Asis Mistry
In the past few days,
Nepal has witnessed the most intense civil unrest in years. The death toll has
climbed to thirty, with over a thousand injured — figures that far exceed
earlier counts. The streets of Kathmandu and other cities bore witness to torched
government offices, burning hotels, and smoke rising beside landmarks of power.
In response to mounting pressure, the military and Gen Z protesters have
entered into negotiations for an interim government. The youth movement has
nominated former Chief Justice Sushila Karki, who has accepted, as the interim
prime minister. Though curfews remain, the reopening of Kathmandu’s
international airport and easing of some restrictions signal a fragile, uneasy
return to order. Yet beneath the calm, the demand is louder: this is not about
restoring social media access alone — it is about dignity, accountability, and
transformation.
Yet to read this as a
dispute over social media would be to mistake the symptom for the cause. The
protests were not simply about access to platforms but about the structural
failures of Nepal’s post-monarchy democracy. They expose the profound disillusionment
of a generation—Nepal’s so-called Gen Z—who have come of age amid insurgency,
corruption, and the hollowness of political promises. Four arguments illustrate
why this revolt matters, not just for Nepal, but as part of a global crisis of
democratic legitimacy.
In Nepal, as in many
parts of the world, governments today are being overthrown less through
electoral contests than through mass protests. The Arab Spring in 2011, Sri
Lanka’s Aragalaya in 2022, and Pakistan’s youth-driven rallies in
support of Imran Khan, the overthrow of the Awami League government in
Bangladesh—all highlight this pattern: elected regimes lose legitimacy not at
the ballot box but in the streets.
Nepal’s September
uprising fits this mould. The Oli government, facing no immediate electoral
challenge, suddenly confronted a legitimacy crisis it could not manage.
Hashtags became battle cries, online discontent spilt onto the streets, and the
state’s reflex was repression. In the end, the ballot mattered less than the
body—youth occupying squares, clashing with police, and refusing to be
silenced.
The deeper crisis lies in
Nepal’s post-monarchy state-building. The 2015 Constitution was meant to
consolidate the republic after a decade of insurgency and transition. Yet it
has failed to secure the loyalty or trust of citizens. Formally, Nepal has all
the trappings of a federal democratic republic. Substantively, the “nerve
system” of politics—institutions that connect citizens with the state—remains
weak.
This is partly because
political elites are embedded in networks of patronage, corruption, and party
cartelisation. Instead of investing in responsive governance, they have treated
the Constitution as an end in itself. The state exists on paper but struggles
to mediate conflicts, deliver services, or generate affective attachment. The
result is a hollow democracy: legal structures without legitimacy, institutions
without credibility.
If the Constitution has
been hollow, so too have Nepal’s political parties. Once vibrant with
ideological struggle, they have, over the past two decades, withered into
clientelist machines. The Maoists, who once fought for radical transformation,
now resemble a managerial party concerned with office-sharing. The communists
have diluted their ideological commitments, while centrist parties trade in
promises they cannot keep.
This erosion of ideology
has profound consequences. Political parties no longer provide citizens with a
grammar of meaning; they no longer connect everyday life to broader visions of
justice, equality, or sovereignty. Instead, citizens encounter only the
cynicism of power-brokers. The alienation is not just political but
existential: ordinary people no longer see themselves reflected in the symbolic
order of politics.
For Gen Z, this vacuum
has been particularly stark. Growing up amid the disintegration of ideological
politics, they have been left with a sense of betrayal—promised democracy, they
encounter only dysfunction.
Perhaps the most striking
feature of Nepal’s Gen Z is their emergence as what might be called “organic
radicals.” Unlike earlier generations, their childhood was marked not by
stability but by insurgency (1996–2006). Violence, displacement, and uncertainty
were part of the texture of their formative years. As they matured, they faced
unemployment, mass migration, and shrinking opportunities.
At the same time, they
have lived under a state characterised by too much government and too little
governance: rules, restrictions, and bureaucratic control, but little delivery
of justice, employment, or services. In this context, protest becomes not simply
an option but the default mode of political expression. For a generation
disenchanted with electoral promises, the streets are the only space where
voice feels possible.
The September uprising is
thus not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a generation raised amid
insurgency, betrayed by elites, and abandoned by institutions.
The state’s response to
this youth mobilisation reveals its own anxieties. Prime Minister Oli described
the unrest as a result of “ambiguity in thinking” among young people—a telling
phrase that casts dissent as immaturity. In effect, the state views youth as
unruly children: familiar yet alien, its own citizens yet strangers to its
order. Psychoanalytically, this is a displacement of the state’s own failure
onto the figure of the disorderly youth.
But repression does not
resolve the crisis. It repeats it. Nepal’s resort to curfews, bullets, and bans
echoes a long pattern—from the monarchy’s suppression of the Jana Andolan to
the state’s violent handling of the Madhes uprisings. Violence becomes a compulsion,
a symptom of a state unable to generate legitimacy through inclusion.
Nepal’s Gen Z protest is
not only a national crisis. It speaks to global anxieties about the future of
democracy. Across contexts, youth who are digitally networked, borderless in
aspiration, and impatient with institutional decay are challenging the state in
unprecedented ways. For states, their presence is uncanny: simultaneously
intimate and alien, both the children of the nation and its most disruptive
challengers.
What Nepal reveals is
that censorship, repression, and moralising rhetoric cannot contain this
generational force. Even after the ban was lifted, protests continued,
signalling that the wound runs deeper than social media. It is about
corruption, legitimacy, and the demand for dignity.
The Gen Z protests should,
therefore, be read as more than an episodic outburst. They are a warning:
Nepal’s democracy cannot survive on empty constitutionalism, hollow party
politics, and elite patronage networks. Unless it can address corruption,
deliver governance, and restore ideological meaning to politics, it will
continue to face eruptions from below.
Gen Z’s revolt is the
return of the repressed future: the demand of a generation that refuses to be
silenced, infantilised, or excluded. Nepal’s challenge is not simply to lift
bans or reshuffle ministers but to confront this generational discontent head-on.
Otherwise, the cycle of repression and revolt will persist, with ever greater
costs for a fragile democracy still searching for its nerve system.
The author is Faculty of Political Science, University of Calcutta.
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