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The main opposition party, Nepali Congress, has warned of boycotting the House if the Prime Minister does not take part in the discussion on the government's policies and programs.

Opposition parties disrupted the Parliament meeting on Wednesday demanding the Prime Minister Balendra Shah's presence in the discussions.

Following the disruption, Speaker Dol Prasad Aryal gave floor to Congress lawmaker Arjun Narsingh KC.

Speaking at the House, lawmaker KC insisted that the Prime Minister himself should answer questions raised on the government's policies and programs.

He also warned of boycotting the parliamentary proceedings if the Prime Minister remained absent from the discussions. 

Every May, as the Himalayan snows begin their slow retreat, tens of thousands of devotees make their way to Pashupatinath. They come from the villages of Gorakhpur and Varanasi, from the lanes of Patna and Lucknow, from the ghats of Kathmandu itself. They pour water, they ring bells, they press their foreheads to cold stone. Nobody asks them for a visa of the soul. Nobody requires them to demonstrate diplomatic credentials before they weep. The river Bagmati runs through all of it, indifferent to the boundary markers that politicians have spent decades arguing over.

This is the lived reality of the India-Nepal relationship—a reality that the current Mansarovar controversy risks obscuring behind the brittle language of sovereignty and cartographic assertion. Nepal’s government has formally objected to India routing its Kailash Mansarovar Yatra through the Lipulek Pass, dispatching diplomatic notes to both New Delhi and Beijing. The objection is constitutionally grounded, historically defensible, and yet politically awkward—because it arrives precisely when the two countries are attempting to lay the groundwork for the first substantive bilateral engagement between the present leaderships, possibly anchored by a Foreign Secretary-level visit from Vikram Misri to Kathmandu.

The timing is not ideal. But the deeper problem is conceptual. The Lipulek dispute, which escalated acutely in 2020 when India inaugurated a road through the contested tri-junction, has become something of a litmus test for Nepali nationalist credibility. The 2020 constitutional map amendment—incorporating Lipulek, Kalapani, and Limpiyadhura—was passed unanimously in the House of Representatives. Even the Nepali Congress, otherwise the most India-friendly major party, voted for it. Raising the issue is therefore not optional for any Nepali government that wishes to maintain its domestic legitimacy. The question is not whether to raise it, but how, and through which register.

The choice to frame it through the Mansarovar Yatra is where the current approach runs into difficulty—not because Nepal’s underlying territorial claim is weak, it is not, but because the Yatra is among the most emotionally resonant religious traditions shared between the two peoples. India's External Affairs Ministry was swift to remind everyone that Lipulek has been the traditional route for this pilgrimage since 1954, a date that predates the current cartographic dispute by decades. For the millions of Indians for whom Kailash-Mansarovar is not a geopolitical talking point but the final ambition of a devout life, Nepal's objection lands not as a reasonable territorial assertion but as an interruption of something sacred. That is the perception problem, and it is one that no amount of legal justification fully dissolves.

When the mountain brought two countries back together

There is an instructive irony here that deserves to be stated plainly. When India and China—adversaries who fought a war in 1962, who exchanged blows at Galwan in 2020, and who have maintained an uneasy armed standoff across thousands of kilometres of disputed Himalayan terrain—decided to resume their slow diplomatic normalisation, one of the early symbolic gestures was the reopening of the Kailash Mansarovar pilgrimage route through Nathu La in Sikkim. The pilgrimage became a soft-power bridge thrown across a very hard political chasm. Religion—specifically the Hindu and Buddhist reverence for Kailash as the abode of Shiva and the site of cosmic origin—did what decades of boundary commission meetings could not: it created a shared frame of reference for two governments looking for a reason to talk without losing face.

This is not an anomaly in Himalayan history. It is the pattern. The religious geography of the region—Pashupatinath, Muktinath, Janakpur, the temple towns of the Tarai, the monasteries of Mustang—has historically functioned as a connective tissue that survives political ruptures. When Indo-Nepal relations hit their lowest point during the 2015-16 crisis, it was the Char Dham circuit, the Ramayana Trail linking Ayodhya to Janakpurdham, and the quiet continuity of cross-border pilgrimage that kept ordinary people connected even as their governments exchanged cold diplomatic language. The temples did not shut. The devotees did not stop. The river ran on.

