THE NEPALI

By Saturday morning, if Balendra Shah’s orders hold, a convoy of excavators will rumble down the embankment road at Thapathali, past the temple ghats and the sluggish brown coils of the Bagmati River, toward a settlement that has resisted the state for decade. What will make the scene unusual is not the machines. Kathmandu has seen this before, with predictably bloody results. What will be different is the figure behind them. Shah, the rapper-turned-mayor-turned-prime minister, has ordered the clearance himself. For once, Nepal’s chief executive and the man who wants to clean the riverbanks are the same person.

To understand why this moment matters, one must return to November 2022, the first and most instructive act in Balen Shah’s long drama with the Bagmati. Freshly elected as Kathmandu’s first independent mayor, high on a mandate built from social media clips, rap lyrics and a furious public exhausted by the old parties, Shah sent his city police to Thapathali with two excavators. He had issued due notice. The High Powered Committee for Integrated Development of Bagmati Civilisation had issued notice three times. The squatters had been told to move.

They did not move. Instead, they threw bricks. The chief of the city police was beaten. More than 21 people were injured. The excavators retreated. Then, in what became the defining pattern of Balen’s mayoralty, something worse happened: the federal government, led by the parties his voters had rejected, did nothing. Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli’s administration declined to send the Nepal Police and Armed Police Force in force to back the municipality. The squatters cheered. Shah fumed on social media. The settlements remained.

It was not the first time the state had tried and failed. In May 2012, the Baburam Bhattarai government mobilised more than 2,000 security personnel to pull down 251 huts at the same location. Political pressure halted the drive mid-operation. The government then spent Rs 230 million building a resettlement colony at Ichangu Narayan in the Nagarjuna hills, intending to give displaced families somewhere decent to go. Not a single family moved in. The site lacked public transport, employment access and adequate water, and had not been designed with any community input. That failure became the definitive case study in how Nepal handles its landless poor: with money, noise and no follow-through.

The pattern repeated across the decades. Every commission formed to resolve the landless question, more than a dozen in thirty years, produced reports and nothing else. Every party, when in opposition, made pilgrimages to the riverbank settlements and vowed solidarity. Every party, upon entering Singha Durbar, quietly forgot the vow. By 2022, an estimated 34,096 families were living along the Bagmati’s banks in the Kathmandu Valley alone, a number that had grown rather than shrunk through every successive government’s tenure.

The emotional vocabulary around the Bagmati settlements has always leaned hard on a single word: sukumbasi, the landless squatter, the dispossessed, the voiceless poor. The placard-writers at the November 2022 protests understood its power. “You can’t kill the poor,” read one banner as squatters marched from Maitighar to New Baneshwar. The slogan was effective, partly because it was true. Genuine landlessness exists on the Bagmati banks and makes a serious moral claim on the state’s attention.

But the settlements are not a monolith of misery. They never were. Krishna Maya Magar, a long-time Thapathali resident, told local media plainly that parts of the settlement had long ago become a secondary real estate market. Huts were bought and sold. People with houses elsewhere registered as squatters to claim political protection. Absentee squatter-landlords rented out their riverside plots to newcomers, including, as Magar noted, Indian nationals who had purchased their footholds from departing Nepali occupants. Some of those wielding the poorest-sounding placards own land elsewhere in the Valley. They have simply found that riverbank occupancy, combined with political patronage, is cheaper than paying rent or property tax.

The numbers bear this out. Out of the 29,000 squatter families counted across the Kathmandu Valley in 2012, only 1,082 were formally registered with the Nepal Landless Democratic Union Party, a fraction so small it suggests that a large majority of occupants did not meet even the movement’s own definition of genuine landlessness. The genuinely dispossessed and the strategically positioned have, for three decades, sheltered under the same political umbrella, and Nepal’s parties have been happy to keep it that way. A population that believes its survival depends on political protection is a population that votes reliably, can be mobilised before elections and can be abandoned without consequence afterward.

This is not to say the genuine poor deserve what is coming to them this weekend without a credible plan for what follows. They do not. But the conflation of every riverbank dweller with the genuinely landless has been the foundational political lie that preserved the status quo. Every party found it easier to weaponise the authentic poor as shields for the fake poor than to do the painstaking work of distinguishing between them. The result is over a dozen wasted commissions, Rs 230 million in squandered resettlement spending and a riverbank that in 2026 still looks almost exactly as it did in 2012.

