Welcome to Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief.

The highlights this week: Nepal’s new government takes office with a public mandate for reform, Bangladesh grapples with a drastic fuel shortage as the whole region suffers, and Pakistan steps up its mediation efforts in the Iran war.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief.

The highlights this week: Nepal’s new government takes office with a public mandate for reform, Bangladesh grapples with a drastic fuel shortage as the whole region suffers, and Pakistan steps up its mediation efforts in the Iran war.

Nepal’s New Government Off to Quick Start

Nepali Prime Minister Balendra Shah took office on Friday, and his government has a strong public mandate to act on its electoral promise to pursue governance reforms and curb corruption. Shah’s anti-establishment party was elected in a landslide last month, spurred in part by the youth-led protest movement that ousted the previous government last September.

The new government seemed to waste little time following through on its pledge: Police arrested former Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli and former Home Minister Ramesh Lekhak on Saturday in connection with a report prepared by the interim government about the Oli government’s crackdown on protesters. (The report was leaked shortly before Shah took office.)

On Tuesday, another former senior official, Chhabilal Rijal—previously Kathmandu’s chief district officer—was arrested. The government has also intensified money laundering probes against Oli and two of the other biggest names in Nepali politics: Sher Bahadur Deuba and Pushpa Kamal Dahal, both of whom are also former prime ministers.

These are major developments not only because they happened so quickly, but also because they are so rare. Nepal’s political elite don’t typically face justice, even though they are widely believed to be involved in various forms of malfeasance. The country’s main anticorruption body prosecuted a former prime minister for the first time just last year

Shah’s government already faces a fundamental dilemma: By holding back, it risks angering a public with high expectations for rapid and meaningful political change. But by moving quickly, it risks a confrontation with the elites who have dominated the country since the abolition of the monarchy in 2008 and even since the transition to democracy began in the early 1990s.

In effect, the new government took power knowing that it would need to make a gamble either way. For now, it appears to be going on the offensive—a move that........

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