India too has consistently recognised this. Prime Minister Modi's first bilateral foreign visit in 2014 was to Nepal, and he chose to go to Pashupatinath first, not to the parliament. He performed rituals at the temple, addressed the Constituent Assembly, and spoke of a connectivity agenda framed in developmental rather than purely strategic terms. Whatever one makes of that visit's long-term outcomes, the underlying instinct was sound: anchor the relationship in its civilisational depth before engaging its geopolitical complications. Both countries share that instinct—they have simply not always acted on it simultaneously.

The mandate and the moment

Nepal’s present government carries something that its recent predecessors did not: a mandate explicitly built on the triad of family, religion, and nation. This is not peripheral to the Mansarovar question—it is central to it. A leadership whose political identity is rooted in religious nationalism, and which has among the most consolidated popular mandates in recent Nepali political memory, is actually better positioned to separate the question of Lipulek’s territorial status from the question of Kailash’s sanctity than any of its left predecessors were.

The contrast with previous governments is instructive. When Prachanda raised Kalapani, his standing as a former Maoist guerrilla complicated the reception in New Delhi—every nationalist assertion was filtered through the lens of his political history. When the left coalition made the 2020 map amendment, it came wrapped in anti-imperialist rhetoric that, whatever its domestic utility, narrowed the space for quiet resolution. The present government's nationalism is of a different register—cultural, religious, civilisational—and that register is precisely the one in which the Mansarovar question is most naturally resolved.

The precedents

The history of India-Nepal relations is littered with crises that resolved more quietly than they began. The 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship—long resented in Nepal as a document of unequal power—has been renegotiated in spirit if not fully in letter through accumulated bilateral agreements over seven decades. The 1996 Mahakali Treaty, which governed the Tanakpur barrage dispute and laid the groundwork for the Pancheshwar Multipurpose Project, was a case study in how two countries can separate a politically charged water dispute from its developmental logic and find a workable arrangement. The treaty was controversial in Nepal, but it demonstrated that sustained technical engagement can produce outcomes even when the political atmosphere is hostile.

The 2014-2015 period produced a series of agreements that received remarkably little public attention given their scope: a power trade agreement enabling Nepal to export electricity to India, a petroleum pipeline agreement, an updated Air Services Agreement, and the launch of the Ramayana Circuit as a joint tourism initiative. None of these required a summit. None generated newspaper front pages. They were the product of sustained secretariat-level engagement between the two foreign ministries—exactly the kind of quiet, functional diplomacy that Misri’s reported visit to Kathmandu is intended to revive and build upon.

The 2023 reset under Prime Minister Dahal produced something similar. Despite the political baggage he carried, Dahal visited India early in his tenure and returned with a package of agreements that included renewed hydropower cooperation and a loosening of the third-country clause that had previously blocked Nepal from exporting power to Bangladesh through Indian territory. The boundary issue was not resolved. It was placed in a bracket—not ignored, but set aside so that functional cooperation could proceed. That bracketing is the real art of India-Nepal diplomacy, and it has a respectable track record. 

The pilgrim as diplomat

There is a concept in Indian classical statecraft—Kautilya is explicit on this—that distinguishes between the objectives of confrontation and the objectives of negotiation, and counsels the wise king to identify the arena in which he has the greatest structural advantage. For Nepal in its relationship with India, that arena is not military, not economic, and not cartographic. It is moral and civilisational. Nepal's most enduring leverage lies in its position as the birthplace of the Buddha, as the custodian of Pashupatinath, as the country through which the sacred geography of the subcontinent runs with unusual density. That is soft power of a very high order, and it is diminished—not enhanced—when turned into a tool of border assertion.

The lakhs of Nepali and Indian citizens who cross each other's territories daily—for work, for worship, for weddings and funerals—are not thinking about Lipulek. They are thinking about the aunt in Bahraich, the brother-in-law in Chitwan, the temple in Janakpur that their grandmother described on her deathbed. This is the living substrate of the relationship. The political class in Kathmandu has at times consistently overestimated how much the territorial dispute exercises the common people of both countries, and underestimated how much the pilgrimage does. The elite’s map and the devotee’s road are not the same document.

