Bluesky

Kathmandu—Last week, on the afternoon before Nepal’s special elections called by interim Prime Minister Sushila Karki after September’s “Gen Z” uprising, I walked across Kathmandu from the Swayambhu neighborhood on the city’s northwest side to the burned-out parliament building in the New Baneshwor quarter to the southeast. Along the way I passed the Singha Durbar palace complex, home to the prime minister’s and cabinet ministers’ offices, its main building under re-construction after September’s arson, an armored vehicle parked inside the imposing gates. Not far down the street was the still fire-scarred Supreme Court.

When I reached the sprawling modern parliament complex along the wide boulevard called Madan Bhandari Road, I met a young man keeping vigil on the sidewalk in front of a makeshift memorial shrine. Taped to the main gate were photos of the 19 young protesters that security forces shot dead outside Parliament on September 8. Their deaths set off a nationwide conflagration—in all, 77 people died in the chaos of September 8 and 9—which resulted in the resignation of 74-year-old, three-time prime minister K.P. Sharma Oli and the dissolution of Parliament, and ushered in a new political era for this struggling nation of 30 million.

“The people inside that building didn’t care about us,” the young man, an earnest, 27-year-old Tribhuvan University graduate student, told me. “The government didn’t care about the people, they only cared about their own wealth and power, their own authority.”

He showed me where a bullet had grazed the back of his neck on September 8, holding up a photo on his phone so that I could see what the fresh wound had looked like. “I am lucky to be alive. It’s like I was given a new start to my life, a new chance.”

So, too, his country. On March 5, Nepali voters swept the three major legacy parties out of power, handing a parliamentary supermajority to the upstart, Gen Z-favored Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) and its wildly popular, populist PM candidate, Balendra “Balen” Shah, a 35-year-old engineer, former rapper, and, until recently, independent mayor of Kathmandu.

The significance of the sweep, what Nepali commentators are calling a “tsunami,” can hardly be overstated. It’s the first time in Nepal’s modern political history—which encompasses a democratic revolution in 1990, a bloody Maoist insurgency or “People’s War” from 1996 to 2006, a royal autocratic coup, and yet another revolution in 2006 that abolished the monarchy and established a federal democratic republic—that any party has won an outright majority, much less a supermajority. Indeed, some analysts assumed that Nepal’s electoral system, with its many parties and its combination of “first-past-the-post” and proportional representation, made such an outcome impossible. Apparently not. Decades of corrupt, ineffectual, revolving-door coalition governments—the country has seen 32 governments since 1990, none of them completing a full five-year term—may now come to an end.

And yet, it is not at all clear that September’s uprising and its resounding electoral ratification on March 5, amount to a Gen Z “revolution”—even if a simplistic international media narrative insists on calling it that. An uprising, a revolt, yes. A turning point in Nepal’s political history, quite possibly. Maybe even a transformational shift, if Gen Z activists and their civil-society allies can build and sustain a movement capable of bringing sufficient pressure to achieve their demands. But at this stage, it remains far from a revolution.

For one thing, the political system—and the pervasive political culture of corrupt impunity—remains intact. What Nepalis have done is to allow the constitutional process to work, so that genuine change, if it comes, will be an ongoing project. The revolution will have to be gradual—and even that is no sure thing.

The RSP and its incoming prime minister are hardly leftist radicals. They’re centrist, anti-corruption technocrats calling for effective, business-friendly governance. Their claims to a non-ideological “alternative politics”—together with Balen’s checkered human-rights record as Kathmandu mayor—don’t necessarily align with many Gen Z activists’ core values, which are ideologically of the left, emphasizing social justice and human rights for Nepal’s many marginalized communities.

For now, Nepal’s uncertain Gen Z “revolution” still has a long way to go.

In the days following the vote, as results were coming in and the RSP “blue wave” was becoming clear, I sat down with two Gen Z organizers who have been deeply involved with movement building and in negotiations with the interim government.

I first spoke with Aakriti Ghimire, a 27-year-old law grad, via Zoom the week before the elections, and now we were sitting by a window in one of modern Kathmandu’s many fashionable cafés. A child of migrants to the city from Koshi Province in Nepal’s far east, she was brought up lower middle-class. She and her friends joined the protests in September, and, among other things, she went on to lead the process of drafting the 10-point agreement signed in December by interim Prime Minister Karki and 142 Gen Z representatives. Having worked on the staff of an RSP member of Parliament and in the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology, as well as having a brief stint in the interim PM’s office, she was well-positioned as a Gen Z liaison with insight into how the government works.

Given that nobody expected a supermajority for the RSP, I wondered what Gen Z will say to the incoming government. After all, the RSP supported the December 10-point agreement in its campaign. They have no excuse but to deliver, right?

“Yes,” Ghimire told me, “now that they have unfettered discretion, and a full five years, they will have to push through everything that they said they would.”

Ghimire has spoken about the December agreement as an outline for a “new social contract,” and I asked her what that means. The September uprising was against corruption and for economic justice, but the agreement goes beyond those demands.

“One of the key points is about inclusivity,” Ghimire explained. “It’s about reparative justice for all the communities that this country has marginalized and ensuring their meaningful participation.” Another, she said, is to fully implement the Gen Z Council, approved by the interim government, which gives young people an institutional voice in policymaking and lawmaking.

But perhaps the most immediate priority is governance and bureaucratic reform. “Because ultimately,” Ghimire said, “what has been going on in Nepal, is that we’ve constantly been switching our political state, but our administrative state remains the same. And without reform in the administrative state structure, we won’t be able to implement what we want to happen.”

