On Thursday afternoon at around 1:45 pm, 25-year-old ride-sharing driver Ganesh Nepali set himself ablaze outside the Department of Passports in Tripureshwar following a distressing altercation with a Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) police personnel. Already struggling to repay a Rs300,000 motorcycle loan, Nepali succumbed to his injuries the following day. While a fresh parking violation and wheel lock triggered the act, his family alleges that repeated fines from city authorities ultimately drove him to his breaking point. His final words to his brother remain a haunting indictment: “This is all because of the metropolis.”

Following his death, police have questioned three city police officers, elevating this tragedy from a localised enforcement issue to a severe trial of systemic urban governance. However, this tragedy is not merely a localised incident of a fine gone wrong. It is a symptom of a deeper, more systemic rot in our urban governance. It is a trial of the Nepali state and its burgeoning municipal police forces, which appear to have traded the duty of service for a mandate of bulldozer and boot.

What is perhaps as staggering as the tragedy itself is the profound silence emanating from the offices of those who once championed the cause of the common man against systemic institutional failure. In January 2023, when entrepreneur Prem Prasad Acharya set himself on fire outside the Parliament building, the reaction from our current leaders was swift and emotive. Then Mayor, now Prime Minister, Balendra Shah wrote then that “each and every unit, department and organ of the state have failed in this case.” Rabi Lamichhane, then Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, was even more contrite, stating, “In this case we are guilty. I am guilty.”

Today, Shah and Lamichhane occupy the very seats of power they once critiqued, yet their silence regarding Ganesh Nepali is deafening. When they were outsiders, every tragedy was an indictment of the old guard. Now that the machinery of the state is under their command—specifically a municipal police force, set by Shah when he was mayor of Kathmandu metropolis, that answers to the Mayor—the rhetoric of systemic failure has been replaced by administrative silence. This shift from vocal empathy to bureaucratic distance is a betrayal of the populist wave that carried them to office.

The death of Ganesh Nepali is the most extreme point on a timeline of escalating municipal aggression. For years, the city police have been accused of undermining the very private property rights that Article 25 of the Constitution of Nepal seeks to protect. We have seen this ‘dozer vision’ in the Tukucha River excavation, where municipal authorities deployed heavy machinery to dig up residential backyards in Hattisar. These citizens held official land ownership certificates (Lalpurja), yet the city attempted demolition without a formal legal process or compensation, effectively acting as investigator, judge and executioner.

The patterns of misconduct extend beyond land to the movable property of the most vulnerable. From the violent crackdowns on street vendors and waste collectors to the forceful seizure of bicycles and carts without providing official receipts, the city police have routinely crossed the threshold of private property and personal livelihood. Mind you, these are not federal police executing court-issued warrants. They are officers whose actions often amount to civil trespass under the Muluki Civil Code.

How did we arrive at a point where a municipal force can act with such impunity? The formation of these units is enabled by the Local Government Operation Act, 2017, and Schedule 8 of the Constitution, which grants local levels the power to manage ‘Nagar Prahari’ (City Police) for enforcing bylaws and protecting public property. While the federal framework exists, it requires individual cities to pass their own legislation—like the Kathmandu Metropolitan City Police Act—to define duties and ranks.

The crisis, however, is not one of authority, but of accountability. Unlike the Nepal Police, who are trained and legally bound by criminal procedure codes, municipal police are often deployed as raw enforcement units using tactics like baton charges and aggressive physical containment, which they are not legally mandated to perform. There is a glaring lack of independent oversight. When a boundary dispute or a parking disagreement arises, the city should file a civil dispute or issue formal notices under the Land Acquisition Act. Instead, they bypass the judicial system entirely, using municipal forces to enforce executive whims overnight.

To understand why this is a moral failure, we might look to the philosopher Robert Nozick. In his Entitlement Theory of Justice, outlined in his seminal work, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick argued that a person is justly entitled to property if it was acquired through legitimate transfer—such as buying a motorcycle or inheriting a shop. Under this view, when a citizen holds a Lalpurja or a legal title to a vehicle, the state has no moral right to seize or damage that property unilaterally.

Nozick’s philosophy fiercely rejects utilitarian overrule—the idea that individual rights can be sacrificed for social utility. A cleaner city or a less congested pavement is a noble goal, but it does not override an individual’s right to their own possessions and livelihood. When the city police seize a vendor’s cart or clamp a driver’s bike without due process, they are committing an act of state aggression. A city cannot destroy the rule of law to enforce a local bylaw.

As expected, opposition parties like the Nepali Congress and CPN-UML have been quick to seize upon this tragedy in Parliament, framing the city police’s actions as ‘structural violence against the working class’. While their criticisms are factually grounded, we must view their outrage through a cynical lens. These same parties have a long history of apathy towards the urban poor when they held the reins of power. Their current fervour is less about the dignity of Ganesh Nepali and more about weaponising a tragedy to erode the popularity of figures in power. We must be careful not to let the genuine plight of the worker become mere ammunition for a political war.

The state must honour private property rights not just in word, but in administrative practice. We need a transition from punitive, reactionary policing to structural, policy-driven urban governance. First, we must demilitarise municipal police training. These officers should be trained in conflict de-escalation and administrative mediation rather than physical containment. If a situation carries a risk of violence, the law dictates that they must defer to the federal police. Second, the government should implement spatial zoning and time-sharing. Instead of absolute bans on informal workers, we should demarcate specific zones and times where vendors and gig workers can operate without the fear of a ‘cat-and-mouse’ game with the city police. Third, we must reform the punitive fine system. Rather than physically clamping vehicles and inviting high-stress confrontations, the city should utilise digital cameras and E-challans tied to licenses. This removes the flashpoint of immediate confrontation that led to the tragedy at Tripureshwar. Finally, the federal parliament must enact an act to protect the street vendors, to give informal workers legal standing and prevent arbitrary confiscations.

The death of Ganesh Nepali was not an accident. It was a consequence— the result of a system that values the aesthetic of the city over the dignity of its citizens. True urban governance recognises that informal labour and gig economies are not crimes to be eradicated, but the very lifeblood of our city. If Kathmandu is to be a city for all, it must first stop being a city that drives its most vulnerable to the flames.