Trusting the Elders: How a Youth Party Got Talked Out of Power

On paper, putting Nepal’s Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) and Bangladesh’s National Citizen Party (NCP) side by side feels unfair.

One is playing in a fragmented, coalition‐addicted system where governments rise and fall like monsoon rivers.

The other is trying to breathe inside a political culture that spent more than a decade convincing people that elections are either pre‐written or apocalyptic. RSP was born into turbulence; NCP was born under a lid.

But if you care about what happens to youth movements when they cross the threshold into “real” politics, the comparison is still necessary because inside that unfairness is a quieter story about trust.

RSP assumed the old guard would never voluntarily make room for it, and behaved accordingly. NCP assumed the elders would do right by the students, if only the students were reasonable.

You can see the consequences in one glance at the electoral map. In Nepal, RSP stood in almost every constituency it could, and walked out as a central actor in the new parliament. In Bangladesh, NCP was persuaded to contest a narrow band of seats and walked out with six MPs and a story in which the big parties once again got to own “change.”

This is not because NCP cared less, organized less, or sacrificed less. It’s because it trusted more and trusted in exactly the wrong direction.

In Nepal, RSP carried itself like a party that wanted to govern, not just testify. It didn’t wait for anyone to declare it “ready.”

It went national, almost by default: candidates across the country, a manifesto that sounded like a performance contract rather than a poem, and internal rules that carved out real space for younger candidates instead of just putting them on the posters.

Youth wasn’t just a slogan; it was written into the way the party distributed power inside its own house.

There was no illusion about how the older parties would respond. Nobody in Kathmandu seriously believed the traditional power brokers would say: “Come in, take half our space, you’ve earned it.” So RSP behaved as if no one was coming to save it. It built what it could, where it could, and let the chips fall.

NCP, by contrast, walked into its first real national contest with something far more fragile than a manifesto: Faith in the elders. Faith that you can take advice from people who have spent their careers designing a game you’re supposed to lose and that this time, they really mean it when they say “we’re all on the same side.”

This is how a youth party gets talked out of power without a single baton being raised against it. The script was familiar. As the election approached, the national conversation in Bangladesh was framed, again, as a massive showdown between the regime and a single main opposition pole.

Every talk show, every op‐ed, every anxious uncle at a tea stall repeated some version of the same line: This is a historic chance, don’t waste it, don’t divide it. Under that pressure, NCP’s own leaders started repeating it too.

Don’t contest too many seats. Don’t frighten donors. Don’t provoke the system. Start with 30, prove you’re “serious”, and trust that the elders will invite you closer next time. That is the language of responsibility on the surface. Underneath, it is the language that keeps new actors permanently junior.

All of this might still have been survivable if the “elders” had treated NCP as a genuine partner. They didn’t. Publicly, the big parties embraced the students, called them “our sons and daughters,” pointed proudly at their faces in rallies and photo‐ops.

Privately and on the ground, their organizers pushed a harder line: that a vote for NCP was a nice idea, but too risky “this time.” That real politics needed grown‐ups with networks, not kids with slogans and trauma.

NCP knew this game. It had already seen how quickly promises wobble when they threaten the old balance. It had already watched the older generation drag their feet on reforms born out of the uprising, play procedural games with dates and documents, reduce life‐and‐death demands into bargaining chips. There were enough warning signs to fill a manifesto on their own.

And yet, when the moment of choice came, NCP still chose trust.

Trust that an older leadership class, raised on zero‐sum politics, would make an exception for them. Trust that if they played nice inside someone else’s alliance architecture, they would be allowed to grow. Trust that “strategic voting” arguments were about defeating authoritarianism, not about ring‐fencing the main opposition’s monopoly over the idea of change.

RSP, in a far less suffocating context, made the opposite choice. It refused to believe in benevolent gatekeepers. It refused to shrink itself to look respectable. It refused to let other parties own the word “alternative.” It acted like a party that wanted power, not a party that wanted approval.

Is it fair to hold NCP to the same standard? No. Bangladesh is structurally harsher terrain. The costs of miscalculation are higher. The margin for experimentation is thinner. A party of young organizers here is playing on hard mode from the start.

But if you strip away the structural differences, the lesson that remains is deeply uncomfortable: Youth parties don’t only lose because the system is rigged. They also lose when they confuse opponents with mentors -- when they believe that if they are humble enough, patient enough, deferential enough, the very people who built the old order will one day step aside and say: “Your turn.”

The elders do not talk them out of power with threats. They talk them out of power with affection, and concern, and long, sighing lectures about realism.

In the end, that is what happened to NCP. It trusted that the older generation would guard its space. It believed that gratitude today would translate into room tomorrow. It let itself be persuaded that the bravest thing a youth party can do in its founding election is to make itself small.

RSP made the opposite bet, and whatever you think of it, that bet paid in the only currency politics understands: seats, leverage, and the ability to say no. The comparison is unfair.

But the question it poses is brutally simple: In the next round, will NCP still be trusting the elders or will it finally behave like the generation that was brave enough to bring the country to this point in the first place?

Apurba Jahangir is a writer, political analyst, and former deputy press secretary to the Chief Adviser of the Interim Government of Bangladesh.