There is a long-established ritual to Nepal’s annual policies and programmes: the President reads the government’s plans to a joint sitting of both houses of parliament, and the prime minister sits dutifully in attendance, escorting the head of state in and out and offering brief remarks. On Monday, May 11th, Prime Minister Balendra “Balen” Shah broke with this convention so conspicuously that it consumed the rest of the week’s political oxygen, even as his finance minister Dr Swarnim Wagle, was trying to build momentum for a genuinely ambitious budget.

President Ram Chandra Paudel had barely been reading for 50 minutes when Shah stood up and walked out. He had arrived in a black T-shirt, black coat and white sports shoes, an outfit that itself attracted commentary, and left without bidding farewell to the President or making the customary remarks when tabling the proposal of thanks. His office later attributed the departure to “health-related discomfort.” Opposition leaders were not persuaded. Nepali Congress parliamentary party leader Bhishma Raj Angdembe called the conduct “unprecedented,” adding: “Perhaps Nepal’s prime minister will now enter the Guinness World Records because no other prime minister in the world has walked out while his own government’s policies and programmes were being presented.” Former prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal urged the RSP not to “misuse its numerical strength” and instead strengthen democratic procedures.

Shah has actually not addressed the House of Representatives since taking office in late March, arguably the first prime minister in Nepal’s modern parliamentary history to have gone more than six weeks without doing so. He has also repeatedly declined invitations from the House’s State Affairs Committee. When opposition lawmakers demanded his presence for the ensuing debate on the policies and programmes, Wednesday’s session broke down entirely. A familiar cast of obstructors: Nepali Congress, CPN-UML, the Nepali Communist Party, Rastriya Prajatantra Party and others, stood in the Well demanding Shah appear in person. Harka Sampang of the Shram Sanskriti Party led the disruption and called for the prime minister’s resignation. The House could not proceed.

By Thursday, discussions on the policies and programmes had resumed in the House of Representatives in the prime minister’s continued absence, with 35 amendment proposals filed by opposition parties. Meanwhile, Finance Minister Wagle tabled the document in the National Assembly, the upper house, where the arithmetic is altogether different. The RSP commands close to two-thirds of the 275-seat lower house. In the 59-member National Assembly, it has not a single seat.

The upper house is elected through provincial assemblies and local governments on a staggered six-year cycle, meaning the RSP’s landslide in the March 5 general election has produced no representation there at all. This constitutional design intended to provide a counterweight to lower-house dominance is now doing exactly that. Eight ordinances that the Balen government had rushed through by proroguing parliament earlier in April must pass both houses to remain in force. The National Assembly registered amendment notices against several of them. CPN-UML announced it would not participate in the voting; Nepali Congress said it would reject anything that curtailed fundamental rights or violated the constitution’s spirit. Nonetheless, the policies and programmes themselves, unlike the controversial ordinances, passed the National Assembly on May 14th without a division vote, after all amendment proposals were defeated by voice.

The ordinance episode has already become a flashpoint. The RSP prorogued a scheduled parliamentary session in order to issue the eight ordinances covering cooperatives, procurement, universities, anti-money-laundering, the Constitutional Council and others, then convened parliament once they were already in place. Opposition parties across the spectrum called it “executive overreach.” The most contentious provision redefines “majority” in the Constitutional Council (which recommends key constitutional appointees) so that three of its six members, including the prime minister, can constitute a quorum. Critics say it concentrates appointment power in the executive, undermining the purpose of the council’s multi-party design.

Amidst the procedural drama, the substance of the government’s plans for fiscal year 2083/84 and the broader 100-point reform framework underpinning the upcoming budget deserves scrutiny on its own terms. The document is genuinely ambitious, and in places breaks from the boilerplate that has characterised its predecessors. Finance Minister Wagle has said the budget, due to be presented on Jestha 15, will be built around five themes: the “dividend of good governance,” economic restructuring, integrated infrastructure, expansion of the middle class, and leveraging Nepal’s “soft power” through tourism and the diaspora.

The policies document represents a coherent, if optimistic, vision of what a reform-minded single-party government with a youthful mandate could accomplish. The RSP is led predominantly by people under 40, and the agenda shows it, emphatic on digital transformation, instinctively distrustful of the old bureaucratic culture, and impatient with the coalition horse-trading that has defined Nepali politics for three decades. Finance Minister Wagle, an economist by training, has been the administration’s most effective public communicator: methodical, data-literate and willing to acknowledge the structural problems that previous governments preferred to paper over. His five-budget-themes framework is the most coherent pre-budget articulation in recent memory.

Yet the gap between intention and delivery is Nepal’s most durable political tradition. Capital expenditure ran at just 24 per cent of budget in the current fiscal year with two months remaining, a figure that has barely budged across administrations. Nepal has never spent the full capex allocation. The government’s 7 per cent annual growth target over the next decade looks particularly strained against a projected 2.3 per cent in the current year. Former government secretaries point out that Nepal’s governance challenges have rarely been a shortage of plans; they have been the entrenched bureaucracy, weak monitoring, and poor inter-ministry coordination that dilute even the best-designed reforms once they leave the prime minister’s office.

“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.

  

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. 

Nepal’s Home Minister Sudan Gurung has tendered his resignation, citing conflict of interest concerns stemming from his shareholding in companies linked to Deepak Bhatta, the controversial businessman arrested on April 1 in connection with a Rs 3.7 billion money laundering investigation. In his resignation statement, Gurung wrote that ethics matter more than the position, and that no power is greater than public trust. He said he was stepping aside so that any investigation into his affairs could proceed without the shadow of influence that comes with holding the country’s most powerful law enforcement portfolio.

