Sacralising the state: Hindu nationalism, populist imaginaries, and the politics of belonging in post-monarchy Nepal

The afterlife of Nepal’s Hindu monarchy persists not as an institutional residue but as an affective force – resurfacing in chants, symbols, and populist imaginaries that seek to re-sacralise the secular state. This article examines the political resurgence of Hindu nationalism in post-2008 Nepal as a grammar of belonging that emerges precisely where democratic legitimacy is faltering. Rather than treating pro-monarchy mobilisations as episodic or nostalgic, it argues that they represent an affective reordering of sovereignty, one that fuses religious idioms with populist resentment. Drawing on recent rallies, political discourse, and symbolic invocations of sacred kingship, the article examines how the state becomes a site not only of governance but also of yearning – saturated with the promise of moral clarity and cultural restoration. The study, therefore, foregrounds the entanglement of memory, faith, and disenchantment to reframe Hindu nationalism in Nepal not as a return to the past, but as a mode of sacralising the present amid a democratic crisis.