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The budget session of the federal Parliament is set to begin on Monday. 

During this session, the government's policies and programs will be unveiled.

According to Parliament Secretariat Spokesperson Ekram Giri, President Ram Chandra Paudel is scheduled to address a joint session of both houses of the federal Parliament at 4 pm on Monday. 

In accordance with Article 95 of the Constitution, the President will present the government's policies and programs at the joint session of the federal Parliament. The Parliament Secretariat has requested that Members of the House of Representatives and the National Assembly be present at the joint meeting to be delivered by President Paudel. 

Meanwhile, a meeting of the House of Representatives and the National Assembly is scheduled for 2 pm. According to the Parliament Secretariat, there is a potential agenda to inform the House about the letter received from the President regarding the convening of the session, as well as to provide updates on the information received from the President's Office concerning the cabinet reshuffle. 

Additionally, eight ordinances, including the 'Public Procurement (Second Amendment) Ordinance, 2083', 'Special Provisions Ordinance on the Removal of Office of Public Officials, 2083', and 'Constitutional Council (Work, Duties, Rights and Procedures) First Amendment Ordinance, 2083', are set to be presented in Parliament.

Nepal is a secular country. However, Nepal’s Constitution defines secularism as the ‘protection of religion and customs practiced from ancient times.’ Hinduism is typically described as the religion that has been practiced since antiquity. Likewise, Buddhism originated in Nepali soil. 

On March 27, conch shells were blown, 108 Batuks recited Rigvedic mantras and 16 Buddhist monks recited Ashtmangal during Balendra Shah’s swearing-in-ceremony as the 47th Prime Minister of Nepal. 

The religious cover of Balendra’s oath ceremony has drawn criticism from many who think the state has no religion. But, as Balendra’s persona has been discussed as a ‘calculative leader’, he must have also considered the global rise of cultural nationalism and its political implications.

According to the latest census of Nepal, more than 90 percent of the total population of Nepal follows Hinduism and Buddhism. For the past 10 years, religious issues have received a lot of attention in Nepali politics. From a global standpoint, cultural nationalism is becoming more and more influential. Discussions about Buddhism and Hinduism have become more prevalent after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took power in India. The Indian External Affairs Minister’s book, Why Bharat Matters, aims to encapsulate India’s foreign policy from a civilizational perspective rather than national one. It calls for a change from a western-centric optics to one rooted in India’s cultural heritage and identity. Simply put, the BJP regime aims to replace Indian discourse with ‘Bharat’. In a similar vein, President Donald Trump is taking part in a public Bible reading  in the United States.

In the Nepali context, the application of Hindu tradition in politics appears to be a common phenomenon. Given how strongly ingrained Hinduism is in Nepal, former prime ministers from all political parties and ideologies have also been making political gestures.  In every government agency, the influence of Hindu ceremonies is evident. However, despite Nepal’s transition to republicanism, no prominent leader of the traditional parties has shown their posturing to Buddhism in the political sphere like Balendra has heralded with. It appears that the PM has presented a clear picture of Nepal’s cultural bottom line. It is undeniable that all religions have a political and geopolitical component, even though the politics of religion is forbidden.

Once more, civilization-related factors support modern economic growth. Nepal has both enormous potential and difficulties in this regard. Through his oath-taking, Prime Minister Shah appears to be appealing for a broader perspective toward the preservation and promotion of Nepal’s civilization. Approximately 98 percent of all Buddhists worldwide reside in the Asia-Pacific region, making Buddhism one of the most powerful religions in Asia. India, Nepal’s southern neighbor, has 8.4m Buddhists, while China, its northern neighbor, has 40m. In a similar vein, data indicate that 2.39m individuals in Nepal are Buddhists.

In Nepal, especially Vajrayana and Newari Buddhism are predominant, while in China, the Han tradition of Mahayan Buddhism is dominant. Tibetan Buddhism (Vajryan) is also popular. More importantly, emperor Ashoka has a history of contributing all his ability and strength in the propagation of Buddhism in the latter half of his life. During the same period, Ashoka installed a pillar at Lumbini with the inscription ‘Hida Buddha Jate’ (The Buddha was born here), pointing out a key part of his journey to enlightenment. 

A new dynamic of Buddhism called Vajrayan flourished, where the advanced dharma tantra doctrine was practiced, thanks to influences from Nepal and beyond. The Vajrayan flourished in Nepal valley in the seventh and eighth centuries. These facts point at internal and external influences on the propagation of Buddhism in Nepal.

