Nepal’s uncertain course after the Gen Z protests
The protests foregrounded the disillusionment with the ruling class, but the country must now confront questions on the path ahead
There are decades when nothing happens and days when decades happen. Nepal has literally lived these lines from Lenin in the past week. Deeply entrenched crony capitalism and a nexus between businesses, political parties, and their close circles of party workers suddenly found themselves at the receiving end of youth-led protests.
This Gen Z Revolution is perhaps the shortest-lived groundswell in Nepal, one that started on a Monday afternoon and led to the collapse of a three-party regime the very next day. By late afternoon, the seemingly defiant Prime Minister (PM), KP Sharma Oli — who had ordered the shutdown of 26 social media platforms, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, and X midnight on Thursday (five days ago) — had gone into hiding. He had fled Baluwatar, the PM’s official residence. The PM-in-waiting, Sher Bahadur Deuba, and his wife, Arzu Deuba (also the foreign minister), were attacked at home by an angry mob. Countless political party properties and private residences of party heavyweights were ransacked across the country. Also set on fire were the Supreme Court, Parliament, and Singha Durbar, the seat of government.
While many of the old-party leaders had gone underground overnight amid the youth charge, the angry crowd refused to be cowed down by the police, even the day after the protests broke out. The brutal police crackdown on the young protesters, many of them in school uniforms, on the first day of the protests, had galvanised people across the country. Confined to their homes by curfew, Nepali people were in total disbelief.
While those who had been part of the national exuberance in 1990 and in 2006 mass movements found their hopes dashed to the ground by the corrupt political class — the Nepali Congress, Communist Party of Nepal-United Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML), and CPN (Maoist) in the main — GenZers felt little ownership of either of these movements. They had come of age at a time when Nepal saw out-migration in record numbers, when despair reigned and hope was in super-short supply.
GenZers, meanwhile, refused to conform to the fatalist worldview of their parents and grandparents and decided to exercise political agency instead, as they saw that rampant corruption in the political cohort had spread to the bureaucracy and businesses. And they decided that this system had to go while they were still young. They had seen Nepal make global headlines for all the wrong reasons: One of these was its steady climb in the global corruption index brought out by Transparency International each year. If the national economy has been afloat all these depressing decades, it is not because of trade or foreign aid, not least because of the parties. Far from it. It is the remittances sent home by Nepalis working abroad — from West Asia to Malaysia, from Norway to New Zealand. Notably, individual household incomes have continued to climb, including in remote villages, and continue to go up. In that sense, Nepalis have never been richer.
Nineteen school and college kids, 17 of them in Kathmandu, were killed in a police crackdown ordered by Oli and then home minister Ramesh Lekhak last Monday. By the next day, Nepal saw an unprecedented turn of events. Oli had not only resigned but had gone into hiding. “The office of the president, held by Ram Chandra Poudel,” a young documentarian, Pranaya Rana wrote in Kalam Weekly, “is the last [civilian] institution standing.”
Amid all this change, some apprehensions remain. Not all the leaders from the three dominant old parties are discredited; in fact, some are still well-connected to their local constituencies. Could we then see a counter-revolution? Could the old parties merge in a desperate bid for survival, or would it lead to defections to the fourth-largest party, the Rashtriya Swatantra Party (RSP), which has the largest group of young technocrats? Will the RSP — registered with the Election Commission only six months before the 2022 general election to quickly become a national party — and the popular young mayor of Kathmandu, Balen Shah, come together? Or, will Shah, who has strangely never bothered to expand his party base outside Kathmandu, lead a new party of GenZers?
And where will the GenZers stand in all this themselves? In less than a week, and two days after a standout Gen Z voice, Sudan Gurung, reverentially bowed to the newly sworn-in Sushila Karki, Nepal’s first-ever woman PM and former chief justice, the Gen Z protestors, in Sudan’s presence, demanded her resignation. In late-night protests on Sunday, the GenZers said Karki had not consulted them while expanding her cabinet. They took exception to the appointment of Om Prakash Aryal, the legal advisor of Balen Shah, as home minister.
Equally important will be the Nepal army’s role. Could it switch loyalty to the monarchy, as it did until sovereignty shifted to the people in 1990 and parliament abolished the monarchy in 2008? There is a groundswell of cultural resurgence among Nepalis centred on various expressions of Hinduism. But Nepalis have never voted along the lines of political Hinduism. Could the election scheduled for early March 5, 2026 become a turning point? How will the current wave of politico-cultural and nationalist revivalism be received in such a diverse society?
Though a large section of the Nepali population is riding a political euphoria at present, the question that stares at the new government is how it will navigate the transition, and if it will prioritise institutions over individuals. This period will be accompanied by deep apprehension until the Nepali people give a fresh political mandate in March, six long months away.
Akhilesh Upadhyay is a senior research fellow at IIDS, a Kathmandu-based think tank. His book, ‘In the Margins of Empires, A History of the Chicken’s Neck’, will be published in December. The views expressed are personal
