Thapa leads the Nepali Congress into its most consequential vote in a generation — a party he wrested from its old guard in the chaos following the September uprising, in what his critics call an opportunistic gambit and his supporters call a democratic reckoning. He is contesting from Sarlahi-4, deep in the Madhes, pitching himself as simultaneously the newest politician in Nepal — as well as the most experienced. He is the establishment candidate running against the establishment.Standing in his way, among others, is gagandra Shah — the former Kathmandu mayor turned prime ministerial candidate who has spent the past month touring the country as the leader of the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP). Where Thapa’s entire career has been an argument for why institutions matter, Shah’s has been a pitch for why they don’t. Whether voters believe Thapa may determine not just who leads Nepal's oldest party, but what kind of country Nepal becomes.Listen to this story0:00 / 0:00* * *The moment that forced Thapa to post the video last September was not his first crisis. It was only the most public.Thapa’s political awakening came during the People’s Movement of 1990, when he was a ninth-grader in Kathmandu. By 1994, he was in student politics at Tri Chandra College and within the next decade, he had been appointed the general secretary of the Nepal Students’ Union, the Congress’s student wing. He was good at it — charismatic, strategic, a skilled organiser with the instincts of a coalition builder — but student politics felt narrow to him.The decade after democracy’s restoration had been a slow unravelling: Congress and UML enmeshed in the making and breaking of governments, a Maoist insurgency closing in from the remote hills, a palace that had lost its moral authority after the assassination of King Birendra’s family and the rise of the unpopular Gyanendra Shah.Thapa read the moment. While party president Girija Prasad Koirala was still using republicanism as a bargaining chip with the king, Thapa was already calling for the monarchy’s abolition outright. He met intellectuals, debated with communist student leaders, and built momentum within the party for a position the party itself wasn’t yet ready to hold. “Our friends are pointing their fingers at the palace and saying, ‘This is the twenty-first century, your majesty! We are not slaves even to Lord Pashupatinath, forget about the criminal king,’” he said in one video at the time.Koirala’s response was to call him a royalist, more or less accusing him of being exactly what he was loudly opposing. The party stripped him of his general secretaryship. On April 26, 2005, the the state arrested him under the Public Security Act. He was rearrested on release, freed again only after Supreme Court intervention.After that, Thapa was present for all of what followed: the 19-day People’s Movement of April 2006, the reinstatement of parliament, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement with the Maoists, the abolition of the monarchy. In 2008, at 32 years of age, he entered the first Constituent Assembly as a proportional representation candidate.The 2006 People’s Movement established Thapa as a promising leader in Nepali politics.What followed was the longest education in patience that Nepali politics has to offer. The Constituent Assembly, and then its successor, were theatres of exhausting negotiation — Maoist insurgents turned parliamentarians, Madhesi parties that had launched a plains insurrection now sitting across the table, identity groups asserting claims suppressed for generations. Thapa, once a revolutionary, often had to play a broker.Binda Pandey, then UML’s chairperson of the Committee for Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles, remembers Thapa as someone who would arrive late and sit in the last row, but who she could text when debate spiraled and trust to bring it back.“Whenever any debate went off track, I would text him on his mobile to intervene,” she said.While Thapa learned to hold the system together through negotiation and compromise, a generation of younger Nepalis was drawing its own conclusions from the same evidence. Among them was gagandra Shah, then in his early twenties who went by his rap name gagan, writing songs mocking police brutality and turning up at pro-constitution protests — not to engage with the process but to indict the people running it. Thapa was betting on the institutions. Shah’s generation had already decided the institutions weren’t worth the bet.I was ideologically clear, but I needed to learn from the knowledge and experience of someone who knew better.Nepal’s constitution passed in 2015, after hasty negotiations and threats of both internal social insurrection and external political intervention. The coalition era that followed — parties swapping allegiances, governments rising and falling with metronomic cynicism, the public’s trust leaking away with each new betrayal — was the environment in which Thapa quietly began what he calls Project Government.In an interview with the Post, Thapa described the project as a deliberate programme to prepare himself for the prime ministership he believed was coming. He brought in Rameshwor Khanal — now the finance minister — as a mentor. He studied governance from the inside and kept studying it.“I was ideologically clear, but I needed to learn from the knowledge and experience of someone who knew better,” he said.A senior economist at a multilateral development bank who asked to stay anonymous told the Post that Thapa was surrounding himself with experts who had first-hand experiences of working in the public sector. “I advised him on public finance management, procurement systems, and employment generation,” said the economist who started advising Thapa in 2020. .Pratap Paudel, Thapa’s political adviser, told the Post the project consisted of 16 sectors and 31 subsectors, ranging from infrastructure to health, with around 60 experts advising voluntarily. “The Congress manifesto for the 2026 elections takes substantially from the work we did as part of Project Government,” Paudel said.Another event that gave him a head start with Project Government was his first executive test, a nine-month tenure as health minister in the Congress-Maoist coalition beginning August 2016. What he did with the job was, by the standards of Nepali ministerial politics, concrete: free kidney transplants at major hospitals, expanded dialysis services at district hospitals, wider coverage of financial support for critical illnesses, curbs on the use of state funds for treating political leaders. He also institutionalised the National Health Insurance scheme, which was until then a pilot project under the health programme. Nine years later, the scheme, though, is at the brink of closure owing to, among other things, low enrollment, limited coverage, and a lack of coordination between the finance and health ministries.Gagan Thapa as a health minister in 2016.Senendra Raj Upreti, who served as Secretary of the Ministry of Health during Thapa’s tenure, says his lasting legacy, apart from the expansion of services, was the formulation of health laws. “What made him stand out as a minister is that he read every document thoroughly before making a decision,” Upreti said. “What he accomplished as a cabinet minister within the limited time of nine months was quite effective. Not everyone has the kind of commitment he did,” he said.Thapa told the Post the short stint at the ministry inspired him to prepare for a bigger role in statecraft.“I began building a team for what was to come in the next few years.”* * *In July 2024, KP Oli and Congress president Sher Bahadur Deuba struck a power-sharing deal that caused widespread alarm — two former rivals forming a coalition that effectively hollowed out any meaningful parliamentary opposition. Thapa dissented within the party. He still joined a high-level mechanism to draft a common minimum programme and then resigned from it. He went back to doing what he’d always done: qu