In constitutional democracies, the test of power is not merely whether it can be exercised but whether it can be exercised without compromising the integrity of the system through which it flows. That distinction between state power and process often recedes in moments of political rupture, when urgency (or, more populistically, ‘promise’) begins to masquerade as justification and decisiveness as legitimacy. Nepal appears to be entering such a moment with the recent appointment of Sudan Gurung as Home Minister. His appointment is a revealing test of the thresholds we are willing to accept, and quietly lower.

Gurung’s rise has been as rapid as it has been contested. On the first day of the Gen Z protests, he publicly disavowed any organisational role, presenting himself as a volunteer distributing water. Yet, material that has since surfaced, including facts of his involvement in seeking administrative permission for protests and a circulated video of him explaining coordination mechanisms, suggests a degree of prior engagement that sits uneasily with that initial representation. These elements, taken individually, may admit of benign explanation, but when taken together, they form a pattern that has not been meaningfully clarified.

Gurung’s own account, as reflected in his statement to and seemingly accepted at face value by the Gauri Bahadur Karki-led commission, claims that senior officials of the Nepal Police and the Armed Police Force reached out to him during the nationwide unrest and requested his assistance in preventing attacks on the police headquarters. This claim, even if accepted, raises more questions than it resolves. If he possessed sufficient influence over protestors for the leadership of security agencies to turn to him in moments of extraordinary crises, then his proximity to the dynamics of those days was not incidental. That proximity may well reflect constructive intervention. But more importantly, it underscores why subsequent institutional clarity about role, influence and responsibility was essential before entrusting him with oversight of those same institutions. Compounding this ambiguity, videos have circulated showing Gurung amid high-intensity rallies on September 9, where slogans about burning Baluwatar (metonym for the prime ministerial abode) were openly raised—circumstances that, at the very least, warrant scrutiny.

The ambiguity extends beyond biography into rhetoric. Gurung’s widely circulated statement that ‘the kids were killed first and Singha Durbar was burned later’ is, in chronological terms, accurate, but it tries to innocently justify the nationwide unrest of September 9. Two distinct failures—police violence and nationwide anarchy—being justified as part of a single explanatory arc risks collapsing moral clarity and dissolving accountability precisely where it is most required.

The concern is not that such contradictions establish wrongdoing, which they alone do not, but that they establish ambiguities which have neither been publicly resolved nor institutionally interrogated before the conferral of one of the most sensitive offices in the state. A segment of public discourse, though increasingly overshadowed by a surge of optimism surrounding the new government, has raised questions about Gurung’s past, his political positioning, and his [un]accountability. While some of them are baselessly accusatory (and even racist), many are inquiries that any candidate for high public office ought to be prepared to address. In a system confident in its processes, such scepticism would ordinarily trigger clarification, not be bypassed through career elevation and subsequent showmanship.

More troubling is the ministerial portfolio he now occupies, which exercises administrative authority over the Nepal Police—an institution that was engaged in investigating aspects of the September violence. Structural concerns arise when those tasked with investigation are institutionally answerable to an individual who has, at various points, been publicly associated with the events under scrutiny. The appearance of compromised impartiality is sufficient to erode confidence in the process. The oft-repeated principle that justice must not only be done but must also be seen to be done is not rhetorical excess—it is a foundational requirement of legitimacy.

These concerns would be serious in any context, but they become more so when viewed alongside recent policing practices. The increasing reliance on urgent arrests, effected without prior judicial warrant and often justified in the language of immediacy, signals a drift towards exception becoming norm. Urgent arrest powers are not inherently unlawful. They exist to address genuine exigencies such as flight risk or destruction of evidence, but their blanket or insufficiently justified use risks bypassing judicial oversight in favour of unchecked executive discretion. Democracies do not endure merely by ensuring that the right people are targeted—they endure when the right procedures are followed, irrespective of political convenience. Moreover, premature arrests initiate procedural timelines that can compress investigations, incentivising hurried charge-sheeting over careful evidence-building. Criminal process, in such circumstances, risks becoming performative—visible and decisive, but substantively fragile.

What is perhaps more disquieting than these institutional developments is the speed with which public scepticism has been displaced. On March 27, Gurung’s appointment was met with unease, even among sections of those otherwise supportive of the current ruling dispensation. Within a day, however, visibly assertive acts—raids, arrests and a heightened rhetorical posture—began to reshape those criticisms into approvals. This shift was not anchored in clarification or accountability but in performance and reflected not merely inconsistency but a deeper transformation in how political legitimacy is conferred—away from adherence to process and towards the appearance of decisiveness in a political culture increasingly shaped by short public memory.

This pattern is not uniquely Nepali. In Modi’s India, the expanding use of preventive detention and broad police powers has often been justified in the name of urgency, even as concerns about due process persist. The prolonged incarceration of activists such as Umar Khalid and Sonam Wangchuk—often without timely judicial resolution of bail—illustrates how the process itself can be stretched in the name of security. Similarly, Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines witnessed visibly forceful action generating widespread approval despite profound legal and human rights concerns. In both contexts, legitimacy is increasingly derived from the perception of decisiveness rather than adherence to procedure. When urgency becomes a substitute for law, exceptions quietly harden into norms.

Max Weber’s distinction between charismatic and legal-rational authority remains instructive here. Charisma, particularly when amplified through sympathetic political and social media ecosystems, can surely mobilise, disrupt and inspire. But unless it is disciplined by institutional constraints—translated into rules, procedures and accountability—it risks eroding the very norms that make governance possible.

Nepal has never lacked leaders who promise decisiveness and transformation, but it risks losing the confidence that power is exercised through law and not around it. If political gimmicks continue to displace process and performance continues to eclipse accountability, the cost will not be borne by any one individual but by the system itself, incrementally and perhaps irreversibly. The choice, therefore, is not between action and restraint, but between power and process. And by that standard, the present moment demands not celebration, but scrutiny.