Since April 19, Deepa Nepali has kept a sit-in at Maitighar Mandala, a protest square in central Kathmandu, under a banner that asks: “Government! Is the room empty?” Nepali is Dalit, from the communities that Nepal’s caste order once branded “untouchable”. She is a law graduate from Kailali, in the far west of the country. In nine years in the capital, she says, no landlord who asked her surname would rent her a room, and some who rented without asking threw her out once they found out.
Her sit-in reached 150 days on September 15, when a lawmaker asked the House of Representatives, the lower house of Nepal’s parliament, how long the government would stay silent. Nepal has a law that, in general terms, already covers what she describes. The Caste-Based Discrimination and Untouchability (Offence and Punishment) Act of 2011 bans caste discrimination in any public or private place, and the government says that is enough. But the Act never mentions renting, tenants, or the question a landlord asks a stranger before a key changes hands. And it depends on complaints that, by one ruling-party lawmaker’s account, mostly never get registered. Nepali’s sit-in is about that gap. Five months in, lawmakers said in mid-September, the government had still not answered her.
What she is asking for
Nepali wants legal provisions that stop landlords asking prospective tenants about their caste before renting out rooms, Republica, a Kathmandu daily, reported in July. She believes an amendment to the 2011 Act can do it. She has said she will end the protest only when the government announces a date for formal talks on caste discrimination in rental housing.
Her surname is part of the story. “Nepali” is a name still treated with untouchability by some in Nepal, the Annapurna Express, an English-language daily, wrote in June. She says recent government decisions and local policies have made it worse: tenants are now asked for citizenship or identification documents, and some people use them as a tool for discrimination. “The rules have changed, but the mindset of discrimination has not,” she said in a May interview with RSS, the national news agency, as translated by the news site Ratopati.
She has taken her own cases to law. She told Republica she is pursuing two legal cases against former landlords who, she says, evicted her after learning her caste. The Annapurna Express reported in June that a case against her landlord was being heard in the High Court, one of the appeal courts below Nepal’s Supreme Court. Both were still being pursued when last reported.
“Sometimes I was evicted after landlords learned my caste. At other times, I faced physical violence. Now it is time to fight the final battle and end this discrimination once and for all.” — Deepa Nepali, to Republica, on the 96th day of her sit-in
What the government has done
The government’s first answer came early. On May 4, two weeks into the sit-in, it directed “fast track desks” to hear complaints of caste and social discrimination, after a meeting between Sita Badi, the minister for women and children, Sobita Gautam, the law minister, and an adviser to Prime Minister Balendra Shah. The Home Secretary, the ministry’s top civil servant, said all 77 district administration offices would be told to run one. He also said the existing legal provisions were sufficient.
About a month into the protest, Home Minister Sudan Gurung met the protesters and assured them that caste discrimination in room rentals would be addressed, Nepali told Republica. On July 23 Badi, a deputy home minister and an RSP whip, one of the party officials who marshal its lawmakers, met them. “What we need is formal government-level talks and a concrete commitment,” Nepali said of that meeting. Of the government, she said: “The new government does not seem to view caste-based discrimination as a serious issue. It appears to be trying to ignore it altogether.”
The sit-in began about a week after the deadline the Cabinet had set itself for a formal state apology to Dalits. That apology had still not been issued four months after it was promised. How the promise ended up as a party leader’s speech is set out in a separate report. Nepali had drawn the line between the two in May. “There is a law that considers untouchability a crime, and there is a constitution that ensures Dalit rights,” she told RSS. “But in practice, not even the door of a room has been opened.”
What the law already says
The 2011 Act is written in general terms. Section 4(2) bars anyone, on grounds of caste and in any public or private place, from preventing, controlling or restricting a person “from entering, attending or participating”, or practising “social exclusion or discrimination of any kind”. Section 4(9) bars preventing a person of a particular caste from obtaining goods, services or facilities. The penalties run up to three years in prison and fines of up to 200,000 Nepali rupees (about US$1,400). Commentators read the Act as covering a refused tenancy. A 2025 column on OnlineKhabar, a Nepali news site, said it makes it a crime to deny someone housing based on their caste, and the Annapurna Express wrote in June that it clearly states that no person can be denied access to a place, service, or opportunity on the basis of caste.