When the fourth ‘Summit of Laureates and Leaders for Children, Development, and Peace’ was scheduled to take place in Lumbini in 2024, an unexpected circumstance came to light. The Chief Minister of Lumbini Province, Dilli Bahadur Chaudhary (from the Nepali Congress), was forced to postpone the summit due to ‘special reasons’ after the formation of a coalition of the CPN-UML and Maoist Center in Kathmandu.  There were reports of pressure from the bordering countries in the north regarding the types of NGOs and programs that would be attending the conference. However, there was no detailed discussion and debate on the internal reasons behind the postponement.

On April 11, the Foreign Minister of Nepal, Sishir Khanal, addressing the ninth Indian Ocean Conference in Port Louis, Mauritius, said that nothing exists in isolation, citing the Buddhist concept of ‘Pratītyasamutpāda’ or the law of dependent origination. This lesson serves as a reminder that every phenomenon depends on other factors and circumstances.

Prime Minister Balen may have organized a swearing-in ceremony with the Shwasti sound and conch for a variety of reasons. And it seems sensible that, for a variety of geopolitical reasons, foreign powers have shown a special interest in Buddhist-related activities in Nepal.

Buddhists are primarily found in the northern Himalayan region, the Kathmandu Valley, a few districts in the eastern highlands, and the districts of Rupandehi and Kapilvastu in the province of Lumbini. Here, it would be worth incorporating Amishraj Mulmi’s standpoint from the book, ‘Shared Bonds, Strategic Interests’, edited by Ranjit Rae. In the chapter titled Himalayas: Borders and Transnational Heritage, Mulmi contends that Buddhism has become more globalized and linked to political identities as a result of Tibetan exiles. Governments in South Asia have therefore found it difficult to connect with Buddhism. He also claims, to some extent, China has convinced, lured, or coerced other nations to restrict their engagement with the Himalayan Buddhist heritage because of its ties to Tibetan exile politics while simultaneously promoting a version of Buddhism that is more in line with Chinese views, citing Sri Lanka’s refusal to host the Dalai Lama in order to avoid upsetting the People’s Republic of China.

The government that was established in Nepal following the GenZ revolt has drawn a lot of interest from across the world. Nepal’s friendly nations and neighbors have strengthened their engagement and sent their best wishes to the current government. May Nepal’s civilizational identity be furthered by this administration and possible advancements be extracted without dispute.

“The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible and achieve it, generation after generation.” - Pearl S Buck

There is a story every Nepali knows. It is the story of young people who stood in the streets of Kathmandu in 1990 with nothing but courage in their hearts and democracy on their lips. Students who had every reason to stay silent chose instead to speak out and change the course of their nation forever. That story is real. That story is powerful.

But there is another story too. One that is harder to tell and harder to hear. It is the story of a student from a remote village who borrowed money from relatives to come to Kathmandu for a degree, only to find the campus shut down again because of a bandha nobody consulted her about. It is the story of dreams arriving at a university gate and leaving through it, quietly broken.

Both stories are true. Both stories are from Nepal. And the painful tension between them is exactly what makes student politics one of the most urgent and most unresolved conversations this generation needs to have.

A legacy written in courage

To understand what student politics has become, we must first understand what it once was and what it was capable of.

Students played an important and instrumental role throughout Nepal’s political history, particularly in the success of the democratic mass movements of 1990 and 2006. They marched when the elders hesitated. They spoke when the powerful tried to silence everyone. They bled on the streets so that future generations could live with rights and freedoms they themselves might never fully enjoy.

The history of student activism in Nepal is more than just a memory. When leaders talk about the past, they are pointing to a time when young people were the true engine of change. In 1990, students pushed for democracy when the path seemed blocked. They proved that when a generation cares about something bigger than themselves, they can rewrite history.

For seven decades, campuses served as the training grounds for Nepal’s leaders. It was where people first learned how to stand together and how democracy works. At its best, student politics is not about party flags or winning seats. It is about the grit to see something wrong and refuse to stay quiet.

That spirit is still here. You see it every time a student asks a tough question in class, a group of peers gathers to solve a problem. That is the real legacy of student politics. It is the simple and brave act of caring.

 When the system began consuming its own

But somewhere along the way, something broke.

Ever since the 1960s, political parties in Nepal have treated campuses like nurseries for their own survival. They used student groups to recruit new faces, while student leaders leaned on these parties to jumpstart their own political careers. What started as a shared vision quickly soured into a toxic loop of dependency and exploitation.

Now, students are the ones paying the price. The academic calendar is a ghost, vanishing every time a political strike locks the gates. When student unions split along party lines, merit is tossed aside in favor of political favors.

