KATHMANDU: Nepal’s government has installed Dr Narayan Datta Kandel, a British-educated lawyer, as Attorney General with unusual haste. Sworn in by Acting Chief Justice Sapana Pradhan Malla, he steps into an office that is both political and constitutional: the state’s chief legal adviser, and a gatekeeper of prosecutorial discretion.

The controversy surrounding his appointment is not merely about proximity to power. It is about whether he meets the bar to hold it-and why that bar appears selectively enforced.

On biography, Dr Kandel looks formidable. A former journalist turned lawyer, he studied in Nepal before pursuing graduate work in Ireland and the United Kingdom, culminating in a PhD from Queen’s University Belfast on freedom of expression. He has worked with organizations such as Amnesty International and the Freedom Forum. In another context, this would read as the making of a public-minded jurist.

But constitutional offices are not awarded on narrative; they are constrained by text. Nepal’s constitution requires that an Attorney General possess the same qualifications as a Supreme Court judge. In practice, that means one of three routes: at least 15 years of continuous legal practice; senior standing at the bar; or a sustained, distinguished contribution to the field of law. It is here that the neat arc of Dr Kandel’s career begins to fray.

His license to practice dates to 2003. Yet a license is not practice. By his own professional timeline, he spent over a decade abroad after 2006, engaged in study and other pursuits. The constitution’s insistence on “continuous practice” was not accidental. It was inserted to prevent precisely this sort of episodic qualification-where years can be counted, but not continuity demonstrated.

Senior lawyers note that the clause was a corrective to earlier judicial appointments that stretched the meaning of experience to breaking point.

Dr Kandel’s defenders may pivot to the alternative: that he qualifies as a “distinguished jurist”. His academic credentials are real, and his work on free expression is not trivial. Yet the distinction is demanding by design. It is meant to recognize sustained, field-shaping contribution-not simply the accumulation of degrees.

Academic study, however rigorous, is not typically treated as a substitute for practice; nor are intermittent engagements abroad easily folded into a claim of continuous legal work.

There is a second, more awkward complication. Until his appointment, Dr Kandel served as the personal lawyer to the Rastriya Swatantra Party Chairman Rabi Lamichhane, defending him in cases involving cooperative fraud, organized crime and money laundering.

As an Attorney General, he may now oversee prosecutions that touch the same matters. The conflict is not merely theoretical. It goes to the heart of the office: can a recent advocate for an accused credibly direct the state’s case against him?

Layered atop this is the question of status. Critics point to Dr Kandel’s past association with the Non-Resident Nepali Association in the UK and raise doubts about his citizenship or residence compliance.

In Nepal’s legal framework, citizens who hold foreign permanent residency (PR) status-such as a “Green Card”-are barred from occupying public office, serving in the civil service, or contesting elections.

Questions over Attorney General Kandel’s qualifications and temperament are reinforced by doubts about his status and past affiliations. Critics point to his long stay in Britain and political involvement with the Non-Resident Nepali Association, including his reported candidacy for a UK leadership role in 2021–23.

A 2023 social-media appeal by his wife for votes in an NRNA UK election has further fueled claims that he may, until recently, have operated as a non-resident Nepali-one without full political rights in Nepal.

His own past remarks have added to the unease. At a diaspora event, his spoke of owning property in Britain and criticized the Nepali state-comments that have since resurfaced online. Few months back on September 11, 2025, a Facebook post following the critical time of 2025 Gen-Z protests, he urging the protection of three institutions: the presidency, parliament and the constitution.

He also made a cryptic remark about a film being shot at the army headquarters not being “in the Nepali language”-a comment interpreted by some as a veiled critique of the political moment.

The timing was sensitive: the army had just played a coordinating role in line with protestors’ demands. What might otherwise have been dismissed as rhetorical flourish instead fed into a growing narrative of political positioning.

Nepal’s law is clear that key constitutional posts require full Nepali citizenship, and that non-resident status carries limits on political and legal rights. The details remain contested, but the opacity itself is damaging.

And yet the sharpest criticism is not that Dr Kandel’s qualifications are being scrutinized. It is that others are not. Nepal’s recent history is replete with constitutional appointments-judicial and quasi-judicial-where eligibility has been interpreted generously, documentation thinly interrogated, and continuity conveniently inferred. The standard appears elastic: tightened for some, relaxed for others.

This asymmetry matters. The credibility of a constitutional office does not rest solely on the individual who occupies it, but on the consistency with which the rules are applied.

If “continuous practice” can be read strictly in one case and loosely in another, it ceases to be a guardrail and becomes a tool. The risk is not just a questionable appointment; it is a system in which qualification is negotiated rather than verified.

For the government, the temptation is obvious. Dr Kandel is trusted, articulate and politically aligned. For a young party that promised meritocracy, the calculation may be that competence plus loyalty is good enough. But constitutional design resists such arithmetic. It demands that merit be demonstrable, not presumed; that eligibility be proven, not inferred; and that the same questions be asked of all, not just the convenient few.

Nepal’s Attorney General must be more than capable. He must be unimpeachable-on paper and in perception. By elevating a figure whose qualifications invite dispute, while leaving similar questions elsewhere unasked, the government has done more than spark a controversy. It has exposed a deeper habit: not missing the question of qualification, but applying it unevenly.