Him Bahadur Shahi

Him Bahadur Shahi was a Nepali Congress politician from Dailekh whose life tracked Nepal's long struggle from the partyless Panchayat era into federal provincial government. He served in the first Karnali Province Assembly and later as the province's minister for internal affairs and law. He died on 16 September 2026 in Kalagaun, Achham, aged about 80, after a heart attack.

Born in Dailekh around 1945 or 1946, Shahi entered Congress politics after meeting B. P. Koirala, a founding leader of the party. Nepali news obituaries describe him as a leading figure in Dailekh Congress circles who took part in the public campaign for multiparty democracy around the 1980 referendum and spent years underground before the 1990 People's Movement. He was arrested nine times in that period and held for 51 days during the 1990 movement, according to Ratopati and Nagarik News.

After multiparty politics returned, he chaired the Dailekh District Development Committee in the early 1990s. He contested Constituent Assembly elections in later years without winning a seat, then entered the newly created Karnali Province Assembly in 2017 on the Nepali Congress proportional list. In the provincial house he also served as chief whip of the Congress parliamentary party. On 6 February 2022 he was sworn in as minister for internal affairs and law in the Congress-led cabinet of Chief Minister Jeevan Bahadur Shahi, succeeding Sita Kumari Nepali.

When his five-year assembly term ended he withdrew from front-line politics and lived in his home village in Chamunda Bindrasaini Municipality. On 16 September 2026 he suffered a heart attack and died while under treatment at Karnali Province Hospital in Kalagaun, Achham. His son Ganesh Kumar Shahi confirmed the death. Party colleagues and local leaders in Dailekh paid tribute to a career spent first in underground democracy work and later in provincial office.

Shahi's path from Dailekh activism to Karnali cabinet office illustrates how the first generation of Congress organisers in the mid-western hills carried local networks into Nepal's federal provinces. For constituents in Dailekh and Karnali, he remained a familiar Congress elder whose public life spanned referendum politics, district administration, and the founding years of provincial self-government.