IMAGE: KANTIPUR
KANTIPUR MEDIA Group is the institution that has set the terms of Nepali journalism for thirty years or so. Founded in 1993, it owns the country’s highest-circulation Nepali-language daily, its best-known English newspaper, its most-watched private television channel and one of its largest FM radio stations. If you want to understand what Nepal’s educated public thinks it knows about its own country, Kantipur is usually where that understanding was formed. For three decades, that has also meant that Kantipur’s relationship with whoever holds power in Kathmandu has been one of the most politically loaded questions in Nepali media—a question the group has never quite answered and which the events of the past two months or so have forced into the open.
The sequence began in March, when Umesh Chauhan, who had been editor-in-chief of Kantipur Daily since May 2023, resigned. He had led the paper through the COVID-19 years, the September 2025 protests that burned parliament and swept the political establishment from power, and the March 2026 election. The group’s statement thanked him for navigating “challenging periods” and announced an open recruitment process: the first time KMG had sought external applicants at that level, receiving 17 applications and shortlisting three finalists.
The new editor-in-chief, Gokarna Raj Awasthi, who started on May 5th, is an unusual choice for a newspaper long associated with political journalism done close to power. Awasthi is an economist-journalist by instinct: he served as business editor at Kantipur earlier in his career, then as SDG Adviser at the United Nations in Nepal, then as Director General of the Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry—Nepal’s largest private sector body—and as a board director of the Securities Board of Nepal. He is not a man shaped by parliamentary corridors and political source networks. He is a man shaped by balance sheets, as well as trade policy and development economics.
Before Awasthi’s appointment was announced, KMG made a different and even more striking hire. In late March the group created an entirely new position—Group Editorial Director—and filled it with Anup Kaphle, a Nepali journalist who had spent two decades abroad. Kaphle was most recently the editor-in-chief of Rest of World, a nonprofit publication focused on technology’s impact in the Global South, which under his leadership won the National Magazine Award and the Edward R. Murrow Award.
Before that he held editorial roles at The Washington Post and BuzzFeed News. He now oversees all editorial operations across KMG’s properties—Kantipur Daily, The Kathmandu Post, Kantipur Television and Kantipur FM—reporting to the managing director. “What excites me about Gokarna is that he understands power in Nepal—how it moves, who holds it and how journalism can speak to it,” Kaphle said when announcing Awasthi’s appointment.
Then, on April 23rd, the managing director those two men reported to resigned. Sambhav Sirohiya, who had taken on the role in 2023 and was credited with turning KMG from an organisation losing more than Rs600m a year into a profitable one, quit with immediate effect.
His letter to staff made his reasons plain: he had “serious disagreements” with Kantipur’s recent reporting, “particularly stories published about then Home Minister Sudan Gurung.” The newsroom had obtained details of Gurung’s suspicious financial transactions from investigative sources and published them. Sirohiya called the stories “sensational and sloppy” and wrote: “I cannot lead a transformation while lending my name to journalism I do not believe in.”
The resignation was explosive for what it revealed about the fault lines inside the organisation. Sirohiya had, in the weeks before, been publicly enthusiastic about the Shah government’s April 1st decision to ban all state advertising in private media—a directive ordering every federal, provincial and local government body to place advertisements exclusively with state-owned outlets like Gorkhapatra and Nepal Television. Most of Nepal’s private media sector was alarmed: the Federation of Nepali Journalists called it an attack on press freedom. The Nepal Media Society, of which KMG was a founding member, filed a legal challenge. KMG withdrew from the Media Society in response, with Sirohiya writing on social media that “the government just killed private media advertising revenue. That’s a good move.” At the same moment, his newsroom was investigating a minister in the same government he was publicly endorsing.
The government’s advertising ban deserves a clear-eyed reading. The official argument—that intermediary agencies were taking large commissions, that Rs3.25bn in annual government advertising was riddled with corruption, and that the directive would end a racket—is not without foundation. KMG itself had published an investigative report on advertising irregularities, which the government cited when announcing the decision.
But routing all government information through state media concentrates the information supply in a way that benefits no one except the government, and it hits smaller private media operations—which lack KMG’s scale and revenue diversification—far harder than it hits KMG. Sirohiya’s welcome of a policy that devastated competitors while leaving his own organisation relatively unscathed was, at minimum, a conflict of interest that his newsroom was ill-positioned to report on while he remained in charge.
What the combined events of March and April reveal is a tension that has been present at KMG for years but has rarely been this public: the tension between an organisation that has built its identity on independent journalism and one that has always operated in close proximity to the political and business establishment it covers. Under Nepal’s old political order, this proximity was survivable because the establishment itself had some internal diversity—the Nepali Congress versus the Communist formations, civil society versus the government of the day.
The new order is different. The RSP government holds near total parliamentary power, its leader has a personal relationship with social media and a demonstrated willingness to confront institutions he dislikes, and the question of whose side Kantipur is on has become more urgent because there are fewer sides.
The hires suggest that at least part of KMG’s leadership understands that the answer to this moment is not strategic alignment with whoever governs but editorial credibility built on independence. Kaphle, shaped by international newsrooms where independence from power is institutional rather than negotiated, is the most direct signal of that instinct. Awasthi, whose career moved between the UN, the private sector and journalism without becoming a creature of political patronage, points in the same direction.
What the next chapter will show is if their editorial direction can truly shape the institution—now operating without Sirohiya’s business leadership and amid a major digital transition.
Nepal’s new government does not need Kantipur’s approval. It has 182 of 275 parliamentary seats and a mandate loud enough to ignore any editorial. But it will need, eventually, an institution capable of telling the country what the government is getting wrong. That is the function that thirty years of institution-building at KMG was supposed to produce. The events of the past two months have made it far harder to say with confidence that the institution can manage the transition from one Nepal to another: not only in business terms but editorially, too. ■
