A day after the KP Sharma Oli government fell in Nepal, President Bidhya Devi Bhandari asked political parties to form a majority government, reported The Himalayan Times. The political instability hits the country at a time when it is facing a deadly second wave of the Covid-19. 

Meanwhile, Bhandari has appointed Oli as a caretaker prime minister. Oli on Monday lost the trust vote in parliament as CPN- MC, headed by former prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, withdrew its support from the government. 

Twenty dissident lawmakers of Oli’s party, led by Madhav Nepal, missed the voting, and Oli’s bid to secure support from MPs of the Janata Samajwadi Party (JSP) had also failed. 

However, given the current political situation, the Nepali Congress (NC), the country’s main opposition party, would find it hard to garner support from other parties to form the next government. 
 
The CPN-MC, led by Dahal, is ready to support the NC; however, the JSP remains undecided. 

Mahantha Thakur, one of the two chairs of the JSP, on Monday said that the party’s priority now is to get its agendas right rather than the formation of the next government. The party has a total of 32 MPs. And 15 among them belong to the Thakur faction. 

Prior to the fall of the government, some leaders of the JSP had been holding talks with Oli over possible support to the government in exchange for their demands. 

It has been demanding withdrawal of cases and release of their party cadres and leaders, amendments to the constitution, and making public a report prepared by a commission that studied oppression during the Madhes movement, according to the statement.