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On the morning of September 6th, a black S.U.V. carrying a provincial minister from Nepal’s ruling party ran over an eleven-year-old girl, Usha Magar Sunuwar, outside her school in the city of Lalitpur. Rather than stop to help the injured victim, the occupants of the vehicle sped away. Many of the powerful in Nepal, like their brethren across South Asia, believe themselves to be exempt from accountability. And Sunuwar, who miraculously survived, became, in the eyes of the public, another casualty of the governing élite’s contempt for ordinary Nepalis. When K. P. Sharma Oli, the country’s seventy-three-year-old Prime Minister, was questioned by the press about the incident, he shrugged it off as a “normal accident.” Oli, a Communist who began his political career as a tribune of the oppressed, seemed unaware of the anger that had accumulated around him.
The previous week, Oli’s government had banned twenty-six social-media and messaging platforms—including Facebook and X—for failing to comply with elaborate regulations introduced, as a multitude of Nepalis saw it, to muzzle people’s speech. Almost half of Nepal’s population uses some form of social media, which accounts for nearly eighty per cent of the country’s internet traffic. Among the users of these platforms are politicians’ children, who appear to lead and post photos of opulent lives: designer handbags, luxury holidays, lavish parties. Wealth “without visible function,” Hannah Arendt once warned, breeds more resentment than do oppression or exploitation “because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.”
Since August, TikTok and Instagram in Nepal had been inundated with sharply cut videos that juxtaposed these excesses with the hardships suffered by most in a country from which, every day, some two thousand men and women leave to look for livelihoods elsewhere. Of those who stay, more than eighty per cent work in the informal sector—as domestic servants, street hawkers, porters, cleaners. Last year, in the formal sector, youth unemployment stood at 20.8 per cent. This helps to explain, perhaps, why young Nepalis are overrepresented among the foreign mercenaries recruited by Russia to fight in Ukraine; the laborers who built the infrastructure for Qatar to host the FIFA World Cup, dying at a rate of one every two days while toiling in extreme heat; and seasonal migrant workers in India.
The remittances of Nepalis abroad, constituting a third of the country’s G.D.P., are indispensable to Nepal’s survival. The social-media ban cut off many of these expatriates from their families. Implemented in the run-up to a major festival, it also disrupted small businesses that rely on online channels to market their products. An immediate public backlash ensued. On September 8th, cities across the country were deluged with angry young protesters demanding a revocation of the ban. They called themselves “Gen Z”—a label that somewhat obscures the fact that one of the protests’ organizers, Sudan Gurung, a philanthropist who leads the non-governmental organization Hami Nepal, is a thirty-six-year-old millennial. At least nineteen people were killed, most of them in Kathmandu, the capital, when demonstrators clashed with security forces, who responded by firing live rounds of ammunition. The government was sufficiently rattled to rescind the ban the next morning. The marches, however, intensified. By the evening, Oli had resigned and vanished.
The protesters had by then mutated into a mob. And, as the state receded, the mob set fire to the symbols of state power in Kathmandu: Singha Durbar, Nepal’s administrative headquarters; the health ministry; the Parliament building; the Supreme Court; the Presidential palace; and the Prime Minister’s residence. Private properties, from the offices of the governing Communist Party to the glass-and-steel tower housing the Kathmandu Hilton, were also set ablaze. Outsiders called this mayhem a revolution. And those participating in it dispensed revolutionary justice to members of the ancien régime unlucky enough to be caught. Sher Bahadur Deuba—who had served five terms as Nepal’s Prime Minister, most recently in 2022—and his wife, Arzu Rana, the foreign minister in Oli’s cabinet, were beaten savagely in their home. Rajyalaxmi Chitrakar, the wife of another former Prime Minister, was burned to death inside her residence.
By September 10th, Nepal had descended into a state of lawlessness, a country without a government or authority. The only national institution that survived—and that possessed the capability to restore order—was the Army, which, sheltering the civilian leadership, opened talks with representatives of the protest movement. Events then moved at dizzying speed. Within forty-eight hours, Nepal’s President had been forced to appoint an interim Prime Minister, dissolve the country’s elected Parliament, and announce new elections. As search teams set about recovering bodies from the charred government buildings, the death toll rose to more than seventy, and the number of injured exceeded two thousand.
Nepal is the third South Asian country in the past four years to stage a violent overthrow of its government. In 2022, anger over soaring prices in Sri Lanka erupted into mass protests that swept the Rajapaksa dynasty from power. Last August, the long reign of Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s autocratic Prime Minister, was brought to a sudden end after bloody street rallies culminated in the sacking of her residence.
One can scarcely draw solace from the trajectories of those recent revolts. In Sri Lanka, the Rajapaksa clan remains a force, bruised but far from vanquished. The movement that defenestrated President Gotabaya Rajapaksa ended with the appointment of his handpicked successor: Ranil Wickremesinghe, a consummate insider who had already served four terms as Prime Minister. Wickremesinghe set loose the armed forces on the protests, which fizzled out rapidly, and stabilized the economy by introducing painful austerity measures backed by the International Monetary Fund. He was defeated in last year’s Presidential elections by Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a left-wing candidate who had pledged to soften the I.M.F. deal. A year into his Presidency, however, Dissanayake has largely maintained the program. Meanwhile, the interethnic hostilities that led to the horrors of Sri Lanka’s civil war—which ended, in 2009, with the brutal defeat of the island’s Tamil minority—persist under his watch.
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Kapil Komireddi
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