Balen Shah did not create the conditions for his own rise. He surfed a wave that three decades of Nepali governance had been quietly building. By 2025, remittances accounted for nearly a quarter of GDP, a figure that sounds impressive until one grasps what it represents: a state that had effectively exported its own working-age population because it could not generate productive employment at home. Youth unemployment was a structural feature, not a cyclical accident. Corruption was not a deviation from the system but its organising principle. The rotating cast of Oli, Deuba and Prachanda had produced, between them, no functioning economic programme and no credible plan for anything beyond perpetuating their own rotation.

When young Nepalis set fire to Singha Durbar in September 2025, they were not articulating a specific manifesto. They were expressing a verdict. Seventy-seven people died in that uprising. What replaced the old order, first an interim government under the austere former Chief Justice Sushila Karki, then the March 2026 elections, was not a revolution in the classical sense. It was something stranger and more radical: a democratic repudiation so complete that the Nepali Congress and CPN-UML, the parties that had defined the country’s politics since 1990, were reduced to rump status. Balen’s Rastriya Swatantra Party won 182 of 275 seats in the House of Representatives, nearly 48 percent of the proportional vote nationally, sweeping six of seven provinces. For the first time since 1999, Nepal had a majority government without coalition arithmetic.

Balen had been among the first prominent figures to back the protesters publicly, and, in a decision that in retrospect looks like genuine political maturity, he declined to seek power during the interim period, supporting the Karki arrangement instead. When he joined the RSP in December 2025 and resigned the mayoralty, the alignment of ambition and moment was complete. The man who had tried and failed to clear the Bagmati banks as a mere mayor, denied federal support by the very government his voters had rejected, was now in a position to give himself that support.

Critics of the current clearance, and they exist across the political spectrum, including Gen Z leader Raksha Bam, who called it a betrayal of the people and political dishonesty, focus on process. Where will people go? Has alternative housing been arranged? Is this not simply the same brutal eviction that has failed every time before? These are legitimate questions. The history of the Ichangu Narayan debacle demands they be asked loudly.

But the critics elide an equally important question: what does it cost to not clear the riverbanks? The Bagmati, the sacred river that cremation ghats and ancient temples line, the waterway that defines the spiritual geography of the Kathmandu Valley, flows today as an open sewer. Sewage from tens of thousands of riverbank families drains directly into it. Industrial effluents join it further downstream. The river is, by almost any environmental metric, a catastrophe. The settlements that line it are not merely an eyesore. They are actively preventing the ecological rehabilitation of the waterway that the valley’s 3.5 million residents depend upon. Floods in the monsoon inundate the same riverbank huts year after year, killing the people that progressives claim to protect, because no government has had the political courage to relocate them to safer ground.

There is a harder case to be made, and Balen’s supporters are not wrong to make it. The actual poor of the Bagmati banks are not well-served by the status quo. Their homes are structurally unsound, perennially flood-prone and built without sanitation. Their children attend school without the security of knowing whether the family will be homeless by evening. Their tenure is legally precarious regardless of how many politicians stop to wave at them before elections. A genuine resettlement programme, properly funded, properly designed with community input, properly located with access to transport and employment, would make the lives of the genuinely landless measurably better than what the riverbank currently offers. The tragedy of Nepal’s history on this question is not that governments tried to relocate the poor and got it wrong. It is that they used the poor as political currency and got nothing done at all.

The risk that hangs over Balen Shah’s action this weekend is not that it is unjustified. It is that it proves half-finished, as every previous attempt has been. A clearance without a credible resettlement plan replicates the pattern of 2012: displacement without resolution, scattered families, a settlement rebuilt within years, political capital squandered and the underlying problem exactly as intractable as before. Government spokesperson Sasmit Pokharel has been notably ambiguous about whether the cabinet has formally approved a resettlement framework. Security agencies, meanwhile, say the plan is in its “final stage.” The gap between those two statements is where Nepal’s squatter politics have always gone to die.

Balen Shah’s singular advantage, the one he lacked as mayor, is that the federal government is no longer his adversary. When his city police were stoned in November 2022, the Nepal Police stood back and watched. This time, the Inspector-Generals of both the Nepal Police and the Armed Police Force have received their instructions from the prime minister’s office directly. The jurisdictional ambiguity that has paralysed every previous attempt, the question of who controls land that is technically federal territory while the city deploys the personnel, has been dissolved, at least for now, by the fact of a majority government with a single chain of command.

Whether that political alignment is enough to produce the genuinely better outcome the genuine poor deserve, real housing and not just clearance, a resettlement site with water and buses and jobs rather than another empty colony in the hills, remains the only question that matters. The bulldozer, as a rapping young engineer once understood intuitively, is a statement.