Even by the colorful standards of Nepali politics, Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) Chair Rabi Lamichhane, 50, has led an eventful life.
In the early 2000s, after dabbling in various radio and television roles in Nepal, he left the country in his early 20s to pursue higher studies in the United States. While in the U.S., he was reportedly involved in financial misconduct like tax evasion.
Lamichhane returned to Nepal later that decade and joined a television network. In 2013, the ever-ambitious Lamichhane entered the Guinness Book of World Records by hosting the longest-broadcast talk show (his record has since been broken). After that, in 2016, he started a combative current affairs TV program that made him wildly popular, as he quickly mastered the art of dressing down senior politicians and bureaucrats live on camera.
Then Lamichhane entered politics. Since founding his party, not a day has gone by without him being linked to this or that controversy – and now, he is in jail.
Lamichhane founded the RSP just over three months before the November 2022 national elections. At its heart, the party is a one-man show, with populist slogans of anti-corruption and good governance as its central planks. Using his celebrity, Lamichhane tried to tap into the growing public antipathy toward Nepal’s three major parties: the Nepali Congress, the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist-Leninist (CPN-UML) and the CPN Maoist Center.
For a party with no ideology or organizational structure, the RSP did remarkably well in its electoral debut, winning 20 seats in the 275-member national parliament in 2022. Its candidates, relatively young and picked from across the professions, came as a breath of fresh air against the old parties and their tried-and-tested leaders.
Then, in December 2022, the RSP got into the government and Lamichhane became the deputy prime minister and home minister. But he soon had to give up the post after he was found to be neck-deep in a controversy over dual citizenship. The court stripped him of his parliamentarian status. Yet he bounced back to be re-elected from the same constituency in a by-election, this time with an even bigger mandate, and in March 2024 again became the deputy prime minister and home minister.
There was more drama to follow. He lost his ministerial berth when the Pushpa Kamal Dahal government collapsed in July 2024, soon after which he was taken into custody.
Lamichhane has been implicated in the embezzlement of millions of rupees from various cooperatives and pumping the money into a television station where he once served as the managing director.
To his critics, the legal evidence against him is overwhelming, enough to end his compromised political career. To his supporters, this beacon of hope for the new generation is being framed so that the traditional parties can continue to rule. In their reckoning, even the judiciary is biased and serves the old guard.
Lamichhane himself admits to making some errors of judgment but maintains that he was not involved in any organized effort to transfer cooperative funds into his media company’s accounts.
The public is divided as five courts have charged him across as many districts, and the Supreme Court has upheld his custody. His supporters point out how those who have committed similar crimes in big parties have not been prosecuted. They argue that Lamichhane’s real crime was that, as the home minister, he dared to investigate the financial conduct of powerful politicians from old parties.
Most notably, there were rumors that the home minister was looking into the possible involvement of Arzu Rana Deuba, wife of five-time Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, in a scam involving the sending of Nepali citizens to the U.S. in the guise of Bhutanese refugees.
With Lamichhane in jail since April, the RSP is now in the middle of a signature campaign to build public pressure for his release. The party claims to have collected over 2.5 million signatures to date.
The RSP appears determined to make the most of the jailing of Lamichhane, perhaps using the same controversy to rally voters in future elections. As with most populist forces around the world, Lamichhane’s legal troubles do not seem to have decreased his support among his core voters, especially among the millions of Nepali migrant workers.
Disillusioned with old parties, many Nepalis also reject regressive forces like the now-abolished monarchy, which also partly explains the RSP’s support. The question is: Can this party, centered on a personality cult and without a binding ideology, survive their leader’s prolonged stint behind bars? (There are no signs that Lamichhane will be released anytime soon.)
The old parties and their old leaders face unprecedented scrutiny as people’s yearning for change continues to grow. For their continued relevance, these parties must revitalize themselves by electing fresh leaders and come up with ideas that resonate with younger Nepalis. Otherwise they may be outmaneuvered even by a compromised populist like Rabi Lamichhane. He may be in jail, but the political vacuum that enabled his rise remains intact.