The gesture was, on the surface, noble. But it has left Prime Minister Balendra Shah in a political minefield.

The controversy erupted over the weekend when media outlets reported that Gurung held shares in Star Micro Insurance Company Limited and Liberty Micro Life Insurance, two firms also linked to Bhatta and the Shanker Group. Gurung’s name appears in the insurance company’s preliminary share register at number 49, representing an investment of approximately Rs 2.5 million. Neither company had yet gone public through an IPO.

The shares, reportedly purchased after the Gen Z movement, were not listed in Gurung’s public asset declaration submitted on April 12. Gurung maintained this was a matter of classification — that his broader stock market investments of over Rs 20 million had been declared — but critics found the distinction unconvincing. “I would not hide Rs 2.5 million worth of shares when my total declared assets exceed Rs 20 million,” he said in his public clarification. “This is simply a matter of classification.”

It was a very Nepali scandal. A minister who had spent months casting himself as the embodiment of clean governance was now explaining, with considerable urgency, why shares he held in a money laundering suspect’s associated companies were not, technically speaking, hidden. The interpretation of asset declaration rules may well be complex. But in politics, the appearance of wrongdoing often travels faster than the facts.

Bhatta, who chairs Infinity Holdings, had long faced scrutiny for allegedly leveraging political and bureaucratic connections to secure lucrative government contracts, operating with perceived impunity under multiple administrations. His arrest followed years of failed attempts to hold him accountable. Previous investigations were reportedly halted due to political pressure, but the case was revived after the new government led by Balendra Shah was formed. 

Making matters worse for Gurung was an old photograph that surfaced showing Bhatta being honoured as a donor at a 2021 event hosted by Hami Nepal, the NGO founded and chaired by Gurung himself. Critics raised concerns about the lack of detailed disclosures on Gurung’s part regarding investments tied to the very figures that his Home Ministry was in charge of investigating. For years, Gurung had been one of the loudest voices demanding transparency from Nepal’s political class. 

Gen Z Movement Nepal called on the government to immediately dismiss Gurung, arguing that allowing him to remain in office could influence the investigation process and represents a clear conflict of interest. CPN-UML demanded his resignation and called for a high-level investigation mechanism to be formed immediately. Nepali Congress issued similar demands. Even within the RSP, the mood was deeply uncomfortable. An RSP lawmaker and party office-bearer said that allegations against the home minister were more serious than those that brought down Labour Minister Deepak Kumar Sah just two weeks earlier. 

Prime Minister Shah held a separate meeting with RSP leaders late Monday evening as calls for Gurung’s resignation intensified. He also sought a written clarification from his Home Minister, which Gurung’s secretariat duly submitted. The procedural formality did little to quiet the noise.

Gurung spent Tuesday fighting back. On Facebook, he was unsparing: “Those who have had their eyes fixed on state money for years are scared now. The media trial and the orchestrated noise is nothing but their desperation. The action won’t stop, I won’t be rattled. I haven’t seen them work this hard even when someone was embezzling Rs 500 million a day.” Less than 24 hours later, he was gone.

It is worth pausing to remember how electric Gurung’s tenure felt just weeks ago. When he took office on March 26, he immediately captured the public imagination. He directed the arrest of former Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and former Home Minister Ramesh Lekhak, names that had long seemed untouchable. He published arrest lists on Facebook like dispatches from a campaign. He named the Shanker Group’s Sulav Agrawal among those brought in as part of the broader Bhatta probe. For a country exhausted by the spectacle of powerful men walking free, it felt, briefly, like something had genuinely changed.

His tenure was nevertheless marked by controversy from the start. Party lawmakers complained that he failed to coordinate with elected representatives during inspections and interfered in matters handled by other ministries. Senior police officials had pushed back when he directed the arrest of Oli and Lekhak, insisting that legal procedures be followed first. The two were eventually released on a Supreme Court order after 15 days. Critics from the security establishment said Gurung had turned policing into a social media performance, treating operational decisions as content rather than process.

None of that diminished his popularity with the public. He had built his following not as a politician but as an activist, a disaster responder, a face of the movement that toppled a government. People wanted to believe in him. That is precisely what made the share controversy so corrosive.

Gurung’s resignation statement struck a starkly different register from his combative Facebook posts. It was reflective, principled and, in its way, unexpectedly moving. He invoked the sacrifice of 46 young people killed during the Gen Z uprising and said the government born of that sacrifice must be held to a higher standard. “My tenure has been one of honest work,” he wrote. “For me, ethics matter more than the position, and no power is greater than public trust.”

He was direct about his reasoning. He said he was stepping down so that an impartial investigation could take place without conflict of interest, and so that his continued presence in office could not be used to question the integrity of that process. “I have fulfilled my moral responsibility,” he wrote. “Now my appeal is this: if we truly want change, everyone must stand on the side of truth, honesty and self-accountability.”

He added, with some pointed edge, that some journalists who had covered him also held undeclared shares in various companies, and that those demanding a clean republic from others must be willing to demand the same of themselves. “Those who want Ram Rajya,” he wrote, “must also be capable of sacrifice and moral courage.”

It was a dignified exit, and a strategically intelligent one. By resigning on his own terms, invoking the movement’s martyrs and the language of conscience, Gurung denied his critics the satisfaction of a sacking. He left the door open to a return.

