IMAGE: EMBASSY OF NEPAL WASHINGTON D.C.
WHEN RABI Lamichhane, the chairman of Nepal’s ruling Rastriya Swatantra Party, flew to New Delhi in June and spent four days meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, the trip was described as a breakthrough in Nepal-India relations. It was also a workaround. Nepal’s embassy in India had been running without an ambassador for weeks. The last envoy, Shankar Prasad Sharma, had been recalled by the Shah government in late March. Nobody had been sent to replace him. The most important bilateral relationship Nepal manages, with the country that accounts for a big share of its imports as well as its exports, was being handled by an acting chargé d’affaires and a party chairman flying in to fill the gap. That was not an exceptional situation, meaning it was Nepal’s normal mode of diplomacy.
Nepal maintains 44 diplomatic missions around the world: 34 embassies and 10 consulate general offices. As of April 17 of them were operating without a properly accredited ambassador. By the end of August seven more tenures will expire, bringing the total to 24 headless missions simultaneously.
Among the currently vacant posts: India, China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Russia, Australia, South Korea and Saudi Arabia. That is Nepal’s entire strategic diplomatic tier, running on acting heads who, as former ambassador Jayaraj Acharya put it: “lack the moral authority for high-level meetings.”
How this happened can be told in two acts. In October 2025 the interim government of former chief justice Sushila Karki recalled 11 ambassadors, all of them political appointees from the Oli government: to China, Germany, Malaysia, Israel, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, the UK, the US and Japan. Before any replacements could be named, the Shah government took office in March and recalled six more: the ambassadors to India, South Korea, Australia, Sri Lanka, Denmark and South Africa. Four of the recalled batch were Congress nominees, two were K.P. Sharma led CPN-UML nominees.
Every change of government since Nepal’s democracy was restored in 1990 has involved some version of this ritual: the new administration clears out the previous one’s people, positions sit empty for months and Nepal’s foreign relationships run on a skeleton crew while the politics sorts itself out.
Nepal’s own rules are supposed to prevent this. The Ambassador Appointment Guidelines of 2018 require that at least 50% of ambassadorial posts be filled from career diplomats in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with the remaining available for political appointees.
In truth governments have commonly tilted the balance towards political picks, treating embassies as rewards for loyal MPs, retired coalition partners and well-connected former ministers. A one-line explanation from a minister in the Kathmandu Post summed it up cleanly: “Since the election results were out, we had been asking the political appointees to resign. As they did not comply, we decided to recall them.” The process treats ambassadors not as professional representatives of the state but as extensions of whichever party put them there: legitimate targets for removal the moment the balance of power upends.
The RSP government, to its credit, has tried to do something different. In late May the Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a seven-page terms of reference and opened applications for ambassadorial posts to any qualified Nepali citizen: the first time in the country’s history that the role has been advertised publicly. Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal set a June 5th application deadline. Candidates would be evaluated on age, experience, education and additional credentials like published research. It is a welcome reform instinct, and in a country where diplomatic appointments have long meant “someone’s cousin who speaks English”, it is a real departure from habit.
The implementation, however, raised questions that the terms of reference didn’t answer. The application form did not specify which countries successful candidates would be posted to—you were invited to apply to be an ambassador somewhere, to be determined. Senior diplomats who had spent decades in the foreign service were unlikely to queue alongside younger applicants in an open public competition; at least one former envoy said that “no qualified people will get selected through the open competition” and suggested the government would do better with targeted talent hunting. Former ambassador Sarmila Parajuli Dhakal was more measured, calling the move positive but noting that the credibility of the evaluation panel would determine whether the reform produced results or just added a procedural veneer to the same appointment process.
The cost of all this is not merely symbolic. Nepal attracted $57m in foreign direct investment in 2024. Filling that number means aggressive economic diplomacy: someone in Washington with access to the right rooms, someone in Beijing navigating the particular conditions of Chinese commercial relationships, someone in London making the case to development finance institutions for Nepali hydropower.
That work requires a properly accredited ambassador who has been in post long enough to build the relationships that matter. An acting chargé d’affaires attending a normal bilateral meeting is not the same thing. Former ambassador Surya Mishra has said so: “Acting heads often lack the moral authority for high-level meetings.” Six months of vacancy at the US Embassy, during a period when Nepal is also navigating an aid withdrawal and FATF grey-listing pressures, is six months of economic diplomacy not being done.
The government now has the opportunity to appoint 24 ambassadors simultaneously, an unusual moment of scale that makes it easier, not difficult, to introduce a different approach. Whether the open competition produces the right people, or whether it becomes another way for the same political distribution dressed up in competitive language, will tell you a great deal about whether the RSP government’s reform instincts extend to the building on Maharajgunj that it has largely ignored since April. ■