Given such a pragmatic view, I asked Ghimire if she sees the September uprising, and what’s happened since, as a revolution.

“The desire was a revolution,” she responded. “Corruption has become a culture in Nepal,” she went on to explain. “Corruption is no longer something that just a few political elites participate in. At this point, a lot of people are forced into political parties just so they can access state services. And they have gotten jobs through partisan allegiances.  That’s where nepotism comes in, that’s where partisan membership comes in.”

“So corruption is no longer what a few people do,” she said. “It’s embedded in our system, and it’s embedded in our culture. A political-cultural revolution still remains to be done.”

Ghimire told me that she believed such a revolution was attainable, but that the next steps require a new kind of political leadership.

“If RSP doesn’t build its own patronage networks, that in itself becomes a big pivot from the existing political culture. That’s a big victory. RSP has this opportunity to lead that political-cultural revolution. Because this time the public has already taken a big step towards doing that. The Gen Z movement was one step. This voting was another step. The public has done their part. Now it’s RSP’s part.”

One potential complication, however, comes in the form of the incoming populist Prime Minister Balen Shah. As the mayor of Kathmandu from 2022 until last fall, when he joined the RSP and threw his hat in the ring for prime minister, Balen was accused by many human-rights advocates of an “authoritarian” approach to governing.

In his much-touted effort to “clean up” Kathmandu, he sent bulldozers into an informal settlement along the banks of the Bagmati River in a failed attempt to evict the slum community by force—they fought back fiercely—setting off protests and a protracted court battle. He brutally cracked down on Kathmandu’s street vendors, banning them without regard for their livelihood or basic dignity.

I asked Ghimire whether the Gen Z movement has questioned this record, and if Balen can really represent their broader, left-leaning agenda. “That is exactly where our skepticism comes from,” she told me. “His track record doesn’t give us any idea that he’s going to be empathetic, that he’s going to look after the ones on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, that he’s going to be mindful of who are the people who will actually bear the brunt of any policies that he’s bringing.”  

During the election campaign, Ghimire pointed out, “he did not have a single townhall meeting where he addressed the public and the media directly. So that sense of accountability toward the public is greatly missing.”

Two days after the elections, I met 24-year-old Monisha Chaudhary at another café, this time in Thamel, the trendy tourist section, with its backpacker guesthouses,new upscale hotels, and eco-spiritual vibe.

Chaudary, whose family is from Madhesh in the southern plains and is thus a member of Nepal’s largest marginalized ethnic group, is a core organizer of Gen Z Movement Alliance, one of the prominent Gen Z collectives. She worked closely with Ghimire and others on the December agreement and is actively engaged in building a Gen Z movement network.

Like Ghimire, Chaudhary speaks as a member of Gen Z’s left flank, not the entire movement, which has never been one cohesive movement to begin with. But there seems to be a center of gravity that is identifiably left or progressive, perhaps more reformist than revolutionary. 

Since the September uprising, one of Gen Z’s main demands has been legal accountability for the shooting of protesters and the widespread abuses by police following September 9. Chaudhary told me of friends working with prosecutors who had seen police bring in poor people from informal settlements on false charges. Such scapegoating of the poor and marginalized was rampant, she told me. “There was blanket criminalization.”

When it came to negotiating the 10-point agreement with the Karki government, Chaudary explained, tensions emerged among Gen Z groups, and some Gen Z leaders didn’t want an agreement with the government at all. “But then we knew that if we didn’t have something in writing, it was all going to fall apart,” she told me.

Soon after September 8-9, the Karki government commissioned an investigation into the police crackdown, and released its report on the Sunday after the election. I asked Chaudhary if she and her comrades can envision Balen and RSP holding people accountable for state violence and the abuse of human rights?

“They have to. Their entire political career—this election—was built on the back of the movement. They capitalized on it. That’s how they won.”

The question of whether Gen Z can remain an influential force looms large for the movement. I asked if they’ve started strategizing about how to keep pressure on RSP, pushing them in the right direction. “We have,” she said. “We’ve decided to make a ‘citizens watch,’ as a digital platform. We’re going to be following up on everything they’re saying in Parliament, all of the policies they’re going to be proposing.”

“We’ve had multiple meetings with RSP before, and there is some rapport,” she said. “And we’ve built a coalition with civil society organizations, activists, in Nepal. We’ve got a good network, I think. All of that is underway.” A strategic planning meeting, Chaudary said, was set for the following day.

So, I asked, is this a revolution?

“I think it is an ongoing revolution in some sense,” Chaudary said. “Because on the day of the protests, people really wanted something different—a break, a transformation, nothing to do with the past. And maybe for the first week, it was truly revolutionary. But over six months, leading to elections, that was also not an easy path. Now you have someone the people have chosen, and it’s through the electoral process. We are looking at the reality, and we see that they have two-thirds. And irrespective of what I feel, what my group feels, it’s the truth that the people have spoken. If you talk to people, they love Balen. They want RSP. And they have gotten it.”

Listening to Chaudhary, I was reminded of something else that Ghimire had said when I asked how they were going to hold the incoming government accountable.

“We are very ready to go out into the streets again,” Ghimire told me. “That energy remains. Everybody’s like, you’ve gotten the power, you see the responsibility and the expectations that the public has put on you. But you also know that we are watching. I think this feeling is very strong. Even across Nepal, across multiple age groups, everybody’s like, there is no opposition in government. We have to be the opposition.”

I told Ghimire I had one more question. When are you running for office?

She smiled coyly, and without skipping a beat, she said, “I don’t think I will. Maybe someday.”