This is now the second minister to exit the Shah cabinet under a cloud in less than a month. Labour Minister Deepak Kumar Sah was removed after the RSP’s central disciplinary commission found he had misused his position to keep his wife on the Health Insurance Board. That looked like a government willing to police itself. Two departures in rapid succession looks like something else entirely.

The Bhatta investigation, which the RSP government had been actively championing as proof of its anti-corruption credentials, has now entangled its own Home Minister. Sources indicate the probe gathered pace following the formation of the new government, with instructions to expedite the case. The irony is sharp enough to cut. The minister tasked with overseeing law enforcement held shares in companies at the centre of the very law enforcement operation he was directing.

Investigators have said that anyone connected to Bhatta’s network remains under scrutiny, and the web of companies, politicians and businessmen continues to widen. The Shanker Group alone has borrowings estimated at close to Rs 200 billion from banks and financial institutions. With Gurung gone, the Home Ministry is now a vacancy at a sensitive and dangerous moment in that investigation.

For Prime Minister Shah, there is a deeper problem that no reshuffle can easily fix. The RSP came to power riding a wave of public hope cultivated through the blood and protest of the Gen Z movement, that a new generation could actually be different. The party won a landslide on March 5 on promises of transparency and good governance. Each cabinet controversy erodes that promise. Each resignation, however honourably framed, raises the uncomfortable question of how thoroughly the party vetted its own people before placing them in positions of enormous power.

The small mercy for Shah is that Gurung went of his own volition, and went with grace. He can say, as Gurung himself said, that the system is working, that questions were asked, pressure was applied, and a minister stepped back rather than dig in. The rather greater difficulty is that a government only weeks old has already lost two ministers, is managing one of the most consequential corruption investigations in recent Nepali history, and must now find a credible replacement to run the ministry at the heart of it all.

In his resignation statement, Gurung reminded the country of why so many had believed in him in the first place. He spoke of the youths who died, of the obligation their sacrifice creates, of the standard a public life must meet not by compulsion but by conscience. It recalled the way Nepal’s Gen Z movement itself had spoken, with a moral seriousness that felt new in this country’s politics.

Whether history judges him as the man who blinked under pressure, or the man who showed Nepal’s political class what accountability actually looks like, may depend entirely on what the investigation finds next. If he is cleared, his exit will read as an act of rare integrity. If investigators find more, the resignation will be remembered as the moment the floor gave way.

What is certain is that the story of Sudan Gurung, the DJ-turned-disaster-responder-turned-Gen Z icon-turned-Home Minister, is far from over. He remains a parliamentarian. He retains a platform. He has shown he can command both a crowd and a news cycle. In Nepal’s turbulent new political chapter, this is not the end of a career. It reads far more like the end of the first act.

The night before he was sworn in as Nepal’s prime minister, Balen Shah released a rap song. The track, “Jai Mahakali,” called for unity across the ethnic and regional lines that have for decades made Nepal so difficult to govern. His supporters shared it hundreds of thousands of times before dawn. The following morning, in black trousers, a matching jacket and his signature cloth cap, he took the oath of office and became the 47th prime minister of Nepal, its youngest ever and the first from the Madhesi community of the southern plains. That combination, the song and the ceremony, the artist and the engineer, the outsider and the head of state, tells you most of what you need to know about why this government feels different from everything that came before it, and why so many people with so many competing agendas are arguing about what it means.

His critics have settled, with some relish, on the comparison to Volodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian president was an actor and comedian before a Russian invasion thrust him onto the world stage, and the argument runs that Mr Shah, similarly unburdened by diplomatic training or foreign policy experience, risks steering a landlocked nation between two of the world’s most powerful and assertive states into exactly the kind of miscalculation that a more seasoned hand would avoid. Nepal sits between India and China, each of which has strong and sometimes contradictory ideas about what a well-governed Nepal should look like and neither of which is above expressing those ideas through infrastructure budgets, trade routes or quiet political pressure. The fear is that a prime minister who campaigns with the emotional directness of a rapper and governs with the impatience of an engineer might, in a moment of nationalist sentiment or diplomatic overreach, say or do something irreversible.

His admirers, for their part, have settled on a different comparison, one that flatters more generously and instructs more usefully. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father, transformed a tiny resource-poor island with an anxious geography into one of the wealthiest and best-governed nations on earth through sheer administrative will, the ruthless deployment of talent, and an absolute refusal to tolerate the gap between what a government promises and what it delivers. The fans who invoke his name when they look at Mr Shah are pointing at something real. The 100-point reform agenda approved in the first cabinet meeting, with its tight deadlines, named responsible officials and public monitoring dashboard, is precisely the kind of governance-by-accountability that Mr Lee pioneered. The cabinet of technocrats and young professionals, filled on merit rather than by party affiliation, is a Singaporean instinct applied to a Himalayan state. The willingness to move fast, make enemies and trust that the mandate will hold long enough to do lasting damage to the old order is, unmistakably, the Lee Kuan Yew method.

The difference, and it is a crucial one that Mr Shah’s admirers should hold onto, is that Mr Lee built his miracle without democratic accountability and Mr Shah must build his with it. Singapore’s founding father managed elections to prevent any serious opposition from emerging, used defamation suits against critics and tamed the press into compliant silence. Mr Shah arrived in office having beaten a four-time prime minister in his own stronghold by nearly 50,000 votes, the largest winning margin in Nepal’s parliamentary history. His authority rests not on suppression but on an extraordinary act of public trust. That is both more demanding and more durable than anything Singapore’s model required. If Mr Shah delivers, Nepal will have proved something that Lee Kuan Yew never tried to prove, that a state can be both accountable and efficient, that democracy and competence are not, as the Singapore story seems to suggest, in tension with each other.