A Nepal that facilitates the Mansarovar Yatra with grace—even while formally and firmly reserving its position on Lipulek’s status—gains considerably more than it concedes. It positions itself as a responsible and generous custodian of regional religious life. It builds goodwill with a constituency in India that cuts across every political party: the devout. And it creates the conditions under which the harder conversations about Kalapani can happen without the emotional charge of an interrupted pilgrimage poisoning the diplomatic atmosphere before it has a chance to form.

What conducive diplomacy looks like

The path forward is not complicated in its logic, even if demanding in its execution. Nepal can formally register and maintain its territorial position on Lipulek through proper diplomatic channels—that is its sovereign right and indeed its constitutional obligation—while signalling, clearly and without ambiguity, that the religious passage of pilgrims will not be obstructed pending the resolution of the boundary question. This is not a concession on sovereignty. It is a recognition that religious pilgrimage and territorial negotiation are different categories of action, to be handled by different instruments on different timelines. They do not need to be collapsed into a single confrontation.

India, for its part, carries its own responsibility in this. A bilateral relationship of this depth and this history is not well served by diplomatic language that foreclose conversation. The characterisation of Nepal’s parliamentary map as having no basis in historical facts is, whatever its legal merits, not the register in which a durable resolution gets built. The Sugauli Treaty of 1816 is a serious historical document. Nepal’s parliament voted unanimously on the map. These are political facts, and they deserve to be engaged rather than dismissed. A more productive formulation—one that a confident and responsible India is fully capable of offering—would acknowledge the existence of genuinely differing positions while affirming a shared intent to resolve them through dialogue. That preserves every substantive position while leaving the door open rather than shut.

The Misri visit, if it materialises as expected, should concentrate on the deliverables where genuine progress is achievable: hydropower export agreements, the Ramayana and Buddhist Circuit as joint tourism infrastructure, cross-border rail connectivity and the post-earthquake reconstruction assistance whose pace has disappointed on both sides. These are areas where Nepal’s developmental priorities and India’s neighbourhood-first agenda are genuinely aligned. The boundary will be resolved—or not resolved—through a separate, slower, more technical process. What the present moment calls for is not a grand settlement but a functional reset: enough trust to allow the relationship to breathe again, enough goodwill to let the pilgrim walk.

There is, finally, something worth saying about the weight of the Mansarovar pilgrimage itself. Kailash is not simply a destination. In Hindu cosmology, it is the axis of the world—the place where Shiva meditates in eternal stillness, where the great rivers are born, where the distance between the human and the divine narrows to almost nothing. For the pilgrim who completes the parikrama of that mountain, the journey has not been about India or Nepal or China. It has been about something that those categories cannot contain. That the road to that mountain passes through contested terrain is a geopolitical fact. That the mountain itself transcends geopolitics is a spiritual one. Wise statesmanship—in Kathmandu and in New Delhi both—has always known the difference. The present moment asks both capitals to act on that knowledge.

CK Lal, in a recent column, writes about the authoritarian aesthetics of the middle class. He revisits an old adage, “Gods do not speak, kings do not listen.” The irony today is that leaders are elected, yet many prefer to communicate through (un)social media rather than engage in direct conversation. 

Balen, standing today not as the mayor of a city but as the Prime Minister of Nepal, would face a very different political environment in which the stakes are higher, scrutiny sharper, and public expectations far greater. National leadership is not just about taking decisions or delivering visible results. It requires engaging the public directly, answering difficult questions, and showing through both words and actions that power remains answerable. 

It’s easy to understand why people are drawn to this kind of leadership. It comes from frustration with traditional politics, a demand for transparency, and a desire for more direct authority.  But those ideals only matter when they are tested under real pressure. A real test of any Prime Minister is whether they remain open and accountable when criticism intensifies.  

Accountability is not about rhetoric. It shows in practice. It means speaking to the press, taking criticism seriously, and explaining decisions, even unpopular ones. A democratic government cannot depend on silence or tightly controlled communication. Once in power, leaders must accept that their decisions will be questioned.

Nepal’s recent history shows a familiar pattern. Leaders come to office promising change, but over time they pull back from scrutiny. Press conferences become rare, interviews controlled, and criticism deflected. This growing distance between the state and the public has eroded trust. If this pattern continues at the national level, it will deepen an already fragile sense of democratic confidence.

