Twenty-eight prominent civic figures have issued a five-point public appeal accusing the Balendra Shah government of veering toward authoritarian governance, the most organised civil society pushback the administration has faced in its first five weeks in office.
The signatories point to three specific areas of concern: the forced, overnight eviction of squatter settlements carried out under heavy security without adequate notice or resettlement plans; governance by ordinance that bypasses Parliament for measures that could have been legislated through the House; and the mass removal of nearly 1,600 public officials without due process or transition planning.
Their five demands are an immediate halt to further evictions until a credible resettlement plan is in place and the constitutional rights of affected citizens are guaranteed; withdrawal of ordinances and return to parliamentary process for major governance decisions; accountability for rights violations during the demolition drive; publication of the National Human Rights Commission’s study report on the killings during the Bhadra 23 and 24 protests; and a guarantee that the government’s reform agenda does not erode constitutional rights and rule of law. Nepal Students’ Union raised the same demand for the NHRC report on the same day.
The appeal arrives as resistance to the eviction drive emerges on multiple fronts. A Dang municipality chairman refused to allow bulldozers in his jurisdiction without proper resettlement plans. Three major international organisations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the International Commission of Jurists, had earlier written an open letter urging the government to strengthen human rights safeguards and accelerate transitional justice. The government, through Urban Development Minister Sunil Lamsal and Federal Affairs Minister Pratibha Rawal, has maintained that evictions along flood-risk riverbanks were necessary ahead of the monsoon, and that genuine squatters will be resettled before any further land clearance proceeds. Whether PM Shah engages with civil society voices at all will be an important signal of the administration’s democratic disposition.