Nowhere is this argument more pointed than in the question of political party-affiliated unions. Mr Shah’s decision to dismantle party-linked bodies in government institutions, and to replace student political organisations on university campuses with non-partisan student councils, has been called his most controversial reform but, in the view of this media, his most necessary one. Nepal’s trade unions and student bodies have not, for the most part, functioned as the engines of worker protection and civic education that their defenders now claim. They have functioned as patronage machines, through which the major parties colonised the civil service, staffed ministries with loyalists, and ensured that every institution of the state was, at some level, an instrument of political survival rather than public service. A nurse who wanted a hospital posting, a teacher who wanted a school placement, an engineer who wanted a government contract learned quickly that the right union card mattered more than the right qualifications. It made it dishonest in ways so deep and so normalised that most Nepalis had stopped expecting anything different.

Dismantling that system is not an attack on organised labour or on student politics. It is an attack on the capture of both by party machines that used them as tools of control rather than protection. Workers in Nepal’s public sector will retain the right to organise; what they will not retain is the right to do so under banners that serve the interests of party leadership rather than their own. Students will continue to debate, advocate and push back against authority; what they will lose is the system by which Nepali Congress and UML and their various satellites used campus politics as a recruitment pipeline for future political operatives. This is an entirely defensible reform in a country where the blurring of party interest and institutional function has been the root cause of almost every failure of governance in the past three decades.

The cabinet that will attempt to implement all of this is itself a statement of intent. Ten of fifteen ministers are under 40. Sasmita Pokharel, who turns 30 this year, runs the education ministry. Sudan Gurung, 38, who rose to national attention during the Gen Z protests of 2025, is home minister. Swarnim Wagle, the finance minister and the oldest at 51, is an economist of genuine distinction who has spent years arguing for exactly the structural reforms the government is now attempting. Nisha Mehta at health, Sobita Gautam at law, Pratibha Rawal at general administration represent a generation of professionals who built their credentials outside the party system and who have now been asked to reform the state that the party system built.

The Lamichhane question also hangs in the air, as it must. Rabi Lamichhane, the RSP chairman who remains Mr Shah’s formal party superior, faces serious allegations of fraud and money laundering. Their alliance was, in the phrase of one Tribhuvan University political scientist, a marriage of convenience. Marriages of convenience tend to become inconvenient at the worst possible moments, and Mr Shah will need to manage that relationship without allowing it to stain a government that has staked everything on probity. It is the one vulnerability in an otherwise unusually strong position, and his critics are right to watch it carefully.

But critics watching that vulnerability would do well to keep the wider picture in frame. Nepal has had 32 governments since 1990 and not one of them completed a full term. It has cycled through prime ministers with a regularity that made serious policy impossible and made the word reform, in Nepali political discourse, almost meaningless from overuse. What Mr Shah has done in three weeks is not merely announce reforms. He has arrested a former prime minister, sacked a minister for nepotism within days of appointment, published a public scorecard against which his own government will be judged, and filled every significant portfolio with someone who appears to have been chosen because they know their subject rather than because they know the right people. He released a rap song the night before his inauguration that asked, simply, to see Nepal smiling. He is now the one responsible for making that happen. The 30 million people who voted for him, marched for him, sang his songs and held their breath through the counting of ballots, are not going to let him forget it.

As a young economist in Washington in the early 2000s, Swarnim Wagle spent his days at the World Bank writing reports about countries that could not implement them. Nepal, the landlocked Himalayan republic where he was born, featured often in the footnotes. Its problems were well-documented: a tax base propped up by the remittances of young men working in Qatar, capital budgets that went unspent year after year, and an economy captured by a small circle of businessmen with better access to ministers than to markets. Mr Wagle knew the diagnosis. He is now, at last, in a position to attempt the cure.

On March 27th he was sworn in as finance minister in the government of Balen Shah, a rapper-turned-mayor whose Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) swept Nepal’s elections with 182 of 275 parliamentary seats, the largest majority in the country’s modern democratic history. Mr Wagle, the party’s vice-chair and intellectual architect, holds degrees from the London School of Economics, Harvard and the Australian National University. He spent 25 years at the World Bank and the UNDP’s Asia-Pacific bureau, where he shaped economic policy for 36 countries. He is also, unusually for a Nepali technocrat of his pedigree, a politician with a growing personal mandate. His majority in the Tanahun-1 constituency expanded from 15,000 votes in a 2023 by-election to nearly 22,000 in March.

The RSP’s central promise is to grow Nepal’s economy from below $45bn today to $100bn within five to seven years, sustained by annual growth of 7%. Mr Wagle is not the first Nepali finance minister to arrive with large numbers and good intentions. He may, however, be the first one who has read enough economic history to know why his predecessors failed.

His structural thesis is that Nepal need not follow the conventional path of industrialisation. Landlocked, seismically active and chronically short of the infrastructure that factories require, it should instead leapfrog into a knowledge- and service-driven economy, using digital transformation, fintech and eco-tourism to generate growth that geography cannot strangle. IT exports, currently negligible, are to reach $30bn within a decade. A target of 30,000 megawatts of hydropower is meant to shift the economy from remittance-funded consumption toward something that actually produces tradeable goods. Some 1.2m domestic jobs are to be created, enough to make emigration a choice rather than a condition of existence.