Nepal’s problems don’t exist in isolation. They feed into each other. Economic instability, unemployment, corruption, federal tensions, and weak governance cannot be addressed in isolation. They require consistent public engagement. Policies must be explained, problems acknowledged, and mistakes addressed openly. When decisions are made behind closed doors, public trust begins to erode. 

There are also concerns about institutional freedoms. The use of police force against   student unions raises questions about academic autonomy and the shrinking space for dissent. Strict border enforcement without viable economic alternatives has increased hardship in vulnerable communities. References to military monitoring of “anarchic activities” suggest an expanding role for security institutions in a democratic setting. At the same time, limited consultation and reliance on ordinances have drawn criticism for weakening decision-making.

Avoiding the media might help control the narrative in the short term, but it weakens leadership over time. It creates suspicion, invites speculation, and leaves others to shape the narrative. A Prime Minister who does not speak openly risks losing the trust that sustains authority.

Facing the public is not performance. It is part of the job. It means answering questions without evasion, engaging criticism without defensiveness, and allowing journalists to probe decisions and reasoning. In a democracy, this is not a burden on leadership but a core responsibility. Strength is shown not by avoiding scrutiny, but by handling it.

Nepal’s constitutional framework relies on checks and balances, with the media playing a crucial role. Open engagement strengthens democratic culture. Avoidance weakens it. Accountability operates both at the level of individuals and institutions.

At the same time, leadership today comes with constant pressure. Every decision is examined, every statement politicized, and every mistake amplified. The instinct to withdraw and rely on controlled communication is understandable. But that instinct must be resisted. Leadership is not about comfort. It is about taking responsibility in full public view.

In the end, authority comes not from controlling information but from explaining it clearly. Clarity will not eliminate disagreement, but it helps people understand decisions. Where there is understanding, trust can survive even in disagreement. Without it, even sound policies can seem arbitrary.

This matters especially in Nepal’s still evolving democracy. Citizens are more informed, more vocal, and less willing to accept one-way communication. They expect dialogue, accessibility, and responsiveness. Leaders who recognize this shift strengthen democratic practice. Those who resist it risk becoming disconnected from the public.

Criticism should not be seen as a threat. It is part of how democracy works. Journalists are not automatically adversaries, and public frustration does not always signal opposition. Both reflect a system still finding its footing. Engaging with them strengthens legitimacy.

A Prime Minister who holds regular press briefings, answers unscripted questions, and explains policies clearly would stand out in Nepal’s political landscape. Such an approach would not eliminate criticism, but it would build trust in how decisions are made and communicated.

We’ve seen the alternative before: limited access, controlled messaging, and a growing gap between the state and the public. Over time, that gap turns into a perception of detachment and opacity. Once that perception takes hold, it is difficult to reverse.

This isn’t about expecting perfection. No leader is without mistakes. What matters is how those mistakes are handled. Acknowledging errors, correcting courses, and doing so openly are signs of credible leadership.

To govern at the highest level in Nepal is not just to exercise authority, but to sustain public confidence in it. That confidence cannot be built through silence or selective disclosure. It requires consistency, openness and a willingness to remain answerable.

A Prime Minister does not stand apart from the public. They stand before it. These questions of leadership are shaped by a broader political environment where visibility and immediacy often take priority over long-term reform. As Chandrakishor argues in his column, “D for Dopamine Government” politics is drifting toward immediacy and spectacle, raising a deeper question: when visibility outweighs substance, can governance still remain accountable?

The images from 8 Sept 2025, still linger. Teenagers in school uniforms standing at Maitighar Mandala, facing riot police. By nightfall, nineteen people were dead, most of them young. Within two days, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli was forced to resign. A leaderless GenZ uprising had done what years of conventional opposition politics never could. 

Six months later, the man who surfed that anger all the way to the prime minister’s chair made a move that left many of those same young people wondering what they had actually won. 

Balendra “Balen” Shah, a former mayor, rapper, and now Nepal’s youngest prime minister, moved fast. His Rastriya Swatantra Party had promised a clean break from the old ways. One of the first big items on his government’s agenda was Point 86: all partisan student unions must leave university campuses within 60 days. Party flags, offices, and organized structures would be removed. In their place, neutral “Student Councils” focused on welfare, not politics. Police would step in if needed. Shah’s reasoning was straightforward—campuses had long since stopped being a place of learning.

