For six decades, Sher Bahadur Deuba outlasted rivals, outwitted kings, and came back from every political near-death. His final undoing was of his own making.
On December 22, 2024, Sher Bahadur Deuba, then-president of Nepali Congress, was in Biratnagar to attend the party’s Koshi provincial conference. During his address, then-General Secretary Gagan Thapa said, “Our party president does not talk much.”
When his turn came, Deuba returned the favour. “The general secretary has already said a lot, so I will say just one thing: I speak less,” he said. “Those who talk a lot shoot themselves in the foot. Those who talk less finish others off.”
In that moment, Deuba summed himself up. The politician, now 80 with a political career spanning over six decades, has long faced criticism — at times ridicule — for his reticence. He rarely tried to deflect it, nor did he seem particularly bothered by it.
The Biratnagar event was one of the rare occasions when Deuba spoke about not speaking much. Yet his career has consistently suggested something else — that to be in power, one does not necessarily need oratory skills and that politics is an art that can be mastered even without the gift of the gab.
What transpired in Biratnagar — the exchange of words between Thapa and Deuba — however, was an indication that not everything was right in the grand old party. The seeds of discord had just begun to sprout.
But that episode took place months before the Gen Z protests that drastically changed not only Nepal’s political landscape but also the way the public viewed the country’s socio-politics.
On the second day of the protests, on September 9, Deuba and his wife, Arzu, were manhandled by demonstrators at their home, which was also set on fire. The Deubas were among the politicians in Nepal who were long viewed as power elites.
How did a man from the far-west, which still ranks low on different parameters of the HDI, become one of Nepal’s most powerful persons — serving five times as prime minister?
Deuba’s story is one of struggle, prison terms, democratic movements, and organisation-building. As if he was born to do politics, to live politics. But then the time came when the fall started. His political arc is such that he rose and rose, but then the democratic values he once espoused began to diminish — one step at a time.
Born on June 13, 1946, in Ruwakhola, Asigram in Dadeldhura, Deuba cut his teeth in politics as a student leader.
Nepali Congress’s founding father, BP Koirala, was in Banaras, India, in exile then.
Deuba was one of the candidates to lead Nepal Students Union (NeBi Sangh), the newly formed student wing of the Nepali Congress, in the convention of the organisation held in 1980 in Bharatpur.
As the favoured choice of BP Koirala, Subarna Shumsher, Ganesh Man Singh, and Krishna Prasad Bhattarai — the stalwarts of the Nepali Congress — Deuba was elected unopposed.
About two years ago, at a function organised in Sudurpaschim, Deuba was invited as chief guest. He narrated a story about how he had first reached Kathmandu after the School Leaving Certificate exams in 1962.
“I walked on foot to reach Dhangadhi. Then crossed over to India to take a train to reach Lucknow the following day. I switched trains to reach Muzaffarpur and then to Raxaul in Bihar,” he said. “From there, I crossed over into Nepal [Birgunj] to travel to Kathmandu.”
As he narrated his three- to four-day-long arduous journey to Kathmandu — from where he would lead the country five times — people from his region were grumbling about how the far-west was still lagging behind in economic indicators.
Deuba’s contemporaries say that had he not had the backing of BP, Ganeshman, and KP Bhattarai, a man from a humble background in one of the remotest regions in the country would not have become the “lion” (English translation of his Nepali name Sher) of Nepali politics.
According to Bal Bahadur KC, one of Deuba’s contemporaries, he was picked by NC stalwarts to lead the region as a commander. “Its effect in due course was bound to be seen in national politics,” KC said. “It’s not that the far-west did not have other leaders. But Deuba had the backing; he had already made his name before the top leadership.”
In Kathmandu, Deuba joined Tri-Chandra College in 1964. He later completed his master’s in political science from Tribhuvan University. Congress leader Chiranjivi Wagle (who left active politics following corruption charges) was Deuba’s college mate at Tri-Chandra.
The founding leader of NeBi Sangh, Bipin Koirala, attributes Deuba’s rise also to the lack of competition, as there were no other leaders in Koshi, Gandaki, and other comparatively accessible and urban centres.
“At the time of the 1980 referendum, when BP went to the west, he took Deuba along,” Koirala recalls. “Deuba got a chance to share the stage with BP, which then paved the way for him into national politics.”
During the 1991 election, the first after the restoration of democracy a year before, then acting party president KP Bhattarai and general secretary Girija Prasad (GP) Koirala entrusted him with the responsibility of distributing tickets in all 19 constituencies in the far-west.
Except for Darchula-2, Congress swept the elections, winning 18 constituencies. That deserved a reward. GP made Deuba home minister in his Cabinet. This was Deuba’s first tryst with real power. His appetite for power from then on just grew bigger, never to be satiated.