The Act never mentions renting, tenants, landlords or what a landlord may ask. Its one clause on eviction from a house, section 4(10), protects members of a family. The OnlineKhabar column describes what refusal usually looks like: landlords “do not openly say, ‘I don’t rent to Dalits.’ Instead, they make excuses: ‘My parents won’t allow it,’ or ‘I just rented it out to someone else.’” A refusal given as an excuse, before any tenancy exists, is hard to bring to a police station. No clause names the question about a surname that comes first.
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CC BY-SA 4.0Original on Wikimedia CommonsWhen cases do reach the police, the numbers are small. Nepal Police registered 39 cases of untouchability in the fiscal year 2021/22 and 30 the year before, the Kathmandu Post, an English-language daily, reported. The then chair of the National Dalit Commission, the constitutional body for Dalit rights, told the paper it received 40 to 50 complaints a year and lacked the staff to look into them. “In most of the cases, authorities try to patch up cases through mediation,” he said.
39 untouchability cases registered by Nepal Police in 2021/22. Source: Nepal Police figures, reported by the Kathmandu Post.
The best-known rental case shows where the pressure runs. In 2021 Rupa Sunar, a journalist, was refused a flat in Kathmandu after the owner learned her caste. The owner was arrested after she complained to the police, and the case drew attention when a sitting minister went to the police station to release the owner, the Kathmandu Post reported.
Rima Bishwakarma, a lawmaker for the ruling Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), set out the gap in the House in mid-August, in remarks reported by Nepal Press. She said she had spent 15 years in rented rooms in Kathmandu herself, and that online room-finding services had become a new channel for discrimination, with some listings setting caste and community conditions. She asked for rentals to be brought under government regulation, with compulsory registration, an immediate stop to discriminatory advertisements, monitoring, and a clear route from complaint to action. Most complaints from Dalits, she said, are never registered at all. A month later another lawmaker, Parbati BK, asked the government to act over an allegation of caste discrimination involving a private room-finding company.
The case that the law is enough
The strongest answer to Nepali is the Home Secretary’s: the law is already there, and the task is to enforce it. Supporters of her protest have made a version of the same argument. Hira Bishwakarma, a writer who has worked on Dalit rights for four decades, wrote in OnlineKhabar in June that the state would not have to spend a single rupee, because the Act already punishes discrimination in any place, public or private. If the government enforced it and had local governments monitor it, he wrote, the problem could be solved. The government can also point to a draft “bill relating to Dalits’ rights and development”, which Gautam told the National Assembly, parliament’s upper house, on August 13 gives priority to the just distribution of land and housing.
That argument concedes Nepali’s point. If the law is enough, the test is whether it works, and on the public record it has not worked for her. The desks were ordered in May. In July she told Republica the government had yet to take meaningful action, and in mid-September lawmakers were still asking it to respond. Bishwakarma’s column made the case for enforcement and in the same breath faulted the government for ignoring the protest. The draft bill, as Gautam described it, concerns the distribution of land and housing, not who may be turned away from a rented room, and in August it was still a draft. Enforcement begins with a complaint being registered, which is where, Rima Bishwakarma told the House, most of them stop.
None of this requires the government to agree with Nepali about the amendment. Her stated condition for leaving the square is a date for formal talks.
What to watch
The protest has reached beyond the square. In August, Ghanashyam Rijal, a National Assembly member for the Nepal Communist Party, asked the chair to direct the government to hold talks with her, calling its refusal even to talk an insult to the whole Dalit community. In late September, rights activists in Ghorahi, in the western district of Dang, held a solidarity protest under her slogan.
The tests are the ones she has named: a date for talks; a change to the 2011 Act that reaches the question and the listing as well as the eviction; and a complaints route that registers what Dalit tenants report. Her own cases against former landlords were still being pursued when last reported.
“Openly, the room is empty here, but they say it is not for you,” she said in May. “So where should we complain?” By mid-September, the government had not given her a date to sit down and answer.
