Nepal’s Violent Gen Z Uprising
On the morning of September 6, a black SUV bearing a provincial minister of the Nepal ruling party ran more than one eleven -year -old girl, USHA Magar Sunuwar, in front of his school in the city of Lalitpur. Rather than stopping to help the injured victim, the occupants of the vehicle moved away. Many powerful in Nepal, like their brothers through South Asia, believe they are free from responsibility. And Sunuwar, who miraculously survived, has become, in the eyes of the public, another victim of contempt for the elite governing for ordinary nepalis. When KP Sharma Oli, the Prime Minister of the country, sixty-three, was questioned by the press on the incident, he shrugged as a “normal accident”. Oli, a communist who began his political career as a podium of the oppressed, did not seem to know the anger that had accumulated around him.
The previous week, the government of Oli had prohibited twenty-six social media and messaging platforms, notably Facebook and X-not to comply with the developed regulations introduced, as a multitude of nepalis saw it, to muzzle people’s speech. Almost half of the population of Nepal uses a certain form of social media, which represents almost eighty percent of the country’s internet traffic. Among the users of these platforms are the children of politicians, who seem to direct and publish photos of opulent life: designer handbags, luxury holidays, sumptuous parties. The wealth “without visible function”, warned Hannah Arendt, generates more resentment than oppression or exploitation “because no one can understand why it should be tolerated”.
Since August, Tiktok and Instagram in Nepal had been flooded with strongly cut videos which juxtapose these excesses with the difficulties suffered by most in a country from which, every day, two thousand men and women leave to seek means of subsistence elsewhere. Among those who remain, more than eighty percent work in the informal sector – as servants, street hawkers, carriers, cleaners. Last year, in the formal sector, young people unemployment was 20.8%. This helps to explain, perhaps, why the young Nepalese are overrepresented among the foreign mercenaries recruited by Russia to fight in Ukraine; Workers who have built the infrastructure for Qatar to host the Fifa World Cup, dying at a rate of one every two days while working in extreme heat; And seasonal migrant workers in India.
The sending of funds of nepalis abroad, constituting a third of the country’s GDP, are essential for the survival of Nepal. The ban on social media cut many of these expatriates from their family. Implementation in the rise of a major festival, he also disrupted small businesses based on online channels to market their products. An immediate public reaction ensued. On September 8, the cities in the whole country were flooded with young angry demonstrators demanding a revocation of the ban. They called themselves “Gen Z” – a label which somewhat obscures the fact that one of the organizers of the demonstrations, Sudan Gurung, a philanthropist who directs the non -governmental organization Hami Nepal, is a thirty -six -year millennium. At least nineteen people were killed, most of them in Kathmandu, the capital, when demonstrators clashed with security forces, who responded in dismissing ammunition tours. The government was shaken enough to cancel the ban the next morning. The steps, however, intensified. In the evening, Oli had resigned and disappeared.
The demonstrators then transferred in crowds. And, while the state was moving away, the crowd set fire to the symbols of the power of the state in Kathmandu: Singha Durbar, administrative headquarters of Nepal; the Ministry of Health; the parliament building; the Supreme Court; the presidential palace; and the Prime Minister’s residence. The private property, offices of the Communist Party governing the glass and steel tower housing the Kathmandu Hilton, were also burnt down. Foreigners qualified this chaos as a revolution. And those who participate in it have returned revolutionary justice to the members of the Old Unhappy Regime to be captured. Sher Bahadur Deuba – who had served five mandates as Prime Minister of Nepal, more recently in 2022 – and his wife, Arzu Rana, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Oli, were beaten wildly at home. Rajyalaxmi Chitrakar, the wife of another former Prime Minister, was burned to death in his residence.
On September 10, Nepal went into a state of anarchy, a country without government or authority. The only national institution which survived – and which had the capacity to restore the order – was the army, which, sheltering the civilian, opened talks with representatives of the protest movement. The events then moved to a dizzying speed. In forty-eight hours, the President of Nepal had been forced to appoint an acting Prime Minister, to dissolve the elected parliament of the country and to announce new elections. While the research teams are installed on the recovery of organizations from the charred government buildings, the death toll has reached over seventy years and the number of wounded exceeded two thousand.
Nepal is the third South Asian country in the past four years to organize a violent reversal of its government. In 2022, the anger against the pricing in Sri Lanka broke out in mass demonstrations that swept the Rajapaksa dynasty from power. Last August, the long reign of Sheikh Hasina, the autocratic Prime Minister of Bangladesh, was suddenly after the rallies of Bloody Street culminated in the dismissal of his residence.
You can barely draw from the trajectories of these recent revolts. In Sri Lanka, the Rajapaka clan remains a force, bruised but far from being defeated. The movement that owned President Gotabaya Rajapaka ended with the appointment of his sorter handpicked: Ranil Wickremesinghe, an accomplished initiate who had already served four terms as Prime Minister. Wickremesinghe dropped the armed forces on demonstrations, which collapsed rapidly and stabilized the economy by introducing painful austerity measures supported by the International Monetary Fund. He was defeated during the presidential elections last year by Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a left -wing candidate who had committed to softening the IMF agreement. A year after his presidency, however, Dissanayake largely maintained the program. Meanwhile, the interethnic hostilities that led to the horrors of the Sri Lanka civil war – which ended, in 2009, with the brutal defeat of the Tamil minority of the island – the chip under his watch.
