IMAGE: NEPALMINUTE
THE MOST dangerous man in Nepal is a 31-year-old fixer with a perfect IELTS score and an unusual gift for being everywhere at once. Inam Sapkota emerged from obscurity to become the alleged intermediary between Supreme Court judges, police chiefs, business magnates and the Prime Minister’s Office. His phone, now in police custody, has yielded enough compromising material to keep Kathmandu’s rumour mills spinning for a decade.
The arrest of Sapkota in late September was meant to be a clever gambit by the Prime Minister’s Office. Police detained former Chief Justice Cholendra Samsher Rana on a pretext, seized his phone and traced the network of influence peddlers surrounding him. It was a phishing expedition disguised as law enforcement. The problem with phishing, as any Nigerian prince will tell you, is that you sometimes catch more than you bargained for.
What the PMO hauled in was a scandal that now threatens to consume the government itself. Sapkota’s messages revealed contacts with sitting Supreme Court judges, senior police officials and, most damagingly, Kumar Ben Byanjankar, the Prime Minister’s best friend and chief advisor. The troll-turned-eminence-grise reportedly held Sapkota’s phones for two days after the arrest. Messages between him and Sapkota were allegedly deleted. Ben’s response to enquiries was a masterclass in contempt: “Write it however you like.”
This is what happens when you govern by memes and Facebook posts. Balendra Shah rode to power on a wave of public disgust with the old parties, promising action over talk, transparency over the smoke-filled rooms of the Kathmandu elite. His supporters saw a structural engineer who would rebuild Nepali politics the way he rebuilt earthquake-damaged buildings: with precision and no patience for the rot underneath.
The rot, it turns out, followed him in. Consider the sequence of events. When journalists received leaked messages exposing the Sapkota network, police officers arrived at media houses demanding that reporters accompany them for “tea”. No warrants, just an invitation you could refuse only by invoking the protection of your editor. The Prime Minister’s Office disowned the operation. The police spokesperson said the PMO had ordered it. Both statements cannot be true; one of them is a lie.
Shah’s response? A Facebook post about mobile games. His advisor’s response? A sarcastic jibe about whether critics even qualify as journalists anymore. The Prime Minister then posted, cryptically, that everyone’s “wrong time” would come. It is difficult to imagine a more perfect distillation of the modern authoritarian temperament: a joke, a threat and a distraction, served in sequence.
The government removed Inspector General Dan Bahadur Karki, a man who had the temerity to ask questions about due process before arresting prominent figures. His replacement, Manoj KC, was the PMO’s preferred candidate. Karki has filed a petition at the Supreme Court challenging his removal. The government denies this was punishment. It was a “change of responsibility”. In the same way, a demotion is a career development opportunity.
Meanwhile, Gagan Thapa of the Nepali Congress finds himself under surveillance, allegedly implicated in Sapkota’s testimony about a Rs180m transaction related to a party leadership dispute. Thapa says his hands are clean and that plainclothes officers have been following him. The opposition is being intimidated. The press is being harassed. The judiciary is compromised.
The deeper problem is one of incentives. Nepal’s political system rewards those who cultivate networks of influence, regardless of party affiliation. Shah promised to break this system. Instead his inner circle appears to have plugged into it with remarkable speed. The old fixers needed decades to build their webs. Kumar Ben, a gamer who founded a meme page, allegedly managed it in months.
The Prime Minister’s supporters will argue that this is a media witch-hunt. That the old parties are jealous of his popularity. That the police leaks are part of a conspiracy to bring him down. Some of this may even be true. The Nepal Police have their own agendas. The traditional parties have their own grievances. The media is far from infallible.
A government that promised transparency now monitors its critics. A Prime Minister who spoke little now speaks in riddles and threats. An advisor who built his reputation on mocking the establishment now allegedly scrambles to delete evidence of his dealings with a fixer. The reformist image is cracking, and the cracks are showing what lies beneath: another group of ambitious men who discovered that power is easier to acquire than to wield cleanly.
Shah has a few years before the next elections. That is enough time to right the ship, to distance himself from the more tawdry elements of his inner circle, to demonstrate that his government can tolerate criticism without reaching for the phone. It is also enough time to prove that his critics were right—that the anti-establishment wave was just the establishment in new clothes.
For now Nepal’s voters are left with a bitter question. If the man who promised to clean up politics has already surrounded himself with fixers and influence peddlers, what exactly was the point? The rapper with the black shades has become the man in the grey suit. His fans may forgive the transition. His country may not. ■