The diagnosis behind this agenda is accurate even if the ambition is steep. Bank deposits have swelled to nearly Rs 7.7 trillion, yet credit expansion remains anaemic and investment demand subdued. Capital is piling up in vaults rather than building anything. Capital expenditure has slipped to just Rs 63.7bn, a figure that reflects not a shortage of money but a chronic inability to deploy it. Nepal is not a poor country pretending to be rich. It is a reasonably-resourced country governed, for decades, as though the principal purpose of the state were to distribute its proceeds among those who ran it.

On his first day in office Mr Wagle announced the abolition of the Revenue Investigation Department, long regarded as an instrument of harassment rather than compliance, and committed to scrapping or amending fifteen separate acts on the recommendations of a high-level reform commission. He promised 100-day, semi-annual and annual action plans. It was the behaviour of a man who understands that in Nepal, where announcements routinely substitute for action, the only way to be believed is to move before anyone can organise against you.

Budgets, however, are intentions. Between Mr Wagle’s intentions and a $100bn economy stand three institutions whose leaders he cannot instruct and whose cooperation he cannot assume.

The most consequential is Nepal Rastra Bank, whose governor, Biswo Nath Poudel, a UC Berkeley-trained economist, took office last May. On arriving he pledged to align monetary policy with the government’s fiscal priorities while preserving the independence of the central bank. Those two commitments are compatible only up to a point. Mr Wagle’s growth agenda requires credit to move from deposits into investment; the governor’s mandate requires it not move so fast as to stoke inflation. The finance minister will need to build the kind of working relationship, through regular consultations and shared targets, that makes coordination possible without making the central bank look like a subsidiary of the treasury. That requires trust, which requires time, which Mr Wagle is acutely short of.

The second figure is Gunakar Bhatta, the newly appointed vice-chair of the National Planning Commission. Dr Bhatta spent fifteen years at Nepal Rastra Bank, rising to executive director, before resigning in the expectation of becoming governor, a post that was blocked by political manoeuvring under the previous government despite what he had been led to believe were firm assurances. He is, in short, a man of considerable ability who has been treated badly by the establishment he served, and who now sits at the apex of the institution responsible for sequencing Mr Wagle’s entire investment programme. Handled well, he is a validator with unmatched knowledge of Nepal’s financial architecture. Handled poorly, he is a vice-chair who files meticulous plans that nobody implements.

The complication is that Poudel and Bhatta are not strangers to each other’s professional shadow. The Nepali Congress originally backed Dr Bhatta for the governor’s post before the appointment eventually went to Poudel after weeks of coalition deadlock. Two accomplished economists, one of whom was passed over for the job the other now holds, are being asked to align their institutions behind the country’s most ambitious economic programme in a generation. Mr Wagle must ensure that coordination meeting does not become a cold room.

His published vision calls for a competitive social market economy built on rule of law, meritocracy and production-led growth. The language is unimpeachable. The Competition Promotion and Market Protection Act has existed since 2007 and has been enforced approximately never. The syndicates and cartels that his manifesto promises to dismantle are not abstractions; they are organisations with lawyers, lobbyists and, until recently, ministers of their own.

His 100-day plan will be the first real signal. If it sets measurable outcomes, credit-to-GDP targets, disbursement rates for capital spending, time-bound reforms to the investment climate, it will suggest that Mr Wagle intends to be judged by results. If it reads like the vision documents his predecessors produced, investors will draw their own conclusions.

Nepal has never lacked for economists who understood its problems. It has lacked politicians willing to make enemies in fixing them. Mr Wagle, for the first time in a long while, has both the intellectual tools and the parliamentary numbers. Whether he also has the stomach for it is what the next hundred days will begin to reveal.

There is a particular kind of modern activism that mistakes the performance of outrage for the substance of it, that confuses the emotional intensity of a gesture with the moral seriousness of a cause. We see it in the world’s most photographed protest movements. 

The point of such activism is never really the cause itself. The cause is the currency with which the activist purchases their identity, where outrage becomes a credential and grief an aesthetic content. The slogan exists not to demand change but to announce the speaker’s virtue to whoever is watching, and in the age of Instagram, someone is always watching.

Nepal’s so-called GenZ leadership has given us a domestic version of this pathology, and it is time we said so plainly.

On the morning of September 8, 2025, thousands of school students and young professionals gathered at Maitighar Mandala in Kathmandu, many of them in uniform, carrying banners that read “Youth Against Corruption.” The movement had no manifesto, no party colours. Its organisers insisted, repeatedly and explicitly, that it had no leaders, and this was not a weakness of design but its central moral claim. 

By early afternoon, police opened live fire on the crowd outside parliament. By September’s end, at least 75 people were dead, the overwhelming majority shot above the waist, in the head, neck, and chest, in what Amnesty International would later call “a shocking and callous disregard for human life.” A 12-year-old child was among those confirmed dead. Over two thousand were injured. 

Those deaths were not background noise to a political event. They were the event. They were the price Nepal’s youngest generation paid for the right to demand that the people who governed them be held to account. It is worth sitting with that before examining what followed.

