Nepal, Sept. 16 -- There is a strange kind of failure that happens not because a thing has been proven wrong, but because those who claimed to represent it never quite lived up to it. A doctrine does not need to be refuted to become useless in the eyes of the people; it only needs to be betrayed often enough, and for long enough, by those who invoked it. This is roughly what has happened to ideology in Nepal over the last decade and a half.

Every major party that emerged from the 1990 movement, the People's War and the republican transition of 2006, carried a label. Some called themselves communists of one shade or another, some socialists, some democrats of a liberal bent. But in government, in opposition and in the long, undignified bu...