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A Reckoning Comes for Nepal

A year after its Gen Z uprising, Nepal faces a struggle not only for democracy and human rights but for climate survival.

On a Monday in mid-April, I walked through the informal settlement in the Thapathali neighborhood of Kathmandu, situated on the banks of the sacred, flood-prone, and sewage-filled Bagmati River. The sights were familiar. I’d visited the decades-old community of about 150 poor and landless families two years earlier while reporting on riverside slums that were facing threats of forced eviction and increasingly frequent and ferocious floods.

This time I was just passing through, retracing a route through the Bagmati’s dense urban corridor, its riverfront alternating between informal settlements, high-end apartments, shiny office complexes, and sleekly designed parks with pedestrian paths beside the fouled river. The pricey new buildings often loom over the slum dwellings like a taunt.

There are many such informal settlements across the Kathmandu Valley’s chaotic urban sprawl, and they’re home to tens of thousands of people. Across the country, there are at least a million informal settlers. Many are internal migrants to the cities from rapidly depopulating rural districts, fleeing droughts, floods, landslides, and poverty. (Roughly one in five Nepalis live below the official poverty line of less than $1.50 a day.) Because these families occupy public property, the government and many Nepalis call them “squatters.”

That day in Thapathali, I paused to chat with a young father who stood in the doorway of his improvised home. Five days later, by the evening of April 25, that home and the entire Thapathali settlement—along with other settlements in Kathmandu Valley—were gone. On the orders of the recently elected prime minister, Balendra “Balen” Shah, bulldozers leveled the community, with thousands of armed security personnel, including national police and the Nepali Army, enforcing the evictions. The government gave the residents 24 hours’ notice—at most. Households scrambled to save what belongings they could. Thousands of people were moved to hastily prepared and ill-equipped temporary holding centers, where they waited for a promised resettlement plan. Many more simply fled, fearful of the authorities. In all, according to advocates for the landless, more than 2,800 households and close to 17,000 people were displaced. At least five people have died because of the evictions.

The razing of the riverside settlements was one of the first initiatives of Shah’s premiership. In March, he had swept into office on a wave of hope and change after last September’s Gen Z uprising and the ensuing violence. His Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) had won almost two-thirds of the vote in the snap elections—unprecedented in Nepal’s 30-year history of unstable parliamentary democracy—and then, in April, Shah exploited widespread anti-squatter (and anti-poor) sentiment for populist effect. As the mayor of Kathmandu from 2022 until this past winter, he had tried and failed to demolish the Thapathali settlement without regard for due process, but he was met with fierce resistance on the streets and, ultimately, was stopped by the High Court pending a government resettlement plan. This time, as prime minister, he moved with overwhelming force—and without any such plan.

The evictions dominated headlines and social media for weeks in April and May and were cheered by Shah’s middle-class fan base. But prominent members of Nepali civil society decried the campaign, calling out Shah’s “authoritarian” disregard for the rule of law and “grave violation of basic human rights.”

What I saw from my vantage point was all of that and more. One of the justifications for the mass evictions, offered by Shah in a social-media post (his preferred means of communication), was to rescue the riverside residents from the deadly floods, as if he had only their welfare in mind—and not the real-estate developers eyeing the city’s riverfront. What I saw, in other words, was the fraught intersection of climate change, social justice, and human rights. To be sure, the people of these riverside communities should be moved out of harm’s way and provided safe and secure housing—but only through a legal process, established under Nepali and international law, of consultation and mutually agreed-upon resettlement options, with plenty of notice before eviction. Not bulldozers at dawn and decades-old neighborhoods reduced to rubble and the debris of precarious lives.

There is a tendency among advocates, especially in the Global North, to talk about global climate justice in terms that are abstract and idealized, disconnected from the social and political realities within specific countries. In Nepal, efforts to implement meaningful climate-adaptation policies at scale have long been stymied not only by a lack of money and institutional capacity but by the political instability and endemic corruption of the revolving coalition governments ruled by the three major legacy parties for the past three decades. The political earthquake in September, combined with the RSP’s election sweep in March, seemed to offer the possibility of a new era—a new generation of leaders who might transform Nepal’s governance and make real progress. But the reality is far more complicated.

If “climate justice” is to mean anything in places like Nepal, where catastrophe is already unfolding, it will depend as much on conditions on the ground as on the amount of funding for adaptation and climate-related “loss and damage” that may or may not materialize through the United Nations and other geopolitical processes. Climate justice will have to be fought for—and equality and human rights will have to be won—not only among countries but within them.

The week before Shah’s bulldozers rolled into the riverside settlements, I sat with two landless women in the informal settlement on the Manohara River, near Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport. The women, members of Nepal’s Dalit community (that is, “untouchables”), told me about their struggles, not least with water—both flooding and scarcity.

The elder of the two, 67-year-old Shanti Devi, migrated from western Nepal and had lived in the community for more than 20 years. She spoke about purchasing drinking water in large jugs, while those who can’t afford them queue up at 4 am at the free public water tap 45 minutes away. “You have to wait for three to four hours,” she said. “There used to be a large amount of water; now it is only a small amount.” The........

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