Consider Tanuja Pandey, who turned 25 four days after September 8, and who by that time had already become the “poster girl” of Nepal’s GenZ protests. A lawyer and climate justice activist from Jhapa who had built the @gen.znepal Instagram presence and coined the rallying cry “Enough is Enough”. Pandey had genuine activist credentials going back years. She founded Harin Nepal, an environmental organisation, at nineteen, and had been writing about climate justice long before the September uprising gave her a national platform. One would be churlish to deny any of that.

But here is what else is true, and what Pandey would rather you not examine too closely. Multiple reports indicate she was associated with the youth wing of the Nepali Congress, the very party whose coalition with KP Sharma Oli’s government had made it an accomplice in the conditions that produced the uprising, and whose headquarters were burned by protesters in September for precisely that reason. 

The Nepali Congress was not a bystander to the rot GenZ rose against, it was one of its institutional authors. When Pandey’s critics raised this, she was, by her own account, “crestfallen”, she denied links to the party with some vigour. Her grandfather, Ramesh Nath Pandey, served as Nepal’s Foreign Minister during the royal regime, a connection the family has deep roots in, and reports of her earlier Congress youth-wing association have never been cleanly refuted.

None of this would be disqualifying in itself. What makes it significant is the gap between Pandey’s self-presentation‚ the scrappy, organic, grassroots challenger to the old order‚ and the actual contours of her biography, which places her closer to the political establishment than her brand identity suggests. Pandey has built her public persona entirely on the premise that she represents a clean break from the old way of doing things. The premise is, at best, complicated. At worst, it is another form of the nepo-kid culture, only wrapped in denim and a climate-justice hashtag.

Rakshya Bam is a more interesting case, and in some ways a more troubling one, because the gap between her stated principles and her conduct has been so consistently and specifically documented. Bam, who grew up in Kailali in the far-west and moved to Kathmandu to study, has spoken movingly and often about the systemic neglect of provinces like Sudurpaschim. “Kailali is not poor, it is made poor,” she has said, with a bluntness that commands respect. 

She walked out of Army Headquarters in the days after September 9 when the army chief tried to seat GenZ representatives alongside Durga Prasai and the pro-monarchist Rastriya Prajatantra Party, saying the grouping would undermine the movement’s credibility. In the aftermath of protests, she told the press without ambiguity that her GenZ friends risked their lives and were shot in the chest and head while shouting slogans for good governance and against nepotism and cronyism, nothing else.

These are the words of someone who appears to understand exactly what is at stake. They are also, it turns out, words that do not constrain her own behaviour. By December 2025, Bam had accepted an invitation to private political negotiations at the Kupandol home of then-Kathmandu’s mayor Balen Shah’s close aide, negotiations in which she was specifically tasked, according to Setopati’s reporting, with coordinating which GenZ figures would join Shah-affiliated Desh Bikash Party, and with holding discussions with martyrs’ families on behalf of Shah’s electoral project. 

To be precise about what this means: the families of people who were shot dead by the state were being approached, through Bam’s coordination, as potential assets in an electoral strategy. The Nepali Congress, the party that co-authored the coalition government whose police opened fire on those families’ children, was by January 2026 proposing that Bam herself contest from Kathmandu-1 on their ticket, a proposal whose significance should not be lost on anyone. 

The party whose headquarters was burned by GenZ protesters in September was, months later, hoping to recruit GenZ’s most prominent coordinator as its candidate. Bam declined. But the fact that the conversation happened at all, that she was a participant in it rather than someone who refused the meeting outright and said so publicly‚ tells you something about the distance she had already travelled from the movement’s founding logic.

Bam has also said, with an apparent sincerity that “some of us should stay outside so we can keep reminding and challenging the people who come to power.” She said this while, by all available evidence, manoeuvring inside the political architecture. Reports suggest she was a trusted aide to Home Minister Om Prakash Aryal of the interim government. The problem is not the access. The problem is that she apparently saw no contradiction between holding it and continuing to perform opposition for an audience that did not know she had it. Bam, so far, has not denied the reports.

Majid Ansari presents a third variation of the same disease. A law student from Morang, the son of a woman who once watched a court officer extort a Musahar villager and who resolved from that moment to use the law as an instrument of justice, Ansari has been more consistent than either Pandey or Bam in his actual advocacy, calling out the Attorney General over the Hope Fertility case, raising questions about the rights of Madhesi and Muslim students, warning against electoral delay with genuine constitutional seriousness. These things matter. 

But Ansari arrived at September 8 as an ordinary law student who joined the protest on that day, watched the crowd grow, escaped through Thapagaun when the gunshots began, and went to Civil Hospital to donate blood. This is not the biography of a movement leader. This is the biography of a citizen who showed up for his country at a critical moment, as hundreds of thousands of others did.

The difference is that Ansari, unlike most of those hundreds of thousands, understood very quickly how to monetise‚ in terms of visibility and platform, the GenZ identity that the movement had made valuable. He was soon being quoted on constitutional matters, and he started issuing public statements demanding the dismissal of the Attorney General, and began advising the nation on how to conduct its democracy. 

This would be admirable if Ansari had some formal institutional relationship to the movement he was representing. He does not. The movement said it had no leaders. Ansari simply became one by insisting, repeatedly and publicly, that he was one, and by understanding that in the media ecosystem that surrounds a successful uprising, a confident voice with the right vocabulary and the right background story is indistinguishable from an actual representative.

This is not a personal failing peculiar to Ansari. It is a structural feature of how leaderless movements get captured. The movement’s great strength, the absence of a named leadership, becomes its greatest vulnerability once the streets go quiet, because the name-shaped void gets filled by whoever shows up consistently in front of cameras.

