Leadership Quote by Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala

“Democracy is indivisible” lands like a warning disguised as principle: you don’t get to treat freedom as a domestic perk while ignoring how it’s won, lost, or crushed elsewhere. Koirala isn’t making a sentimental appeal to global solidarity; he’s making a hard political claim about contagion. Democratic backsliding is rarely contained by borders, and neither are the tools that enable it: propaganda, security-state habits, foreign patrons, and the quiet normalization of emergency rule.

The phrasing is doing strategic work. “Cannot afford” turns morality into cost-benefit realism, aimed at leaders and citizens who would prefer democracy to be a national brand rather than a daily practice. “All struggles for it” widens the frame beyond elections to the messy ecosystem that keeps them meaningful: labor movements, minority rights, press freedom, anti-corruption campaigns. Koirala’s subtext is that democracy at home is built out of reflexes learned in public - how you respond when someone else’s rights are under pressure is rehearsal for when yours are.

Context sharpens the edge. As a central figure in Nepal’s democratic movement and a prime minister who faced imprisonment and monarchical repression, Koirala understood democracy as fragile infrastructure, not a settled achievement. For countries wedged between great-power interests and internal authoritarian temptations, neglecting democratic struggles elsewhere isn’t just hypocrisy; it’s strategic blindness. The line insists that democracy is a networked condition: starve one node, and the whole system weakens.