THE NEPALi

“Today RSP/Balen government completes one month,” wrote Rabindra Mishra, former vice-chairman of the Rastriya Prajatantra Party. Mishra, a veteran observer with no particular loyalty to the new dispensation, offered a remarkable ten-point audit. Ministers, he noted, are no longer seen draped in garlands weighing kilograms; they are not turning up to ribbon-cuttings and pointless receptions; roads are not blocked when the prime minister travels; and, for the first time in decades, there is “a sense of new and clean politics.” 

He concluded with a pointed wish, “the day the government legally dissolves the party-affiliated fraternal organisations of teachers, professors and civil servants, I would celebrate with a feast.” Those organisations, he wrote, are the termites of good governance. While they survive, clean administration is a fantasy. But it is one particular act – the clearing of squatter settlements along Kathmandu’s riverbanks – that has made the Balen government’s first month genuinely historic.

The operation began in the early hours of a Saturday. Hundreds of security personnel from the Nepal Police, the Armed Police Force and the Kathmandu Metropolitan Police fanned out along the Bagmati riverbank in Thapathali. Most residents co-ordinated and bundled their belongings into trucks. By midday the corrugated-iron shelters that had lined the riverbank for a generation were rubble.

The scale of the operation, as detailed by Deepa Dahal, the prime minister’s press and investigation officer, was considerable. Settlements in ward 9 (Gairigaun) and ward 31 (Shantinagar) of Kathmandu Metropolitan City were cleared of structures on encroached riverbank and public land. The Thapathali settlement in ward 11 was vacated by 12:30 in the afternoon. Nepal Police and metropolitan police officers did not merely stand guard but physically helped residents carry and transport their belongings. Residents themselves, Dahal reported, expressed solidarity with the government’s move, making the Thapathali transfer “peaceful and cordial.”

By the dusk, 144 families from Thapathali, Gairigaun and Shantinagar had made contact with government authorities. They were first taken to Dasharath Stadium in Tripureshwor, where their details were recorded. Temporary accommodation was then arranged for them in various Kathmandu hotels, while household goods were stored in two designated locations: the stadium itself and the Radhaswami Satsang Byas Nepal facility in Sundarighat, Kirtipur. Search and rescue teams continued working to ensure no residents had been left behind. Plans to clear settlements in Gothatar Buddhachowk and Manohara Tol in Kageshwari Manohara municipality were paused for the day.

The clearance of these three settlements is the most dramatic act yet of a government barely one month old. It is also, in ways that go well beyond urban planning, a political earthquake.

Nepal has a squatter problem of formidable proportions. Kathmandu Metropolitan City alone has an estimated 2,245 landless squatter families along its riverbanks. Across the country there are reckoned to be millions more. Fourteen separate commissions were formed after 1990 to resolve the issue. None succeeded. The settlements became a fixture of the capital’s landscape, and crucially, a fixture of its politics.

Communist parties, principally the CPN-UML, have dominated Nepali politics for most of the past three decades. Their leaders discovered early that squatters, disproportionately poor, landless and politically malleable, made reliable constituents. Promises of land titles and legal recognition were dispensed before elections. Nothing was delivered afterward. KP Sharma Oli, the CPN-UML’s four-time prime minister, was among the loudest critics when Balen, as Kathmandu’s mayor in 2022, first tried to clear the Thapathali settlement. Balen’s response was withering. The squatters, he said, had been “just a vote bank” for Oli and his party, used when convenient and abandoned otherwise.

The charge stung because it was true. Repeated efforts to relocate the settlements ended in failure, not least because federal governments, dominated by the left, declined to provide the municipal authorities the security forces needed to do the job. Balen’s own first attempt as mayor, in November 2022, ended in a violent clash that left 36 people injured, including the municipal police chief.

What changed is that Balen now controls the federal government. His Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), a four-year-old anti-establishment outfit, won a landslide in the snap general election of March 5th, triggered by the September 2025 Gen Z uprising that toppled Oli’s government and left 77 people dead. The RSP won 124 of the 164 counted seats. It swept all ten Kathmandu Valley constituencies. Balen himself defeated Oli in the latter’s home constituency of Jhapa-5 by nearly 50,000 votes, the largest winning margin in Nepal’s parliamentary history.

Mishra was generous in acknowledging a point that Balen’s admirers sometimes gloss over. The RSP’s triumph was not Balen’s alone. Without Rabi Lamichhane, the party’s founder and formal chairman, mired in legal controversies but the architect of the RSP’s organisational infrastructure, none of what is now visible would have been possible. Balen and Lamichhane together delivered, in Mishra’s words, “an extraordinary electoral result rarely seen in the world.” They brought not a political but a generational transfer of power to Nepal, one that, Mishra judges, “will not easily be reversed.”

The eviction drive is part of Balen’s 100-point governing roadmap. The plan promises a GIS-based national database of landless squatters, verification of genuine beneficiaries within 60 days, and resolution through relocation and land allocation within 1,000 days.

Not everyone is applauding this move though. Amnesty International called the evictions a “dangerous erosion of the rule of law,” warning that clearing families without prior verification or guaranteed alternative housing risked turning a governance challenge into a human rights crisis. Few lawyers and Gen Z activists filed a petition at the Supreme Court challenging the evictions as unlawful, arguing that affected families were not consulted and have nowhere to go.

The government has arrested Narayan Pariyar, the acting chair of the Squatter Front and a CPN-UML leader, on what police described as banking charges unrelated to the eviction. Critics find the timing convenient. And residents themselves tell a more complicated story. Manisha Lakandri, whose family has lived in Thapathali for over fifty years, said she had been asked to find her own housing. “We are searching for rooms, but we haven’t found any,” she said.

The government’s response is that eviction and rehabilitation can proceed in sequence.Verification of genuine squatters will follow promptly and land will be distributed. Senior advocate Raju Chapagain is unpersuaded. Eviction first, verification later, he argues, is simply not a lawful approach.

Whatever the legal merits, the political logic is clear. For three decades, Nepal’s communist parties built power partly by managing, rather than solving, the squatter problem. They positioned themselves as protectors of the poor against an indifferent state, while ensuring that the poor remained dependent enough to keep voting. Balen has scrambled this calculus entirely. By acting where the left only promised, he has stripped the communists of one of their most durable grievances. The electoral data from March tells the same story. The RSP did best in urban and semi-urban areas with high internet access, among voters who had grown up watching the left govern Nepal into stagnation. The CPN-UML was reduced to 25 seats. The Nepali Congress, once the country’s dominant liberal party, won just 38.

Nepal’s communists now face what one analyst called “a huge ideological crisis.” They lack a platform to rally citizens around. Their failures in government contributed directly to the emergence of a rapper-engineer who made cleaning up Kathmandu – literally and figuratively – his political identity. The Gen Z uprising that opened the door for Balen was itself a repudiation of a political class that the left had long led.

Balen’s approach carries its own risks. Moving fast without adequate resettlement guarantees could generate genuine suffering and political backlash. His own party shows signs of internal strain. Second-tier RSP leaders say they were not consulted before the eviction decision. And his record as mayor, which included accusations of using police against street vendors and demolishing structures without full due process, suggests a governing style that prizes speed over procedure. But in a country that has watched fourteen commissions do nothing, speed may be exactly what voters wanted.