Accountability in Kathmandu, Questions in Dhaka

“This is for the change we truly deserve.” What once resonated as a lyrical line in Balendra Shah’s song “Balidan” has now transcended melody to become the lived, and occasionally turbulent, reality of Nepal’s streets.

On March 27, at the age of 35, Balen assumed office as Nepal’s youngest prime minister. His party, the Rastriya Swatantra Party, secured an outright majority with 182 seats in the 275-member House of Representatives. This landslide is not merely electoral arithmetic; it is a resounding indictment of entrenched political elites and a clarion call for renewal.

Within the first week of taking office, Balen set the cat among the pigeons. His administration launched an uncompromising anti-corruption drive. Former Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and former Home Minister Ramesh Lekhak were summoned to court over allegations of criminal negligence tied to fatalities during the September 2025 mass uprising.

Long-dormant money laundering cases against former premiers Pushpa Kamal Dahal “Prachanda” and Sher Bahadur Deuba were dusted off and reopened. A high-level probe into wealth accumulation by public officials since 1990 was announced, sending tremors through the political establishment. It was, in every sense, a political earthquake, and the aftershocks are still being felt.

Enter Sudan Gurung, who in those early weeks emerged as something of a political rockstar. His impromptu inspections at airports to curb passenger harassment, pledges to domestically source rations and uniforms for lower-ranking police personnel, and even the symbolic act of halting his own convoy to allow ordinary commuters to pass first had struck a resounding chord.

This “citizens-first” ethos spread across social media, capturing the public imagination and turning Gurung into the face of a new kind of governance, one that felt human, urgent, and unscripted.

But revolutions, even hopeful ones, carry the seeds of their own complications. On April 22, Sudan Gurung resigned from the Home Ministry. Not in disgrace imposed from outside, but in a move that was, paradoxically, itself an act of governance. Allegations had surfaced over his investments in micro-insurance companies with links to businessmen under investigation for money laundering, and rather than cling to his post, Gurung chose to step down.

“For me,” he wrote on Facebook, “morality is greater than a position, and there is no greater power than public trust.”

In a political culture anywhere in South Asia, that sentence should be framed and hung in every cabinet room. Prime Minister Balen promptly assumed personal oversight of the Home Ministry, a signal that the reformist engine would not be allowed to idle.

And then, on April 23, came the move that made even seasoned observers pause. President Ramchandra Paudel suspended the sessions of both houses of the Federal Parliament before they had even convened, just days after summoning them for April 30.

Acting on government recommendation, the President cited unspecified “special reasons,” offering no further transparency to the public or opposition. The word “unprecedented” floated through Kathmandu’s political corridors, and rightly so.

This is Nepal’s tightrope moment. Gurung was the second minister to exit the cabinet in April alone. Earlier, on April 9, Labour Minister Dip Kumar Sah was sacked after his party found he had misused his office to retain his wife on the Health Insurance Board.

Two ministers gone in less than a month. Parliament suspended under a cloud of ambiguity. The gap between the promise of sweeping reform and the grinding reality of governing a volatile democracy has never looked wider.

And yet, here is the crucial distinction: Nepal is being held to account by its own government. The RSP rose to power on the back of Gen Z protests demanding generational change and the removal of the old guard. That same uncompromising scrutiny has now turned inward. When a minister strays, the axe falls. When ethics are questioned, resignations follow. When a journalist was arrested over controversial language in past YouTube content, public backlash forced a swift reversal.

The cycle of accountability, however messy and imperfect, is turning. Balen is learning on the job, but more importantly, he is trying, and more importantly still, he is being watched, and he knows it.

Yet scrutiny of Balen has not come only from outside the government. Nepal’s leading newspaper, the Kathmandu Post, has published several sharply critical editorials in just the first two months of his tenure. One of the more striking criticisms concerns his relationship with Parliament itself.

Unlike any prime minister before him, Balen went through his first six or seven weeks in office without delivering a single parliamentary speech. Even when he does attend, controversy follows: On April 2, during a joint session, he walked out midway through the President’s address, to nationwide surprise.

The responsibility of answering parliamentary questions has largely been delegated to the finance minister, with critics arguing that Nepal’s Gen Z government is quietly drifting toward a more presidential style of governance. The courts have added their own rebukes, suspending several government decisions, including restrictions on civil servants forming unions, with the High Court ruling such restrictions inconsistent with Nepal’s own labour laws and International Labour Organization conventions.

Perhaps the sharpest controversy of the young government concerns the appointment of Nepal’s Chief Justice. Setting aside three more senior candidates, Balen appointed a relatively junior judge, a move critics say violated established tradition. The government’s defence, that the Constitutional Council recommended it and Parliament approved it, has satisfied few, given that the Council is chaired by the prime minister himself and his coalition controls a near two-thirds majority in the lower house.

The appointment has been challenged in court, and the fact that three judges more senior than the new Chief Justice continue to sit on the bench has created visible divisions within the judiciary. The debate over whether seniority or political discretion should govern such appointments is hardly new to South Asia, but Nepal’s experience is the region’s latest, and most public, chapter.

At a deeper level, Nepal’s transformation is also intersecting with questions of identity and memory. The Kirat people’s oral tradition, “Mundhum,” is increasingly being revisited in public discourse as a cultural framework shaping political consciousness.

This renewed attention reflects a broader effort, under the new political climate, to reclaim indigenous knowledge systems and integrate them into modern governance debates, particularly around identity, heritage, and representation. Even as Parliament is suspended and the cabinet reshuffled, the civilizational conversation is ongoing.

But as Nepal’s story unfolds with such urgency, its triumphs and stumbles equally on display, what does Bangladesh’s narrative look like?

The Bangladesh Cricket Board recently held fresh elections, a procedural step, but one that still leaves open the deeper question of whether institutional appointments in Bangladesh are made on merit or proximity. Where Nepal trims the fat in pursuit of institutional integrity, even at the cost of cabinet stability, we still need to work considerably harder at eliminating conflicts of interest within the very structures meant to ensure accountability.

That said, a more encouraging accountability culture is beginning to stir within Bangladesh’s own political class, one that deserves acknowledgement rather than dismissal. Some members of parliament have taken to publicly countering criticism online with detailed, point-by-point rebuttals, while many elected representatives have begun conducting impromptu visits to government offices in their constituencies to audit public service delivery firsthand.

Ministers, too, are showing signs of closer vigilance over their portfolios. When the administrator of Rajshahi City Corporation applied to travel to France to study energy-efficient street lighting technology, the Prime Minister rejected the proposal outright. More tellingly, when a separate proposal was submitted for a mayor and several officials to visit the United States, that too was turned down.

Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s note on the file was characteristically blunt: There is no need to fly to Florida to learn mosquito control. Standing beside a local pond for a few hours after dusk, he wrote, would yield more innovative solutions than any overseas trip.

Where convoys once brought ordinary citizens to a standstill, and junkets abroad were simply the done thing, these small but pointed interventions represent a genuine shift in tone. Tone, in governance, matters more than it is often given credit for.

Yet these promising signals must be weighed honestly against a persistent and troubling counterweight. Across various institutions and public bodies, appointments continue to be made along lines of kinship and party loyalty rather than qualification. Criticism of this practice has grown louder, and rightly so.

A government that signals accountability through symbolic gestures while quietly reproducing the old patronage architecture in its appointments is, at best, sending a mixed message. That architecture needs to change, and the urgency of that change is no less pressing for being inconvenient to acknowledge.

To be fair, Bangladesh’s new government has undertaken several commendable initiatives. Tarique Rahman’s “I Have a Plan” mantra has captured the imagination of Gen Z. The introduction of family cards, farmer cards, mid-day meals in schools, the ambitious planting of 150 million trees, and plans to dredge 10,000 kilometres of rivers are no small feats and deserve their due credit.

In a further sign of reform, the National Parliament has also passed a bill abolishing the duty-free car import privilege previously enjoyed by members of parliament.

But a closer look reveals a more complicated picture. A special parliamentary committee has reviewed 133 ordinances issued during the interim government and submitted its recommendations to the House. Of these, 4 are to be repealed outright, 16 are not to be converted into bills for the time being, 98 are to be approved as is, and 15 are to be passed in amended form.

In other words, 20 ordinances are set to lose their legal validity altogether, and among the casualties are some of the most consequential reform instruments of the interim period.

Chief among the four ordinances earmarked for repeal are those concerning judicial independence: The Supreme Court Judges Appointment Ordinance and the Supreme Court Secretariat Ordinances of 2025 and 2026. These measures had sought to establish a Supreme Judicial Appointment Council for recommending qualified individuals to the Appellate and High Court divisions, and an independent Supreme Court Secretariat to govern judicial administration, discipline, and transfer under the authority of the Chief Justice.

Reforms painstakingly constructed to insulate the judiciary from political interference are now being revisited, and it is worth asking whether we are dismantling the scaffolding before the structure has had a chance to stand.

The 16 ordinances that the committee suggests should not yet be introduced as bills, covering the National Human Rights Commission, anti-disappearance laws, Anti-Corruption Commission powers, Right to Information, and more, are to be, in the committee’s phrasing, “further reviewed, strengthened, and later reintroduced.” If that does not happen before April 10, they lapse automatically.

“Further review” can sometimes be the bureaucratic waltz that reforms perform on their way to oblivion, and that is a risk worth taking seriously. The committee’s report, presented by its chair Zainul Abedin, also carries the dissenting signatures of three Jamaat-e-Islami members, a reminder that even within this process, the political temperature is anything but tepid.

While Nepal is leaving no stone unturned in its sweeping reforms across banking and bureaucracy, even as it navigates internal cabinet crises in real time and in full public view, Bangladesh’s new Bank Resolution Law appears to contain loopholes that could potentially allow former shareholders to re-enter through the back door. Will this stem financial malpractice, or merely delay the reckoning?

