By Dr. Janardan Subedi

When a leader lies repeatedly, the architecture of deception eventually demands reinforcement. Each lie must be shored up by another, and then another still—until even the falsehoods begin to collapse under their own contradictions. This is precisely the case with Nepal’s current Prime Minister. His statement that Nepal has been transformed into an “accessible country” is not just a distortion of reality—it is part of a habitual pattern of denial and rhetorical inflation. Mr. Prime Minister belongs to that peculiar category of politicians for whom truth is not a point of reference, but a tool of performance. When truth becomes flexible, citizens are forced to live in the tension between what they know and what they are told to believe. In such an environment, public trust erodes not by accident, but by design.

This culture of manufactured truth is not the burden of one leader alone. It is systemic, shared, and rehearsed across the ruling elite. It is not only KP Oli but also Sher Bahadur Deuba, Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’, and their respective political surrogates who belong to this expanding liar’s club. In fact, Oli may simply be the most skillful performer among them—a more coherent voice in a chorus of rhetorical deception. What unites these figures is not ideology or vision, but a shared commitment to deny failure through language, to confuse governance with propaganda, and to treat citizens as spectators in a political theater of illusions. The crisis, then, is not just one of leadership, but of a political culture where the highest offices are held hostage by the compulsions of continual fabrication.

In any democratic society, the words of a Prime Minister carry symbolic and strategic weight. They do not merely describe reality; they help construct it. But when those words become detached from lived experience—when political language functions more as fantasy than as framework—they create what sociologists term “discursive alienation.” That is, citizens no longer hear their own condition reflected in the speech of their leaders. Instead, they encounter denial disguised as leadership.

To claim that Nepal has become “accessible” raises a series of urgent and measurable questions. Accessible to whom? In what ways? And based on what indicators? If accessibility is defined in terms of physical infrastructure—such as roads, electricity, health posts, or internet—then we are compelled to ask how many citizens in Karnali or Far West can reach a hospital within two hours? How many households in the Tarai, still struggling with flood risk and seasonal displacement, feel this “accessibility”? For the child who walks three hours to school, or the farmer whose produce rots on unpaved trails, the Prime Minister’s claim is not just distant—it is absurd.

To be fair, development is complex and gradual. No administration can deliver universal accessibility overnight. But the concern is not with what remains undone—it is with the deliberate misrepresentation of what has not yet been done. What the Prime Minister calls “accessibility” may in fact be infrastructural fragmentation. A few concrete roads, a new airport terminal, or imported electric buses do not constitute transformation. Accessibility cannot be reduced to the symbolism of ribbon-cuttings or drone-shot visuals. It must be measured in terms of equitable reach, affordability, quality of service, and sustainability.

Moreover, accessibility is not simply a matter of logistics; it is deeply intertwined with power and inclusion. A society becomes “accessible” when its institutions are transparent, when its health care is affordable, when justice is reachable not just for elites but for ordinary citizens. Nepal today is witnessing the opposite. As oligarchic politics solidify and the political mafia continues to dominate public institutions, access has become a privilege—not a right. If you know the right politician, bureaucrat, or contractor, Nepal may indeed appear “sugam.” But for the millions without connections, it remains sankraman—dangerous, slow, and unpredictable.

Even more troubling is the performative populism embedded in such claims. The Prime Minister’s rhetoric functions as what political theorist Jürgen Habermas would call a “legitimizing discourse.” It is not designed to reflect empirical truth but to consolidate authority and distract the public from institutional failures. In this context, “accessibility” becomes a mythic narrative—one that reassures party cadres and development partners while obscuring systemic dysfunctions.

Let us take a few examples. The average time it takes for a citizen to get a national ID or passport, or to register property in rural municipalities, remains prohibitively long. Government websites are inaccessible to those without high-speed internet or digital literacy. Hospitals in remote districts still suffer from a severe shortage of doctors, equipment, and medicines. In many parts of Nepal, women must still be carried in bamboo stretchers for miles to deliver their children. If this is what constitutes “accessibility,” the concept has been emptied of its moral and developmental substance.

Accessibility also has a political dimension. An accessible country is one in which power is decentralized not just administratively, but substantively. Yet Nepal’s federalism remains largely ceremonial, with local governments heavily dependent on central allocations, both fiscally and legally. Rural municipalities have limited autonomy to address local needs, while corruption and nepotism continue to dominate appointment and budgetary processes. This is not accessibility; it is entrapment within a centralized illusion.

Finally, from a moral and ethical standpoint, the Prime Minister’s assertion reflects a deeper pathology of Nepali governance: the substitution of performance for accountability. When leaders claim success without evidence—when they speak of transformation while citizens struggle for basics—they do not merely lie. They delegitimize the very concept of public service.

Nepal is not yet an accessible country. It is, at best, a country in pursuit of accessibility—with islands of progress surrounded by oceans of neglect. For a Prime Minister to declare otherwise is not just misleading; it is an erasure of the suffering and perseverance of millions who still wait for the state to arrive in meaningful ways.

In conclusion, democratic speech must be grounded in democratic ethics. Leadership is not about producing applause lines—it is about listening, reckoning, and responding. Accessibility is not a slogan. It is a lived condition. And until every child can walk to school safely, every woman can give birth with dignity, and every citizen can reach justice without bribery or delay, no one should claim that we have arrived.

Until then, such statements are not milestones—they are mirages.