For parents and teachers who had watched years of chaos, this felt like relief. For others, it felt like a betrayal.

I’ve spent enough time around students at Nepali universities to understand why the reform found support, even among some young people. Tribhuvan University and dozens of others had become a stage for political theatrics. Student union elections regularly descended into lockouts, stone-throwing, and worse. In 2021, an assistant professor at Tribhuvan University was badly beaten by members of one union. Strikes could shut down entire departments for weeks. Even exam results sometimes moved along party lines rather than merit. The old parties—Nepali Congress, CPN-UML, CPN (Maoist Center) —treated their student wings as feeder systems for cadres and local muscle. What should have been a space for ideas and debate had become outposts for patronage and power.

The damage was real and measurable. A generation lost semesters, delayed careers, and absorbed the lesson that loyalty mattered more than competence. 

To pretend this is just a simple house-cleaning exercise is to forget Nepal’s own history. Student politics didn’t start as a problem. For long stretches, it was the only real solution available. 

It began in 1947 under the Rana oligarchy, that hereditary prime-ministerial dynasty that treated the country like a family business for over a century. No parties, no press, no breathing room. A group of students launched the Jayatu Sanskritam movement, asking simply that their schools teach mathematics and science alongside Sanskrit. The regime responded with arrests and exiles. Those modest protests quietly cracked open a political consciousness that had been ordered to stay quiet. 

In 1979, students protested again and police killed demonstrators. The absolute monarchy blinked. King Birendra promised a referendum—something unimaginable without that pressure from below. They didn’t win the vote, but they forced an autocrat to negotiate.

1990 brought the Jana Andolan. Students were the ones marching into police batons while senior leaders stayed safer. Their persistence helped bury the Panchayat system and open the door to multiparty democracy.

And in 2006, during the second People’s Movement, students once more showed up when it counted, helping end a 240-year monarchy and a vicious civil war. Democratic Nepal is built on student blood.

What makes this history sting now is that those young people back then weren’t fighting for student unions as institutions. They marched because no one else would. The unions, messy and imperfect as they became, were the only vehicle available when everything else was shut down.

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.

Balen Shah is young. His party markets itself as fresh and anti-establishment. Yet the old parties still control well-oiled student wings that could easily be turned against his reforms. There’s a legitimate question whether this ban is purely about cleaning up education or about neutralizing a familiar threat. Controlling the worst behavior makes sense. A total ban feels heavier, especially coming from a leader who positioned himself as the voice of frustrated youth.

The 2025 uprising itself was deliberately different. Leaderless, online-organized, allergic to party flags. Those protesters inherited the spirit of past movements but rejected the old machinery. Now their own leader is dismantling that machinery.

The tension is real. The old partisan model had become rotten — too entangled with patronage, too comfortable with violence, too damaging to education. But removing organized student political voices entirely carries its own risks. Non-partisan councils can manage hostels and welfare issues. They are far less likely to challenge a government when it cuts education budgets, appoints cronies, or makes decisions that hurt young people’s futures. Democratic muscle memory matters. When the only approved form of student engagement is polite administration, something important gets lost.

This isn’t just Nepal’s dilemma. Look across South Asia. Bangladesh’s 2024 protests toppled a government partly in rebellion against a corrupted student wing that had turned predatory. Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya showed what raw youth anger can achieve when institutions fail. In India, campus politics remains messy and often ugly, but it still produces some of the sharpest challenges to authority. The question everywhere is the same: can you kill the poison without killing the spirit?

Shah was right that the old system had to go. Decades of disruption and cynicism had poisoned too much. But a ban is a blunt instrument. What Nepal actually needs is reinvention—independent student bodies that answer to students, not parties, with real space to organise and push back when necessary. Not the old racket. But not silent obedience either.

The young people who stood at Maitighar in September 2025 weren’t doing it as union members. They were doing something older and more fundamental: acting like citizens when it was risky. Nepal’s challenge now is to create institutions that respect that impulse instead of managing it away.

How the country threads this needle will matter beyond its borders. In a region full of young populations that established powers struggle to accommodate, getting this balance right between stability and democratic vitality is harder than it looks. The old model deserved to die. But a democratic voice is not something any country can afford to casually bury, even when doing so brings a temporary sense of relief.