K. P. Sharma Oli
K. P. Sharma Oli was prime minister of Nepal three times, in 2015-16, 2018-21 and 2024-25, the Communist who had spent fourteen years in the king's prisons for a Naxalite rising in Jhapa in the 1970s, led the Unified Marxist-Leninists from 2014. He governed the republic's longest and most nationalist government, from 2018, after his party and Prachanda's Maoists merged and won two-thirds of the parliament together. They were the years of the map of 2020 that put Kalapani and Lipulekh, held by India, inside Nepal's borders by a constitutional amendment passed unanimously. They were the years of the transit treaty with China of 2016 that ended India's monopoly on the country's trade, of the railway to Kerung that China promised and has not built, of the pandemic in which the country's oxygen ran out, and of the twice-dissolved parliament of 2020 and 2021, which the supreme court twice restored, the second time removing him from office and installing Deuba, after the merged party had split over his refusal to share. He was born in Terhathum in 1952, the son of a farmer, lost his mother to smallpox at four, and joined the Communists in 1966 at fourteen. He was the party's organiser in Jhapa when its cadres killed landlords in 1971-72, for which he was jailed from 1973 to 1987. He was home minister in 1994 and deputy prime minister in 2006. He survived a kidney transplant in 2007 and a second in 2020. The first government, of 2015-16, was the constitution's promulgation and the Madhesi protests in the plains that killed fifty and the Indian blockade of the border for five months that turned the country toward China, which made his name. The third, from July 2024 in coalition with the Congress, ended on 9 September 2025, when the Gen Z protests against the social-media ban and the leaders' children's wealth were shot at, nineteen dying on the first day and seventy-four in all. The crowds burned the parliament, the Singha Durbar, the supreme court and his house. He resigned and was flown by army helicopter out of Kathmandu. The interim government of the former chief justice Sushila Karki dissolved the parliament and called an election for March 2026. He has called the uprising a conspiracy. The party has kept him.
- Lived: 1952 CE – ?
- Nationality: Nepali
- Roles: prime minister, politician
