At Samakon, a talk show aired on Kantipur Television, on December 9, Gautam had said the Ministry of Home Affairs would “straightaway” issue citizenships to children through matrilineal descent. Subsequently, the talk show host, Nirmala Sharma, went to the Ministry with a team of mothers from Lalitpur struggling to confer the legal documents to their children.

But the instructions Gautam gave to his Ministry officials were not to issue citizenship to every child who were trying to receive one in the name of mothers, but on a case-by-case basis.

“The directive was to look at individual cases and see if a citizenship can be bestowed. I called the Lalitpur CDO myself and relayed the message,” said Joint-secretary Dhanraj Gyanwali, also the head of the Law Department at the ministry.

And some people in his ministry have even taken to going off-message.

On Thursday, Lalitpur Chief District Officer Yadav Koirala said the idea of giving citizenships through the mothers was “nonsense” and “dangerous”. “A provision like that would allow every foreigner to be a Nepali. This is not about gender equality, but about nationalism and national security,” Koirala said.

Despite this opinion, Koirala met Deepti Gurung, an activist whose children are currently stateless and who appeared at Samakon last week. Gurung said Koirala assured her that he would call the authorities at her ward and ask them to issue a birth certificate to her 17-year-old child, a document required to acquire citizenship. The second child—a 14-year-old daughter—will have to wait as a case regarding her birth certificate is pending at the Supreme Court.

The Citizenship Act of 2006 grants power to both mothers and fathers to individually confer citizenship to their children. The Act, however, has never been translated into action. Instead, a provision, which is already approved by the Political Dialogue Consensus Committee in the draft of the new constitution, states that both the mother and father have to be Nepalis for their child to be a Nepali.