What connects all three of them, and what connects Nepal’s GenZ leadership more broadly, is the philosophy of activism as performance. The slogan “Don’t Forget the Blood of Martyrs” was chanted in the streets of Kathmandu by such activists as early as September 9, and it has since appeared on banners, been invoked in press releases, and referenced in speeches with a frequency that should make anyone who actually cares about those martyrs feel something close to revulsion. Not because the sentiment is insincere, but because sincerity, by itself, is not accountability. 

As of the time of writing, the commission set up to investigate protest deaths has not released its findings. The people who ordered those 2,642 live bullets, the police logs confirmed that number, have not faced court. The families of the martyrs received 10 lakh rupees each in compensation and a declaration from the interim government that their children were martyrs, which is the kind of gesture that soothes a news cycle without disturbing a power structure. Our self-declared GenZ voices issued suitably outraged statements at appropriate intervals. None of them has made this their consuming, daily, non-negotiable campaign in the way that justice for the dead actually requires.

Meanwhile, at least 49 GenZ-affiliated groups had registered at the Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers by December 2025, according to reports. Most were led by prominent faces of the protest movement itself. The political economy of the martyrs had, within three months, been converted into a registration drive.

This is a specific kind of dishonesty that is more dangerous than ordinary hypocrisy, because it is indistinguishable from genuine conviction on the surface. Tanuja Pandey wrote, in reference to someone else, that “history never forgives traitors who turn the people’s hope, pain and sacrifice into a game of self-interest.” Rakshya Bam, in the same breath as accepting a political brokerage role, said the new forces must not forget “the essence of the GenZ revolution.” Majid Ansari tells young Nepalis to question leaders rather than idolise them, while allowing himself to be idolised as a leader. None of these people, I suspect, believe they are being hypocritical. 

This is the endpoint of activism-as-performance, the final stage in which the performer can no longer tell the difference between what they are saying and what they are doing, because the saying has become, for them, a form of doing. This happens everywhere. Greta Thunberg, a popular young Swedish climate activist, once refused to fly to climate conferences, and crossed the Atlantic by sail to honour her stated convictions. But recently, she crossed the Mediterranean twice on diesel vessels to participate in political theatre. The distance between who she was and who she became was not measured in kilometres but in the slow erosion of the distinction between gesture and action. Nepal’s GenZ leaders have travelled a similar distance in considerably less time.

The movement of September 2025 was, in the strictest sense of the word, heroic. It was heroic because it was leaderless, because it was waged by people in school uniforms who had nothing to gain and everything to lose, because it refused the logic that change requires a saviour, and because it paid a price, in blood, in real blood, on real streets, that no amount of subsequent Instagram content can retrospectively justify or redeem. 

The 75 people who died did not die so that Tanuja Pandey could become a commentator, or so that Rakshya Bam could be courted by the Nepali Congress as a candidate, or so that Majid Ansari could be quoted as a constitutional authority. They died because they believed, with the desperate and unstrategic conviction of people who have run out of patience, that this country could be better than it has been.

Honouring that belief requires requires the willingness to remain angry past the point where anger is fashionable, past the point where the cameras have moved to the next story, past the point where the political opportunities have been distributed and the movement’s leaders have found their way into the rooms they always, on some level, wanted to be in.

The way of common decency is to pay the price for what you stand for. The martyrs of September 8 paid it fully. The least their self-appointed inheritors can do is stop making speeches about their sacrifice and start earning the right to invoke it. If that is too much to ask, then consider a much smaller request: say nothing. We do not need moral instruction from people who have learned to speak the language of sacrifice while quietly collecting its dividends. The families of the dead do not need elegies. They need justice, and justice, unlike outrage, does not trend.
 

The Nepali Congress was never meant to be the kind of party it has become. Founded in 1947 in the twilight of Rana autocracy, it drew intellectual and moral inspiration from the Indian National Congress but was shaped by Nepal’s own peculiar conditions of a feudal monarchy, a fragmented society and a nascent middle class. Its leading lights, most notably B. P. Koirala, articulated a vision that combined political freedom with social justice, but not at the expense of individual liberty.

Mr. Koirala’s thought is often misread through a modern ideological lens. He spoke of “democratic socialism,” but in practice this meant something closer to European social liberalism than to redistribution. He believed in parliamentary democracy, civil liberties, and a mixed economy in which the private sector would play a leading role. The state, in his view, was a body to correct wrongdoings rather than a dominator of economic life.

In short, the Nepali Congress was born as a liberal party with conservative instincts. Cautious about upheaval, respectful of institutions, and attentive to the realities of a poor, agrarian society. It was a party of reform, not revolution. So how did such a party come to be perceived as indistinguishable from the socialist and even communist forces?

The answer lies partly in Nepal’s turbulent political history. Its early years in power were cut short by King Mahendra’s royal coup in 1960. When democracy returned in 1990, the ideological terrain had shifted. The global Cold War was ending, but Nepal’s domestic politics were increasingly shaped by leftist insurgency, culminating in the Maoist civil war.

Faced with the rise of the Maoists and the Communist Party of Nepal Unified Marxist–Leninist (CPN UML), the Nepali Congress made a fateful choice of convergence rather than differentiation. It embraced populist rhetoric, expanded state commitments, and blurred its economic philosophy. Over time, “democratic socialism” hardened into something more programmatically statist. It gained pace more so in the era of Sher Bahadur Deuba, party’s former leader and five time prime minister. 

