Ex-minister Mahabir Pun and his inappropriate remarks about ex-minister Padma Aryal

The newly elected parliamentarian, Mahabir Pun, who is seen as a part of Nepal’s “new politics” wave, is a controversial figure, particularly for his critiques, which occasionally are personal attacks and publicly aggressive. 

This week, Pun, who won from Myagdi on an independent candidacy, took to social media to lash out at CPN-UML’s MP-elect Padma Aryal.

Pun’s words were sharp and dismissive. He accused Aryal of arrogance, questioned her legitimacy, and framed her as a relic of a political era that Nepal had already begun to outgrow. He belittled her current role as a lawmaker, accusing Aryal of securing a seat in the parliament via the proportional quota through sycophancy. 

Aryal is not a marginal figure. She is a senior figure and secretary in the UML, a former minister who has overseen two ministries: Land Management, Cooperatives, and Poverty Alleviation and Agriculture and Livestock Development. This is the second time she will be entering the parliament.

In 2017, she secured 35,142 votes, winning the Syangja-2 constituency, which she lost in 2022, securing nearly 10,000 fewer votes. This election, the party placed her in the Proportional Representation (PR) list. Despite Aryal having the political capital and party resources to contest through first-past-the-post, the decision rightly raises accountability concerns, if it aligns with the principles underlying the PR.

Pun’s remarks could have raised such concerns, but it didn’t. In reality, it was simply a dismissive and insulting comment, lacking even basic political etiquette, and doing nothing to address the substantive issues at hand.

Additionally, a fact-check by Techpana found that the very premise of the outrage, a statement attributed to Aryal about “taming” new leaders in the upcoming parliament, had been circulating from a misleading or unverified social media source, not a confirmed remark.

And then Aryal responded, not with equal aggression, but with something more controlled, and perhaps more consequential.

She said she had been “excited” to collaborate in the new parliament with someone as Pun with expertise in the information technology sector on improving Nepal’s IT and combating misinformation. That expectation, she wrote, had now turned into “disappointment.”

More importantly, she challenged the foundation of Pun’s reaction.

Aryal accused him of relying on content from what she described as a party-affiliated, toxic Facebook page, and amplifying fabricated claims without verification. For a figure like Pun, she implied, the failure was not ideological, but procedural.

It was about judgment. And then came the line that lingers longer than the accusation: “भ्रम कहिले कसका बिरुद्ध कुन हतियार बनी सोझिन्छ, कस्लाई पो थाहा छ र?”
(Who knows when misinformation turns into a weapon against whom?)

For Nepal’s emerging political class, this should be a moment of pause.

Because the promise of “new politics” has always rested on a simple claim that it will be better informed and cultured than what came before. That it will rely less on rumour, less on patronage, less on instinct, and more on evidence, verification, and accountability.

But if a leading figure of that new politics, whom the incoming government’s party supports vigorously, can be pulled into a public outburst by unverified content, and given free rein to disparage others on social media without accountability, what does that say about the resilience of that promise?

The problem is not just misinformation. Rumours, whispers, and half-truths have long been a part of the political ecosystem everywhere. The difference now is speed and amplification. And Pun is highly active on social media, which magnifies what he says. With nearly 290,000 followers in X, his comments alongside Aryal’s unverified post reached over 55,000 views. Over 1,000 users liked what Pun had to say, and what he says can travel faster than a correction, which he hasn’t done so far. Other than Pun, other social media accounts have also shared the posts, further widening the fabricated claim. 

As far as the newly elected lawmaker himself is concerned, there is something troubling at play here. Far worse than being reactive, it is a personalised attack, not a disagreement over a policy or a procedure. It comes across as a deliberate move to delegitimise another lawmaker.