Kathmandu, May 13 -- Even by Prime Minister K P Oli's standards, this was risky brinkmanship: three days after he lost a confidence vote in Parliament he remains in office after dividing the other parties to ensure they could not muster the numbers to form a new coalition.

Oli's two-pronged strategy hinged on ensuring that the Mahanta Thakur faction of the Janata Samajwadi Party (JSP) would stay neutral and not join any partnership with the Nepali Congress and the Maoist Centre. And he brought back a dissident faction of his UML led by Madhav Kumar Nepal, who was threatening to resign from Parliament with about 25 loyalists.

If they had resigned, the NC-Maoist-JSP coalition would have been possible, since the total number of seats in Pa...