The numbers are a mess. Tribhuvan University teaches 75 percent of the country, yet it rarely finishes a semester on time. A four-year degree can easily stretch into six years of waiting. This is not just a scheduling error. It is a human cost. Every extra year represents a family sinking deeper into debt and a young person watching their prime years slip away.

Corruption has seeped into every classroom. Last year, education complaints were among the highest reported to the national anti-corruption agency. Sadly, student politics has become both the victim of this broken system and the engine that keeps it running.

The patron and the puppet

Perhaps the most damaging truth about student politics in Nepal is one that is rarely spoken. Most student organizations in Nepal are not truly independent. Student leaders often talk about fighting for better facilities and basic rights to justify what they do. But in reality, it is hard to tell if they are working for the students or just following party orders.

After the big changes in 1990, these student groups lost their main enemy and struggled to find a new purpose. To stay relevant, they tied themselves even closer to big political parties. What started as sharing the same ideas slowly turned into a total reliance on them. Student leaders became political tools, and campuses turned into places for finding new party members. The average student, who just came to university to learn, was forgotten in a game played by people with their own agendas.

Experts who study education in Nepal say this ‘boss and worker’ relationship between parties and student groups is holding back the entire school system. This is not just a random guess. It is a conclusion based on years of research and the actual lives of people at every university in the country.

The question nobody wants to answer

And yet, the story does not end with destruction.

The Sept 2025 protests in Nepal were about much more than a social media ban. While the ban was the final spark, the movement was actually an explosion of anger over corruption and the loss of freedom of speech. It became the deadliest political struggle since the republic began in 2008. These protests showed a massive wave of young people rising against inequality and a deep sense of hopelessness. Crucially, these were not the usual protests ordered by party bosses. They were different because young people acted on their own conscience rather than following a command.

This difference is a big deal. It shows that the true spirit of student activism, the kind that changed Nepal in 1990, is still alive. It has just been buried under years of political control. When the pressure gets too high, that spirit finds a way to break through.

The government under Prime Minister Balen Shah later introduced a major reform plan. Point 86 of this plan says that all political student groups must remove their offices from schools and universities. Some student leaders call this a move toward dictatorship. However, legal experts say it is a valid step. While some argue the move ignores rights, experts like Chandrakanta Gyawali point out that although the constitution allows people to form unions, it does not specifically protect political unions tied to major parties.

This debate is exactly the kind Nepal needs to be having. Not a debate about whether student politics should exist, but about what kind of student politics deserves to exist.

What genuine student politics looks like

Real student politics, student politics in its truest and most powerful form, looks nothing like what most Nepali campuses experience today.

It looks like students are organizing to demand better quality education, transparent fee structures, and accountability from university administrations. It looks like student leaders who actually attend the same classes, eat in the same canteens, and feel the same frustrations as the students they claim to represent. It looks like campus elections decided by ideas rather than by party muscle and political connections. It looks like a young generation that is politically aware without being politically captured. That understands the difference between civic engagement and party service. That can criticize any government regardless of which party is in power, because its loyalty belongs to students and to the country rather than to any flag or symbol.

This is not an impossible vision. It exists in universities around the world. Nepal had something close to it once. The question is whether this generation has both the awareness to see what has been lost and the courage to demand it back.

Conclusion

Student politics gave Nepal democracy. It has also stolen years of education from hundreds of thousands of students who deserved far better. Both of these truths must be held together honestly if this conversation is ever going to lead anywhere meaningful.

Youth serves as a mechanism for political reproduction and change in Nepal's democracy. That sentence carries both the promise and the danger of student politics within it. Young people can reproduce the best of what came before them or they can reproduce the worst. They can be the agents of change or the instruments of those who resist it.

The future of student politics in Nepal does not belong to the party bosses who have shaped it so far. It belongs to the students currently sitting in classrooms across this country, deciding what they believe in, deciding who they will become, and deciding whether the legacy of 1990 is something they will honor with their actions or simply mention in their speeches.

That decision, more than any election or bandha or government reform agenda, is where the real power has always lived.

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” -Nelson Mandela

There is a scene that has repeated itself with enough regularity in Nepal over the past few years that it has started to feel normal. A government directive needs to be carried out. Maybe it is a demolition order, maybe an eviction, maybe the detention of a businessman or a political figure. Before courts have issued rulings, before affected parties have been notified, before any of the usual administrative processes have run their course, security forces arrive. The operation is swift. The result is visible. The process was the operation itself.

