Nepal Prime Minister Balendra Shah’s first month in office has been marked by speed, with concerns rising over a democratic stress test.
Mr. Shah’s Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) won a whopping 182 seats — just two shy of a two-thirds majority — in the March elections, triggered by last September’s Gen Z protests. Analysts and observers say the Shah government is trying to rule by ordinances, bypassing legislative debate, even as it moved to evict landless squatters, with security forces razing houses and other structures along the riverbanks in the Kathmandu Valley.