Where Balen has declared zero tolerance for corruption and backed it with the dismissal of his own colleagues, our own police reform commission and efforts to tackle large-scale financial irregularities still have considerable ground to cover. The ordinance review has only deepened this anxiety, because if the legal architecture of reform is being quietly dismantled while the rhetoric of change grows louder, then we owe it to ourselves to ask what exactly we are building.

Nepal’s governance experiment, even in its current turbulence, is marked by an unusually granular administrative activism that has no parallel in our recent experience. Gurung’s push for domestically produced police uniforms, proposals to revise service tenure structures within the police force, and emotionally charged interactions with senior officials, all contributed to a sense of disruptive governance.

His halting of ministerial convoys reinforced a symbolic break from elite privilege. His resignation, when accountability demanded it, reinforced something rarer still: Institutional integrity over personal ambition. The suspension of Parliament may yet prove to be a tactical stumble or something more serious, but the story of how Nepal navigates it will itself be a governance lesson for the region.

The reformist impulse has also extended into diplomatic posture. Early in his tenure, Prime Minister Balen convened a collective meeting with foreign ambassadors, signalling a “balanced diplomacy” approach that avoids over-alignment with any single power bloc.

His engagement with regional leadership, including accepting an invitation from the Indian Prime Minister, reflects an attempt to position Nepal as strategically neutral yet actively engaged in regional cooperation. A parliamentary crisis at home has not dimmed that diplomatic ambition. If anything, the pressure to perform externally makes the internal reckoning more urgent.

That diplomatic ambition, however, has not been without friction. Nepal’s two most consequential neighbours are watching Kathmandu’s new government with a mixture of curiosity and unease. Before the election, the RSP positioned Nepal not as a buffer state between India and China but as a potential connector, a hub for regional cooperation.

In practice, the early months have seen Balen’s government orient itself considerably more toward Washington than toward either neighbour. China has grown particularly wary, given reports of growing American interest in the status of Tibetan refugees living in Nepal and the perceived proximity of certain elements within the movement to advocacy groups aligned with Tibetan independence causes.

India, meanwhile, found itself quietly embarrassed when the planned visit of Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri to Kathmandu was cancelled, with reports suggesting that Balen showed little enthusiasm for the meeting. As a landlocked nation historically described as a yam between two boulders, Nepal has always understood that productive diplomacy with both neighbours is not optional.

Balen’s nationalist instincts are well understood, but experienced observers in the region question whether a posture of studied distance from Delhi and Beijing is a strategy Nepal can sustain, particularly as both powers move ahead with plans to expand trade through Lipulekh, a region where Nepal itself has unresolved territorial claims.

We Bengalis are, by temperament, an emotional people. We are a cricket-loving nation to the core. A morning defeat of the national team dampens our spirits, yet by afternoon we are back in front of the screen, ready to ride the same rollercoaster again.

Amid this cycle, the lapsing of anti-disappearance legislation and the quiet erosion of judicial independence ordinances barely register. But as Vietnam surges ahead and Nepal, even while grappling with cabinet resignations and a suspended Parliament, begins to close the gap, we must honestly ask whether we risk watching nations that started later leapfrog us entirely.

This contrast becomes even sharper when placed against the accountability narratives now emerging from Kathmandu in real time. The removal of one cabinet minister for nepotism, the resignation of another over financial allegations, and the parliamentary suspension have all unfolded transparently, in public statements, on social media, and under the glare of a citizenry that refuses to look away.

The speed and decisiveness of these actions stand in stark contrast to the more muted accountability processes we witness at home, where a parliamentary committee’s report on 133 ordinances generates far less public outrage than a dropped catch at Mirpur.

Balen Shah’s journey from artist to Prime Minister is itself emblematic of a generational shift, and his administration’s turbulent first months are, in a strange way, proof of that very shift. Stumbles included, this is what genuine governance looks like: Messy, contested, and relentlessly public.

From ensuring 33% female representation in his cabinet to convening ambassadors for a message of balanced diplomacy, from sacking ministers to stepping up personally when the role demands it, his governance reflects a daring, if imperfect, commitment to accountability.

We are weary of being cast as the cautionary tale in someone else’s success story. This constant comparison breeds a quiet resentment. It is time to flip the script. We aspire to occupy the driver’s seat, not remain passive spectators. To do so, we must look beyond envy and draw lessons from Nepal’s audacity and from its stumbles, as well as from our own recent missteps.

The quiet expiry of ordinances that once promised judicial independence and stronger human rights protections should not be greeted with a shrug. It should be met with the same intensity we bring to a last-over finish at a cricket ground. Our passion, our emotional fervour, must not eclipse our responsibility to nation-building.

Nepal’s Parliament may be suspended. Its cabinet may be short two ministers. But its accountability mechanism is very much alive, and that is precisely the point. The game we need to win is far bigger than cricket.

Nafew Sajed Joy is a Bangladeshi researcher, writer, and environmentalist whose work sits at the intersection of academia, journalism, and social advocacy.