This is not how governance is supposed to work. But under Balendra Shah, first as mayor of Kathmandu Metropolitan City and now as Prime Minister, it has increasingly become how governance works. Security forces are being used not to respond to genuine threats but to execute administrative objectives that would otherwise require the slower, messier work of going through courts, councils and proper institutional channels. The force does not follow the decision. The force is the decision.

The April 2026 evictions along the Bagmati riverbank brought this pattern into sharp relief. Thousands of people, many of them from poor and marginalized communities who had lived along the river for years, were displaced through operations in which security personnel were the most visible presence. There were no adequate resettlement alternatives. The timelines did not allow for meaningful legal challenge. Families lost homes, documents and livelihoods in a process where due process was not delayed or imperfect but structurally absent. The security operation was the entire governance process.

To understand why this matters, it helps to be clear about what it is and is not. This is not a story about a government deploying security forces inappropriately in a crisis. Every government does that. This is something different: a pattern in which security deployment has become the routine mechanism for achieving governance objectives, rather than an exceptional response when everything else has failed. The difference is not semantic. One is emergency governance; the other is governance by emergency.

Nepal’s security forces are paying a price for this that rarely gets discussed. During the decade-long armed conflict (1996-2006), the Nepal Police, the Armed Police Force and the then Royal Nepali Army accumulated deep public distrust through documented brutality and rights violations against civilians. Entering the peace process gave them an opportunity to rebuild. Democratic positioning of the army along with programs like Police My Friend and community policing initiatives were deliberate efforts to change the relationship between uniformed personnel and the communities around them. Those efforts took years and produced real, measurable improvement in how Nepali people related to the institutions meant to serve them.

Much of that rebuilt trust collapsed during the GenZ protest movement of Sept 2025. The crackdown on protesters produced images that will not quickly fade: police officers abandoning their posts, weapons left behind in the chaos. The Nepali Army’s conduct raised separate and equally serious questions. When major public infrastructures were set ablaze during the protests, including Singhdurbar (the seat of the Executive), the Supreme Court and the Office of the President, the army stood conspicuously passive. Its failure to intervene to protect institutions of the state has never been satisfactorily explained to the public. 

More recently, reports of the army collecting data on landless people across various districts have raised alarm about whether it is operating beyond the boundaries its constitutional mandate sets. When the institution charged with defending the constitution appears to be overreaching into civilian administrative functions, it signals a deeper confusion about what security forces are for.

The Bagmati evictions have added yet another layer. Security personnel are being publicly identified as the people who came and took away the homes of families who had nowhere else to go. Whether those officers agreed with the orders or had any say in the decision are questions most observers are not stopping to ask. The association between the force and the harm is direct and visible. The policy decision that produced the harm is several steps removed and considerably less visible. The government makes the call; the security forces wear the consequences.

Running underneath all of this is a problem that Nepal has never adequately confronted: there is no clear, publicly understood framework for when government security forces should be deployed and when they should not. Even where rules exist in law, they have not been communicated in any meaningful way to the public. This ambiguity is not a technical oversight. It is a structural vulnerability. When the boundaries of legitimate deployment are vague, those boundaries become easy to push. Leaders in government can use security forces to consolidate their hold on power, to intimidate opponents, and to bypass institutional checks, all without obviously crossing a line that has never been clearly drawn. 

Left uncorrected, this is precisely the environment in which elected authoritarianism takes root. A leader arrives through the ballot box but governs through coercion, and the institutions that should resist find they have no clear ground to stand on.

None of this means that governments should not enforce laws, that informal settlements on public land are beyond regulation, or that accountability for corruption does not matter. Legitimate governance pursues legitimate objectives. But it pursues them through processes that respect rights, allow for contestation, and remain accountable to the people they affect. When security force deployment substitutes for that process, even legitimate objectives become harder to defend.

Since People’s Movement 2006, Nepal has spent 20 long years building, imperfectly and unevenly, a democratic system premised on civilian supremacy over security forces. That principle is not self-enforcing. It requires clearly defined rules about when the state's coercive apparatus can be activated, by whom, and subject to what oversight. What is needed now is not simply a change in political leadership but a serious, public reckoning with the scope and limits of security force deployment in a democracy. The habits being established today will be difficult to unlearn. 

A government that routinely governs by force teaches its successors that force is how governing is done. That lesson, once normalized, does not stay contained to one administration. It becomes available to whoever comes next, with whatever objectives they happen to hold.

That is the question worth sitting with: not whether Balendra Shah's governance goals are right or wrong, but whether the way he is pursuing them is building the Nepal he says he wants, or quietly dismantling the foundations that any decent governance ultimately depends on.

The author is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA