The national defence force, it seems, is interested in everything but matters military. After selling petroleum products, building roads, operating emulsion plants, running schools and medical colleges—and peddling bottled water—it now wants to venture into clothes-making. In the process, it has chosen to bat aside any criticism it has faced over the years over its growing commercial interests. Senior army officials now are in favour of reviving sick industries and helping with the country’s industrialisation. What’s more, Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal is understood to have taken the army’s proposal positively, in the hope that the revival will boost the economy.

The army is learnt to have conducted a feasibility study to raise from dead the Hetauda Kapada Udyog, which has remained moribund for the past 24 years. The defence force says the factory suffered from poor marketing, lack of technological upgrade, frequent power cuts, and financial burdens due to overstaffing—all of which it can fix. By injecting Rs1.93 billion into the company and spending Rs780 million a year on its operation, the army top brass thinks the factory can be made profitable again. The revival proposal sounds excellent, except that it is not the army’s task to make and sell clothes. As an added bonus, the factory’s takeover comes with the prospect of using a vast area of land it is located in.

The army’s deep interest in land is evident in the way it has for years occupied the open fields in Tundikhel, Kathmandu. With top political parties and bureaucrats looking the other way, the public call for the army to vacate the Tundikhel premises for public use has been sidelined for years. Rather than listen to the concerns of the public and the civil society, the institution has chosen to press on with its ill-advised ventures.

It hasn’t even been a month and a half since the Chief of Army Staff, Prabhu Ram Sharma, stated before the State Affairs and Good Governance Committee of the House of Representatives that the Kathmandu-Tarai Expressway wouldn’t be completed even by 2027. Sharma even claimed that the army had not asked for the project, implying that the responsibility for the delay lay somewhere else. Coming six years after the army started the project, the statement by Sharma was thoroughly unprofessional. As unprofessional as its venture into the road-building initiative was, its sole focus right now should be on using all its might and resources to complete work on the expressway at the earliest—and again never take up such projects.

But Nepal Army, if anything, seems to enjoy the controversies it is gathering as it defies its professional character. Even without such business ventures, the institution has its hands full with its duties related to national security, intelligence gathering, protecting national parks and saving people’s lives in times of disaster. In the mad rush to make money, the army leadership is corroding the legacy and legitimacy of their own institution. This in turn represents an unprecedented threat to national security. The army should pull back from more adventurism in business before it is too late.