Kathmandu’s arrest of a prominent political observer who shared critical reporting by The Grayzone is the latest sign that a government which promised reform may be more repressive than the one it forcibly replaced.
The Supreme Court of Nepal has ordered the government to explain its reasoning for arresting political analyst Bharatmani Dahal, who was jailed by the country’s cyber police on the grounds that he had spread “misinformation” by sharing a recent report by The Grayzone.
Nepali media reports that Supreme Court Justice Kumar Regmi issued a “show-cause order” requiring the government to justify its arrest of Dahal, who was detained at a tea shop in southeastern Nepal on September 20. The court’s decision came in response to a petition by Dahal’s daughter, who maintains that her father is being held unlawfully.
A political firestorm erupted in the Himalayan nation after The Grayzone published leaked documents from 2019 showing at least four of Nepal’s new political leaders – including Prime Minister Balen Shah – were named by an American government regime change training outfit as figures whom the group would “support” in the future.
The documents showed that an offshoot of the National Endowment for Democracy called the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening (CEPPS) promised in 2019 to support not only Shah, but three other figures who’ve risen to the upper echelons of Nepali politics: Nepalese Home Minister Sudan Gurung, Parliamentarian Sagar Dhakal, and Rabi Lamichhane, the embattled chairman of the political party to which all of the officials mentioned now belong.
The plans were meant to be carried out as part of the so-called “Indo-Pacific Strategy,” Washington’s preferred euphemism for its efforts to prevent China from cooperating with its neighbors.
Published in full by this outlet, the documents’ authenticity has not been contested by either the government or its supporters in the media.
Dahal shared The Grayzone’s article on September 12, describing this outlet’s reporting as “Another Explosion in the American Press.” As of publication, Dahal is the only Nepali known to face legal consequences for disseminating the documents. But he’s far from the only one with questions.
In the weeks since The Grayzone published its report, reporters in Nepal asked the leader of the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), Rabi Lamichhane, about the documents. Lamichhane avoided the question, instead telling journalists that he had not read The Grayzone’s recent report and casting doubt on this outlet’s credibility.
That evasiveness seems to have backfired, however. Following the Shah government’s detention of Bharat, an array of political figures have spoken out against the arrest – and condemned the heavy-handed tactics behind it.
Mahesh Basnet, the Secretary of the Communist Party of Nepal, Unified Marxist–Leninist (CPN-UML) noted with dismay that Bharat Dahal “was arrested while having tea at the direction of the prime minister’s secretariat.”
“Why was he arrested? Because he provided somewhat extensive commentary on the Grayzone issue.” Basnet suggested the government’s overly-defensive response bordered on self-incrimination: “This is like the saying that when a thief is told to cut off the thief’s leg, the thief raises his own leg. Balen and his people are raising their legs.”
“If the report is false, they should prove that it is false and provide clarification and an explanation.” The government’s decision to “arrest Bharat Dahal [over] The Grayzone report,” Basnet said, “shows their authoritarian, autocratic and vindictive style.”
The Shah administration pledged to root out political favoritism, but since taking power in early 2026, Nepal’s new government has quickly sought to sideline those it deemed insufficiently loyal. That group appears to include the Supreme Court judge who ordered the government to provide information on Dahal’s arrest, Justice Kumar Regmi. In July, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Commission of Jurists warned that they’d received “credible reports” that three senior Supreme Court justices, including Regmi, were “subjected to political pressure to resign and threatened with impeachment” if they refused to support Shah’s installation of a less experienced magistrate as the country’s new chief justice.
To be sure, some factions in Nepal remain unconvinced by The Grayzone’s reporting. Yet even a hit piece in the Kathmandu Post questioning our journalistic bona fides tacitly conceded that the documents published by this outlet were legitimate. After rehashing the blatantly false and borderline defamatory claims on The Grayzone’s Wikipedia page, the Kathmandu Post acknowledged the document published by this outlet explicitly “says its youth programmes were ‘in line with the objectives of the Indo-Pacific Strategy,’” the US policy for the region,” adding: “What that actually means in practice is something neither the Americans have explained nor Nepalis have probed further about.”
But the intrigues exposed by The Grayzone investigation weren’t limited to US meddling in Nepal’s foreign affairs or Washington’s plans to antagonize Beijing in its periphery.
As CPN-UML Chair Mahesh Basnet explained, this outlet’s reporting also raised serious questions about the Shah government’s involvement in the so-called Gen Z protests which roiled Nepal in 2025, and ultimately brought the country’s current rulers to power. Given the possibility that Shah and his associates may have manipulated a subsequent investigation to exonerate themselves from criminal liability, Basnet said his party’s position was clear: “If destructive activities were carried out against important structures of the country under the influence of foreign powers, our stance is that there should be an impartial investigation and strict legal action against the guilty.”