My journey from the hills of Pokhara to the halls of Harvard was not easy. However, along the way, I have often found myself confronting an uncomfortable question: What would my life have looked like had I been born not in Pokhara, but in a village in Humla? Not into my family, but into one without the same footing? I made it here, and I am grateful. But gratitude has never quite silenced the question. It is, in fact, the question that led me to study political philosophy at Harvard, and eventually to the work of John Rawls.

What a just society ought to look like is one of the prime questions in political philosophy. Having read across the works from Plato to Marx, it is Rawls and his magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, whose framework I find most rigorous and most honestly applicable to Nepal’s present condition.

Rawls builds his theory of justice on a thought experiment. He asks us to imagine designing the basic principles of a society from behind what he calls a ‘veil of ignorance’, a position in which we are stripped of all knowledge of our caste, class, gender, language and every other accident of birth. Only from behind this veil, Rawls argues, we arrive at principles that are genuinely fair, because only then are we designing institutions we would be willing to inhabit from any position within them.

Nepali policymakers should internalise the Rawlsian idea of justice. Consider the citizenship law. For years, children born to Nepali mothers and foreign fathers found it considerably harder to obtain citizenship than those born to Nepali fathers. On its surface, this looks like a legal technicality. In practice, it determines whether a person can open a bank account, own land, sit for a government examination, or send their children to a public school. These are not peripheral concerns. They are the basic conditions of a dignified life. Now ask the Rawlsian question. Would anyone, not knowing the circumstances of their own birth, agree to a rule that handed out these possibilities based on which parent happened to be Nepali? No rational policymaker would accept such a rule. The rules are biased because the people who wrote them already knew exactly where they stood.

The same question applies to how Nepal allocates its budget. Per-capita development expenditure in Bagmati Province consistently dominates that of Madhesh and Karnali. Roads, hospitals, universities and real economic opportunity remain clustered around Kathmandu while the provinces that need them most get the least. A policymaker in Kathmandu should be able to look at every policy they sign and ask honestly, if they had been born in a village in Karnali, would the policy have given them a fair chance to succeed in life?

Similarly, the civil service examination, the principal gateway to public service in Nepal, is administered in Nepali, while only around 45 percent of the population speaks Nepali as their mother tongue. Such a policy creates a structural barrier that systematically disadvantages non-Nepali speaking communities, not because they lack ability, but because the state has defined competence in terms that privilege one linguistic community over others. A policymaker must ask whether a young Tharu man has a fair chance of entering the civil service under such a system.

Nepal’s political imagination has long been divided between two exhausted frameworks. The first is the developmentalist promise that growth will eventually reach everyone. The second is the identity-political demand for ethnic autonomy and group representation. Both are valid, yet neither has delivered justice to those who need it most.

The developmentalist camp often sells the dream of ‘making Nepal Switzerland.’ Their philosophy is that the government should prioritise infrastructure development, increase GDP, and that a rising tide shall lift all boats. There is nothing wrong with wanting roads and hospitals and economic growth as basic infrastructure and developments promote the liberty to live a full life. However, such hollow development without structural change does not improve liberty; it undermines it and increases inequality. Such policies often get prioritised where power already sits. Kathmandu gets a better highway; Bajura gets the promise of one. Schools in cities get better education from well-equipped teachers, while children in rural areas do not. The developmentalist camp often roots for meritocracy. But the fruits of growth with this mindset go to those already positioned to receive them, and as a consequence, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.

The identity-political framework sees what the developmentalist camp cannot. Nepal’s bureaucracy, civil service, courts and universities were not built for everyone. They were built by and for a particular caste, a particular language, a particular geography. Asking a Madheshi farmer or a Tharu woman to simply compete on equal terms within institutions designed without them in mind is definitely not just. However, even within excluded communities, the story is not simple. A Dalit woman in Humla faces several walls at once—her caste, gender, poverty, geography—each identity from her birth limits her pursuit of life. The same is true for those marginalised by sexuality or by identities the state has never bothered to name. What I am trying to argue is that representation without redistribution is incomplete justice. And there are people for whom the state is not even an abstraction to argue with. It simply has never shown up. No road, no school, no document that makes them legible to the system meant to serve them.

A government serious about justice has to begin with those people. Not with the median citizen or the taxpayer in Kathmandu, but with the person for whom the state has been most absent. It is the minimum condition for a government that wants to call itself legitimate. None of us chose where we were born, which family we came into or which community shaped us. Those were accidents. A government that does not acknowledge it wholeheartedly is not governing justly.

Nepal has written a constitution; it has not yet built a philosophy. As I walk through Harvard Yard, I still think about the version of me born in Humla. He may not have made it very far at all—not because he lacked talent, but because the institutions meant to serve him were never designed with him in mind. My caste, gender and upbringing in Pokhara gave me a head start I did not choose at birth. Humla would have given him a burden he did not deserve. He deserved better. So does everyone in the country still waiting for the state to show up. This is what we need the government and development for.

This piece is part of an op-ed series in collaboration with The Nepal Discourse, a convening at Harvard University and MIT focused on shaping Nepal’s strategic vision for the next decade.