The easternmost district of the Tarai-Madhesh routinely produces momentous events and colourful personalities. The uprising of Nepali Naxalites began in Jhapa. The district repeatedly elected one of the earliest Maoists of Nepal, Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, who later became hyper-revisionist and uber ethnonationalist. Prime Minister Balendra Shah had to discard his metropolitan base in Kathmandu and travel to the banks of Mechi to defang the political predator through electoral means in its den. 

The district can now also boast of a young achiever who is claimed to have shaken the structure of governance in the country to its very core, with his reach extending from the bar to the bench and from the chambers of executive authorities to the salons of lawmakers. Allegations are so outrageous that they defy imagination and appear to be true precisely due to their incredulity. Rudyard Kipling quipped, “The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Kathmandu” in a different context, but it holds equally true of the state of the State in Nepal.

Little was known about the 30-year-old Inam Sapkota before he was detained by the Special Bureau of the Nepal Police. The Bureau normally deals with counterterrorism and transnational crime investigations, often operates from its secretive offices and unmarked locations, and reports directly to the Inspector General of Nepal Police. Clearly, there is more to the Inam Logs containing call registers, timestamped messages and contact lists. 

Some of the information made public has been corroborated, denied or ignored by the affected parties. The media is awash with what can perhaps be called ‘investigative cover-up’ exercises: Limiting the linkages of the young man to the disgraced former Chief Justice Cholendra Shumsher Rana, controversial middleman-cum-fixer Deepak Bhatta and his clients, at least two prominent judges of the Supreme Court, and a clutch of politicos across party lines. Political scandals are primarily born of three impulses: The corrupt pursuit of capital, the illicit shortcut to power and the arrogant abuse of authority. 

Whenever anything important happens in Nepal, everyone rushes to allege, explore or blame ‘foreign conspiracy’. The country appears to have become a lot more confident after the Chartreuse Revolt of Fall 2025, when every estate of the State fell to violent protests and widespread arson within two days. The transnational connections of fixers who went around with past, present and future prime ministers in their pockets will perhaps remain unexplored because doing so may expose the elements behind the regime change of 2025, which was later legitimised through almost plebiscitary elections.

While the media failed to expose fixers before their fall, the judiciary—at least a section of it—sanguinely sleepwalked into their comforting embrace. There is a reason the executive has been emboldened to challenge the press, and the legislature is contemplating clipping the wings of the judiciary to complete ‘state capture’ that began last year.

It is tempting to expect that revelations of this scale would trigger widespread indignation. Instead, the public reaction has been muted at best, if not total indifference—a collective shrug from a society that has grown thoroughly scandal-fatigued.

For the average citizen, the Inam Logs do not reveal a new breach of trust so much as they confirm a long-standing suspicion: Formal institutions are merely administrative facades for informal networks of exchange. Indignation requires a baseline expectation of integrity, and that hope was buried a decade ago—when, after the 16-point pact of 2015, the banana republic without bananas turned out to be as rotten as the parasitic pumpkin monarchy of the past.

Moreover, the post-Chartreuse landscape has left the public psychologically spent. Having witnessed the sudden and absolute collapse of governance during Fall 2025, there is a pervasive sense of fatalism. If a violent upheaval and sweeping elections could only repackage the same underlying machinery under new management, what difference does one high-altitude intermediary make? Apathy, in this climate, is not ignorance—it is self-defence against perpetual disillusionment.

Hubristic ethnocracy

The Supreme Court of India's logo features a Sanskrit motto Yato Dharmastato Jayah, meaning “where there is righteousness, there is victory.” The Sarbochcha Adalat in Nepal has no such pretentions, and for good reasons. Derived from Arabic, Adalat originally meant uprightness, moral rectitude and justice, rather than an institution dispensing justice. When monarchs of the past conceived of courts as extensions of their sovereign authority to dispense justice, they called them Adalat, eventually investing them with a dignity and authority reminiscent of lèse-majesté, reflected in the doctrine of contempt of court. Although itself a creation of the Constitution, the Sarbochch Adalat appears to regard itself as the owner of the Constitution rather than its custodian and interpreter.

Resembling the press in countries under authoritarian regimes, the most widely distributed network of print, radio and television in Nepal is controlled by what can perhaps be termed the Ministry of Truth with a nod to Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty-Four. However, before 2015, there was an independent press that wasn’t overtly xenophobic, jingoistic and ethnonationalist. Prominent media persons had established their credentials by campaigning for democracy, though not necessarily standing for equality, fairness and justice. After the Madhesh Uprising of 2015, however, much of this independent press—barring honourable exceptions—became what I had then termed the ‘Palanquin Press’, happily carrying its ethnonational chieftain, Sharma Oli, to his short-lived glory, with disastrous long-term consequences for the national economy, polity, society and international relations.

Kathmandu’s elitist civil society—composed almost entirely of Bahuns, Chhetris and high-caste Newars—takes immense pleasure in critiquing the executive, often with ample justification. It also loves to hate politicos of all colours, although its distaste for campaigners from subaltern communities appears invariably more pronounced. The judiciary, however, often gets an easy pass, perhaps because influential sections of the dominant Khas-Arya community regard the Supreme Court, along with the Nepali Army, as the two lines of defence of their ethnonational hegemony against claims for equality, inclusion, restitution and fairness.

Realities bite

Indians take their cows as seriously as Nepalis do, so a recent comment of the Madras High Court can be instructive: “Judges need not be treated as holy cows.” The Court went on to invoke Lord Atkin’s celebrated observation that justice must remain open to public scrutiny and outspoken criticism. This deserves to be read alongside First Amendment scholar Frederick Schauer’s observation that “there seems to be little free inquiry about free inquiry and little free speech about free speech”—a warning that has acquired renewed relevance in the United States, where the established republic appears to have gone wayward in recent years. Together, these observations suggest that neither the judiciary nor the press can remain entirely insulated from the society and polity in which they function: They reflect the prejudices, hierarchies and contradictions of the milieu they inhabit.

All the breast-beating about the state of the State, supposedly dictated by a handful of fixers—possibly with transnational connections—is pointless. Like the executive and the legislature, the judiciary and the fourth estate have their societal roots and reflect their cultural values that Dor Bahadur Bista had identified in unforgettable terms: Bhagyabad, Bahunbad, Chakari and Afno Manchhe (fatalism, Bahunism, habituated subservience and networks of privileged kin and pliant loyalists). Political connections and the nature of the regime determine institutional functioning, while majoritarian impulses often prevail over rational behaviour.

Nepalis must do what they know best: Pray. Tihar greetings 2026, with wishes for patient endeavours rather than dreams of quick prosperity.