In a political landscape long dominated by aging male leaders, patronage networks and ritual nods to inclusion, Nepal has just witnessed something genuinely new. The Inclusive Socialist Party, registered ahead of the March 2026 general elections, is the country’s first political party founded and led primarily by sexual and gender minorities, with the explicit aim of turning Nepal’s much-praised constitutional promises into lived political power. In a country often celebrated internationally for its progressive court rulings on gender identity and same-sex relationships, the party’s emergence exposes a stubborn gap between law and reality.
Nepal is no stranger to bold legal language on inclusion. Since the 2007 Supreme Court decision recognising a “third gender” (tesro ling), and more recently the 2023 ruling allowing same-sex and transgender couples to register marriages, the country has built a reputation as a South Asian outlier. Yet politics has remained stubbornly traditional. Power still clusters around Singha Durbar (the central government complex), senior party bosses, and informal alliances shaped by caste (jaat), ethnicity (jatiyata), gender and class. LGBTQ people, Dalits, indigenous Janajati communities and women are frequently invoked in speeches, rarely seen at the decision-making table.
It is precisely this contradiction that the Inclusive Socialist Party seeks to confront. The party has more than 500 members, the majority drawn from sexual and gender minority communities, alongside allies from other marginalised groups. Its leader, Numa Limbu, a third-gender activist turned politician, has framed the party as a refusal of tokenism. “I have been requesting previous parliamentarians to raise our issues,” she told regional media. “But if we have a seat at the table, then others don’t have to speak for us.” The message is simple but radical in Nepal’s context: representation should not be symbolic, outsourced or dependent on goodwill.
The party’s advisory circle includes Sunil Babu Pant, one of South Asia’s most prominent LGBTQ activists and a former member of parliament. Pant has been blunt about why constitutional recognition has stalled. “Absence of representation from the community has meant that rights ensured to us by the constitution have not translated into laws,” he said, pointing to gaps in employment protection, healthcare access and legal clarity for same-sex families. For the party, entering parliament is not about visibility alone, but about legislative follow-through.
While the Inclusive Socialist Party’s identity is rooted in LGBTQ politics, its manifesto deliberately situates gender and sexual rights within a broader critique of Nepal’s political system. The document argues that discrimination is rarely singular. A lesbian Dalit woman in rural Nepal, for example, faces overlapping exclusions tied to gender, caste, class and geography. To address this, the party proposes interlinked quota systems across state institutions and political bodies, designed to reflect multiple layers of marginalisation rather than a single identity marker. It is an explicitly intersectional approach, still rare in mainstream Nepali politics.
Decentralisation is another pillar. The manifesto argues that meaningful inclusion cannot be delivered solely from Kathmandu. Power, it insists, must shift away from Singha Durbar and into municipalities and local governments, where people actually encounter the state. Health care, education and justice services should be accessible at the local level, a move that would particularly benefit transgender people and sexual minorities who often avoid distant state institutions due to stigma or fear of harassment. Limbu has repeatedly emphasised that “power should be in the hands of citizens, not only leaders”, a sentiment echoed in the party’s calls for participatory, technology-enabled local democracy.
For LGBTQ communities, the implications are concrete. Local control over health services could mean safer access to gender-affirming care. Clear national legislation, rather than vague constitutional principles, could protect same-sex couples from bureaucratic obstruction. Employment protections could move from rhetoric to enforceable law. In a political culture where minority issues are often folded into vague appeals to samabeshi (inclusion) without enforcement, the party insists on specificity.
The party also consciously positions itself against what it calls Nepal’s culture of political patronage. Traditional parties, it argues, have treated sexual and gender minorities as vote banks or international showcases, while reserving real power for established elites. By fielding LGBTQ candidates directly, the Inclusive Socialist Party challenges not only social conservatism but also the internal hierarchies of progressive politics itself.
Whether the party will win seats remains uncertain. Nepal’s electoral system favours established machines, and social prejudice has not disappeared simply because courts have issued progressive rulings. Yet even skeptics acknowledge that the party has already shifted the conversation. It has made visible a truth long whispered by activists: legal recognition without political representation is fragile.
In a country negotiating the meaning of loktantra (democracy) after monarchy, civil war and federal restructuring, the Inclusive Socialist Party’s arrival marks a new phase. It reframes LGBTQ rights not as cultural exceptions or donor-friendly headlines, but as a test of whether Nepal’s promise of inclusion can survive contact with real power. As Limbu put it, with quiet defiance, the goal is no longer to ask others to speak. It is to speak, legislate and decide for themselves.
I loooove the courage of these brothers and sisters. Truly. In a region where “progressive” politics so often means adding one rainbow flag to an old boys’ club and calling it a day, what these Nepali activists are doing feels bracingly honest. They’re not asking politely to be included in someone else’s dinner party. They’ve cooked their own food, set their own table, and marched straight into the political hall with it.
Nepal likes to congratulate itself for being enlightened. Third gender recognition, court rulings, constitutional language that looks fabulous in donor reports. Auntie has read them all. But anyone who has spent time in South Asia knows how wide the gap can be between paper rights and lived reality. Rights that live only in court judgments and NGO workshops are fragile things. They evaporate the moment budgets, ministries, or grumpy middle-aged men in parliament decide they are inconvenient.
That’s why I am cheering for this party like a shameless aunt at a school play. Because instead of begging legacy parties to “please remember us”, they’ve said: enough. We’ll remember ourselves. We’ll speak for ourselves. We’ll draft the laws ourselves. That alone is revolutionary in a political culture where minorities are usually trotted out during campaigns and quietly shelved afterward.
Do I expect a landslide? Auntie is romantic, not delusional. Nepal’s political machine is old, stubborn, and smells faintly of mothballs and entitlement. But do I want a few sharp, fearless voices landing in that parliament like chili in warm milk? Absolutely. Even a handful of MPs who refuse to bow, soften their language, or perform gratitude would be enough to rattle the routine. Imagine forcing debates on LGBTQ dignity, caste discrimination, women’s autonomy, and local power in a chamber used to polite avoidance and patriarchal throat-clearing. Delicious.
What I admire most is the refusal of tokenism. These candidates are not decorative. They are not there to prove Nepal is “modern”. They are there to legislate, to argue, to block bad laws and push good ones through sheer stubborn presence. That takes nerve, especially when your body, your love life, your gender expression are already treated as political statements.
So yes, Auntie wishes them a landslide. But even more, I wish them disruption. Noise. Awkward questions. Speeches that make old men shift uncomfortably in their seats. Because sometimes progress doesn’t come from winning everything. Sometimes it comes from refusing to be ignored ever again.