Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: A day after swearing in former Supreme Court Chief Justice Sushila Karki as the Interim Prime Minister, Nepal’s President Ramchandra Paudel late on Friday dissolved Parliament and announced fresh elections to be held on March 5, 2026, the media reported.
After a week of chaos, the Himalayan country is slowly limping back to normalcy, and curfew has been lifted, although the security forces are keeping a strict vigil across the country to prevent re-escalation of chaos that culminated in the appointment of the country’s first woman Prime Minister to lead Nepal into the elections.
The President’s announcement came hours after he appointed Karki to lead the country until the next parliamentary elections.
President Paudel “dissolved the House of Representatives … and fixed March 5, 2026, Thursday, for the elections,” according to a statement from his office.
Karki was appointed after two days of intense negotiations between Paudel, army chief Ashok Raj Sigdel and the protest leaders behind Nepal’s worst upheaval in years, which left at least 51 people killed and more than 1,300 injured.
India said it hoped that the developments would help foster peace and stability.
“Heartfelt congratulations to the Honourable Sushila Karki Ji on assuming the office of Prime Minister of Nepal’s interim government. India is fully committed to the peace, progress, and prosperity of Nepal’s brothers and sisters,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a post on X.
The country-wide protests in Nepal were sparked by a social media ban that has since been rolled back. The violence subsided only after Oli resigned and fled on Tuesday. His office and private houses were among the prime properties torched.
Nepal has grappled with political and economic instability since the abolition of its monarchy in 2008, having seen over a dozen prime ministers since, while a lack of jobs drives millions of young people to seek work in other countries like India, West Asia, South Korea and Malaysia.
The landlocked country of 30 million people, tucked between China and India, inched back towards normalcy on Friday – with shops reopened, cars back on roads, and police replacing the guns they wielded earlier in the week with batons.
Generation Z, which led the protests on Monday against the ban on 26 social media platforms and against the “corrupt” Communist-led government of KP Sharma Oli, now claims that wanton destruction caused on Tuesday, was because of infiltration of anti-social elements.
In just two days of chaos, the country has gone back by two decades and suffered enormous financial losses to the tune of billions of rupees, besides endangering employment of hundreds of people engaged in tourism and other sectors.
On Friday, some remorseful youths were seen cleaning up the mess the protesters created earlier in the week. Nepal will take years to return to rebuild its iconic structures, including government buildings such as the President’s House, Parliament, Supreme Court, and Sinh Darbar, and private properties like Hilton Hotels.