When I met the prime minister of Nepal five years ago, he was sitting on a white leather sofa in a top-floor suite at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan. Baburam Bhattarai, a soft-spoken, mustachioed man, was the fourth prime minister in four years and, at heart, a stern ideologue, who frequently quoted Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, and Sun Tzu during our interview.



After we were done, he expressed his surprise that a Nepali journalist had come to interview him in New York. “Why don’t you come back home? The world ought to know about the good things happening in Nepal and we need young, energetic people like you.” The man was the architect of Nepal’s decade-long Maoist insurgency between 1996 and 2006, in which thousands of people — including journalists — were targeted, killed, and disappeared by both the rebels and the state. “I want to, but if I did the kind of reporting I am allowed to do in America, I would have my hands and legs broken,” I told him.

Nepal, a tiny country of 28 million people nestled in the Himalayas, is best known for being home to Mount Everest. But for a country its size, Nepal’s problems pile as high as its mountains. The last three decades have seen the emergence of a multiparty democracy and the end of the monarchy that ruled Nepal for two centuries. But it has not been painless. Numerous attempts to establish democratic rule have seen bloodshed since the early '90s, and the massacre of the royal family made headlines around the world in 2001. Last year, a devastating earthquake killed nearly 9,000 people and left a million homeless. But throughout this period Nepalis have been left with the feeling that they are watching a particularly gruesome version of Groundhog Day, with the same politicians winning elections and coming back to run — and ruin — the country again and again.

A yam between two boulders — as the old saying has it — Nepal is effectively a playground for the two regional superpowers, India and China. Historically it has leaned toward India, and Nepal’s leaders regularly go to New Delhi to express their grievances and ask for blessings. But a few months after the earthquake last year, India blocked the borders and halted supplies into the country, alienating many Nepalis — and pushing its leaders into Beijing’s arms.

Politically, a lot has happened since I met Bhattarai back in 2011: Nepal has had three more prime ministers in five years; the Maoist party split into half a dozen factions — and have reunited under a new name; and the country’s leaders have passed a historic, if highly controversial, constitution. K.P. Sharma Oli, a Marxist-Leninist, was elected last September, but there are already rumors that the government could collapse any day.

Despite the weakness of his coalition government, Oli likes to play the big man, establishing himself as a staunch nationalist, strongly opposed to India’s meddling. He has appointed six deputy prime ministers, and Nepalis mock him for running an Oligarchy. He is given to lengthy public addresses — all of which are faithfully broadcast on TV — in which he makes promises that few believe he can keep. Last month, he said he would bring trains that have “pointed noses” to Nepal, referring to a high-speed network that he said would connect Kathmandu and Beijing. Then he said Nepal — which is both landlocked and one of the poorest countries in the world — would float its own ship in the oceans. A few days later, he claimed the country would produce oil within two years.

Now 64, Oli spent more than a decade in prison for his underground activism in the late '60s and early '70s. During a period of direct rule by the then king, Oli led a bloody class struggle in eastern Nepal, which saw eight local landowners beheaded.