KATHMANDU – Nepal’s Public Accounts Committee exists to audit ledgers, not to stage confrontations. Last month it did both. Ruling party lawmaker Khagendra Sunar accused Inspector General of Police Dan Bahadur Karki of embezzling crores of rupees from a routine procurement contract covering socks, shoes, uniforms and rations, and demanded the country’s top police officer step aside while an investigation ran its course. Sunar delivered the accusation in a manner former officials have since described as verbally abusive, based on an anonymous complaint. Karki did not walk out. He offered his personal bank statements and phone records for immediate audit. That offer is the detail Sunar’s campaign has yet to answer.
The confrontation has since split Kathmandu’s political class, and it deserves to. A lawmaker’s duty to investigate corruption does not license him to convict a public official on an anonymous tip, in a televised hearing, before a single document has been examined. What happened in the Public Accounts Committee was a verdict delivered ahead of the trial.
Nepal’s procurement audits follow a paper trail: tender documents, vendor invoices, delivery receipts, comparative pricing across bidding cycles. None of that requires a shouting match. It requires subpoenaing the file. If Sunar has evidence that election-period contracts for police supplies were steered toward favored vendors, the committee has the power to summon procurement officers, freeze the relevant accounts, and compel disclosure. Instead, Sunar used a House floor session to ask why ministers get dismissed over lesser allegations while Karki remains in his post, framing the government’s restraint as protection of wrongdoing. That is a rhetorical question, not an investigative one.
Karki’s response undercuts the premise of the attack. When an official facing corruption allegations refuses scrutiny, that refusal is itself a signal. When an official instead volunteers his private financial and phone records for audit, the burden shifts. Karki denied all wrongdoing and offered his personal records for immediate examination. Sunar has not accepted it. A legislator genuinely committed to rooting out graft would seize that offer as the fastest route to the truth. Declining it, and continuing instead to make the accusation in public forums, suggests the goal was never the audit. It was the spectacle.
The Forum of Former Nepal Police Chiefs, under former IGP Motilal Bohara, formally objected that mistreating the sitting IGP undermines the morale and cohesion of the entire security organization. That is not a reflexive closing of ranks. A police force answers to civilian oversight, but its chief also has to command roughly seventy thousand officers who watch how the state treats him. If the head of the institution can be humiliated on an unverified complaint, with no chance to produce his own records first, every officer below him absorbs the lesson that rank offers no protection against accusation without proof.
None of this means Karki should be shielded from scrutiny. But there is a difference between demanding an investigation and pronouncing guilt before the investigation starts. Sunar has conflated the two, and Home Minister Sudhan Gurung was right to warn against character assassination built on unverified allegations.
If Sunar has the evidence he claims to have, the honest move is to hand it to investigators and let the ledgers speak. Everything else is theater, and theater has never once balanced a budget.
