Politics & Power Quote by Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala

Crisis talk is cheap; crisis talk from a democrat who knows how quickly nations slide into strongman logic is something else. Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala is not trying to dazzle here. He is trying to tighten the room. The blunt repetition of "national" functions like a drumbeat: national crisis, national identity. It narrows the audience into a single collective body and, at the same time, warns that the body is being torn apart.

The key move is "All have realized". That phrase is rhetorical pressure, not a poll result. Koirala is manufacturing consensus to make inaction feel irresponsible and dissent feel fringe. In a country like mid-20th-century Nepal, where legitimacy was contested between palace power and emerging party politics, declaring universal recognition is a way to pre-empt the usual escape hatches: denial, distraction, fatalism. If everyone already knows, the only question is who will act.

His subtext is that the threat is not merely economic hardship or administrative breakdown but a deeper erosion of the story that holds the state together. "Heightened since the last few years" suggests a slow boil rather than a sudden catastrophe: a rolling accumulation of abuses, instability, and perhaps deliberate attempts to redefine the nation from above. By framing the danger as identity itself, Koirala signals that the crisis is constitutional and moral, not just managerial. It is also a strategic appeal to moderates: when identity is "endangered", compromise starts to look like surrender, and democratic restoration starts to look like national survival.