This was not merely an ideological shift, it was an organisational one. The party became less a vehicle for ideas and more a coalition of factions competing for state resources. Its leaders spoke the language of redistribution while presiding over a system that delivered neither efficiency nor equity. The result was a slow erosion of credibility. To the poor, the party seemed ineffective; to the middle class, it seemed unprincipled; to the young, it became irrelevant.

After it ousted Mr. Deuba and elevated Gagan Thapa as its chairman from the special convention in January this year, the party attempted to position itself as a centrist force. A moderate alternative to both leftist radicalism and conservative reaction. But centrism, when untethered from a clear philosophy, becomes mere opportunism. Mr. Thapa did not realise that. Maybe he did not have enough time? 

On economic policy, the party oscillates between promises of welfare expansion and vague commitments to private-sector growth. On governance, it speaks of reform while perpetuating the same networks of patronage. On ideology, it invokes Koirala while ignoring his emphasis on individual freedom and institutional integrity.

This ambiguity might once have been electorally viable. It is no longer.

The general election held on March 5 has upended Nepal’s political order. The Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), a party barely a few years old and led by the former journalist Rabi Lamichhane, swept to power in a landslide that few predicted. It secured a commanding majority of 182 seats in the 275-member parliament, while the Nepali Congress was reduced to a distant second with a fraction of that tally.

The scale of the victory is unprecedented. Final counts in most constituencies showed RSP’s candidates far outpaced both the contenders of Congress and the UML. This was not a routine anti-incumbency swing. It was, in the words of observers, a “tsunami”.

The rise of the RSP cannot be understood without reference to the youth-led September protests of 2025, which toppled the UML’s KP Sharla Oli-led coalition government. The demonstration, driven by frustration with corruption, unemployment and political stagnation, created the conditions for a new kind of politics.

RSP positioned itself as the vehicle of that anti-establishment discontent. Most of its members: young, technocratic, and digitally savvy. Its PM-candidate, Balendra Shah, former mayor of capital Kathmandu, cultivated a direct connection with young voters, bypassing traditional party structures and media channels. The result is a generational realignment. 

Nepal is a young country—more than 40% of its population is under 35—and this cohort has had enough. And they displayed the youth power in the ballot box quite loudly. 

For the Nepali Congress, this is an existential threat. It is no longer competing with the ideological rival, because there are hardly any differences in Congress and RSP’s beliefs. Faced with such a challenge, the temptation for Congress is obvious: to imitate the RSP. To adopt its rhetoric, its style. But that would be a mistake. 

The RSP’s appeal lies precisely in its novelty. It is unburdened by history, untainted by governance, and unencumbered by internal factions. Five years in the government is unlikely to turn this upside down. Even if RSP fails to deliver on its promise, the party will have the excuse to sell that it took them five years just to clean the mess left behind by Congress and the Communists. 

The Nepali Congress carries the weight of decades in power. It cannot credibly present itself as an outsider. Nor can it outbid the RSP on populism without further eroding its own identity. More importantly, the RSP already occupies the space of reformist activism. If imitation is not the answer, then what is?

The Nepali Congress should return to its roots. It should embrace a coherent ideology that speaks to contemporary realities. That ideology is best described as conservative liberalism. This does not mean a retreat into reactionary politics. It means a commitment to institutional stability, market-led growth, fiscal responsibility, and social pluralism. These principles are not alien to the party’s history. They are, in fact, implicit in the vision of its founders.

Across the world, centrist parties that have survived the populist wave have done so by clarifying — not diluting — their ideological positions. In Europe, for instance, social-democratic parties have embraced market reforms while maintaining a commitment to social protection. In Asia, successful democratic parties have combined economic pragmatism with institutional conservatism.

Nepal’s context is different, but the lesson is similar. Voters reward clarity. It would be a mistake to assume RSP’s success as just a rejection of the old parties. It is a reward for a party that, however loosely defined, offered a distinct narrative. The Nepali Congress, like the CPN UML, currently holds no story to narrate.

For Congress, ideological repositioning is necessary but not sufficient. The party must also address its organisational weaknesses. First, it must renew its leadership. The dominance of ageing elites has long alienated younger voters. Second, it must reform its internal structures. Patronage and factionalism have undermined its effectiveness. Transparent processes for candidate selection and decision-making are essential. Third, it must reconnect with voters. This requires not just better communication, but a willingness to listen, to understand the frustrations that drove millions to support the RSP.

The enormous power has given RSP an opportunity to reshape the country’s political and economic landscape. If it succeeds, even partially, it will likely entrench as the dominant force for decades to come. In such a scenario, the Nepali Congress risks becoming a relic of a bygone era. So, the stakes could not be higher.

Even if the RSP falters, the space it occupies will not automatically revert to Congress. Other challengers will emerge, perhaps more radical, perhaps more disciplined. We saw the rise of the Shram Sanskriti Party, led by former mayor of Dharan, Harka Sampang, in this election. The Nepali Congress still has assets such as nationwide organisation, legacy of democratic struggle, and a reservoir of goodwill among older voters. But these assets are depreciating rapidly.

To arrest the decline, the party must make a choice. It can continue on its current path which is hedging its bets, diluting the message, and hoping for the best. Or it can undertake a more difficult but ultimately more rewarding course of redefining itself as a party of conservative liberalism. Mr. Thapa, or whoever leads the party next, should remember that brands decay long before they die. It is pretty clear that walking in the current path, there is only one destiny for the party.