Recent allegations of Medicaid fraud in Ohio, United States, involving some individuals and entities linked to the resettled Bhutanese community, have reopened an older debate in Nepal’s public sphere: Who gets to be called Nepali, who is pushed outside that name and who benefits when identity is stretched or narrowed according to convenience. Home to more than 40,000 resettled former Bhutanese refugees, Ohio has become the latest backdrop for a conversation that has surfaced repeatedly over the years.

There is a recognisable pattern in how resettled Bhutanese people of Nepali-speaking backgrounds are treated in Nepal’s public discourse. For years, many have been welcomed into the idea of a global Nepali family when they sing Nepali songs, celebrate Dashain or speak emotionally about Nepal. But when the recent allegations of fraud emerged, this same cultural intimacy suddenly became inconvenient. Then comes the rush to disassociate, draw hard borders and hastily declare, “They are not Nepalis.” A recent commentary by Bhushan Dahal, a renowned Nepali journalist, is one prominent example of this troubling pattern, but it is far from the only one.

The pattern is almost reflexive: The very moment something goes wrong, it has historically been a common trend to blame the Bhutanese community, not because evidence demanded it, but because they could be an easy target given their vulnerabilities. Individual allegations involving specific people become a ‘Bhutanese fraud problem’, as if criminal liability can be transferred onto an entire displaced population.

This blame-shifting is then reinforced by opportunists who quickly trade in identities for selective solidarity. Some have reached for the fake Bhutanese refugee scandal in Nepal as supporting evidence, as though that history confirms a pattern of Bhutanese deception. It does not. That scandal was conceived, organised and shamefully executed by Nepal’s own political elite, including senior officials and a sitting Home Minister, who exploited the Bhutanese refugee label for financial gain.

To invoke that scandal as a character reference against the very community whose name was stolen in it is not only logically wrong, but it strongly compounds the injustice. The treatment of the Nepali language and traditions as suspicious instruments of deception is historically insensitive. The Nepali-speaking Bhutanese were forcibly uprooted from their birthplace in the late 1980s and early 1990s for upholding the very language, dress and ancestry that Bhutan’s despotic state treated as threats to national purity. Their language was removed from schools, their public identity was criminalised and their belonging was questioned because they refused to disappear into enforced cultural uniformity.

To imply that these same songs, festivals and cultural gatherings are a calculated camouflage designed to hide criminal behaviour is a cruel inversion of history. In reality, Nepalis from Nepal do not own the Nepali language and culture as exclusive property. The ancestors of the Nepali-speaking Bhutanese migrated to the hills of Bhutan even before modern Nepal took shape within its current political boundaries.

As prominent Nepali journalist, Rajesh Koirala, has observed of the diaspora in New Hampshire, Dashain among resettled Bhutanese is no borrowed national costume. While many immigrant communities from Nepal are increasingly drawn towards modernised, party-centred events, the resettled Bhutanese have fiercely retained traditional worship and ritual observance. This was never a strategy of camouflage; it was a strategy of cultural survival.

Resettled Bhutanese were not Nepali citizens merely because they speak the Nepali language. Nepal generously hosted them as refugees for nearly two decades, opening its borders to over 100,000 people and continues to shelter close to 7,000 individuals in camps across Jhapa and Morang. And unanimously resettled, and even those languishing in the camps, have always been indebted to Nepal for this gesture. On the specific question of citizenship, voting rights and the legal privileges of the Nepali state, Kathmandu has every right to draw the line.

However, there is a fundamental difference between being politically Nepali and being culturally Nepali, and conflating the two is where the discourse goes wrong. A culture, a language and an ancestral memory are lived, inherited and carried irrespective of political constructs. Kathmandu can decide who holds a Nepali passport, but factually, it cannot decide who holds a Nepali identity. By reducing a cultural identity down to a legal passport, such arguments alienate not just the Bhutanese-Nepali community, but, in a way, the entire Nepali diaspora.

Some resettled Bhutanese, particularly those born and raised in refugee camps, have at times described Nepal as ‘their country’ out of emotional attachment and the experience of statelessness. Growing up stateless, belonging nowhere on paper, produces exactly this kind of confusion. It is a reason for compassion, not a pretext for suspicion. As California-based youth Thakur Kharel wrote on Facebook, “Many of us grew up hearing ‘Bhutangey’ used as an insult. We were told we were not Nepali enough in Nepal, not Bhutanese enough in Bhutan, and now even in America, some people still want to decide when we belong.”

Nepali identity, distinct from the legal matter of citizenship and voting rights, is not a political topic. Outside the domain of passports and electoral rolls, who identifies as Nepali in language, culture, tradition and spirit is a matter of individual and collective conscience, not a matter for Kathmandu to adjudicate. Neither media nor politicians hold the authority to tell a community that has carried its language, festivals and ancestry across centuries and continents that its identity is conditional or up for review.