Politics & Power Quote by Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala

Democracy, Koirala warns, is a promise you can’t cash with speeches alone. For countries newly arrived to the ballot box, he frames poverty not as an adjacent policy concern but as democracy’s stress test: if basic material life doesn’t improve fast enough, “freedom and sovereignty” become abstractions that people will trade away for anyone offering order, food, or wages.

The line works because it flips the usual self-congratulation of “new democracies”. Instead of treating elections as the finish line, it treats them as a fragile down payment. “In time” is the sharp edge: it acknowledges impatience as political reality, not a moral failing of the poor. It also signals how quickly legitimacy can evaporate when expectations outrun institutions. Koirala isn’t romanticizing popular will; he’s policing it with urgency.

The subtext is that sovereignty is hollow when it can’t deliver agency in daily life. A flag and a parliament don’t mean much if citizens remain trapped in hunger, debt, and dependency. For a postcolonial state like Nepal, sovereignty was never just independence from foreign rule; it was the ability to govern for the majority rather than for courts, landlords, or distant patrons. Koirala’s warning also reads as a preemptive rebuttal to authoritarian “developmentalism”: if democracy fails to reduce poverty, strongmen will claim that rights are a luxury.

He’s making a hard, pragmatic case for social-democratic priorities: redistribution, public services, land reform, jobs. Not as ideology, but as democratic self-defense.