Wen Stephenson: What just happened in Nepal? Was this—is this—a revolution? Or is it too soon to say? And if it is a revolution, is it an accidental one? Did anyone see this coming? It doesn’t appear that the Gen Z movement or anyone else expected anything like this to unfold.

Kunda Dixit: If you asked me a week ago whether all this would happen, I’d have said, no way. Nepal is a democratic country. It may be a flawed democracy, but it was functioning. What happened elsewhere, in Bangladesh, in Sri Lanka, where despots were overthrown by street uprisings, we were saying it may happen here at some time—but not now.

But how it snowballed from a peaceful youth movement against corruption into a nationwide revolution, if you want, was very rapid, within two days. What we underestimated—although we [at Nepali Times] had been writing about it—was how angry the people were, how they were losing patience, and that they were fed up with the system and wanted change. And it was triggered by social media.

If you look at how it started, it was a group of youth who had an online campaign—a disparate group, there were many different people, with totally different intentions and even ideology. But what they had in common was this anger against the system.

And it had been building up for the past 20 years at least, since the Maoist conflict ended. After 17,000 people were killed in the insurgency, nothing really changed; the revolutionaries imitated the people they overthrew. These were Maoist communists who waged a war for 10 years, and then they joined the mainstream democratic politics, and they became like everyone else.

WS: When you say fed up with the system, you mean the corruption and nepotism, the political paralysis, the constantly revolving coalition governments?

KD: Yes. And if you look at Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, they both had very similar youth-led revolutions on the streets that toppled their governments. The difference is, there the leaders were almost despotic—you could almost call them tyrants. In Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina had been in power for 15 or more years. She had basically sidelined and jailed the opposition. She was going after the media. Sri Lanka was similar. It was a debt-ridden country. After Covid, the economy was in shambles, so that fed into the anti-corruption movement in Sri Lanka.

But in Nepal, it was a functioning but flawed democracy. What happened here was the social media magnification of the anger against elected leaders.

WS: Remind me, how many coalition governments has Nepal had in the last 15 years?

KD: We’ve had 14 governments in 15 years.

WS: And it was always this same revolving cast, the three main parties and their leaders.

KD: They would also include some of the smaller parties, just for numbers, but the three main parties called the shots. It was musical chairs.

WS: And the same three guys.

KD: Yeah, three alpha males. They had in a way rigged the system where they’d get elected over and over again—even though they were kleptocrats who didn’t perform.

WS: In your editorial on September 11, you wrote about how it snowballed from the Gen Z anti-corruption protest into this broader, violent uprising, and you mentioned “class rage.” Is there a clear understanding of who exactly infiltrated the Gen Z protests and instigated the violence?

KD: It is quite clear that it was infiltrated.

WS: Do we understand who the violent elements were?

KD: So there’s been a movement over the past two years to restore the monarchy. The last king [Gyanendra] has been working on that with several groups behind the scenes, not very overtly. One of them is the fifth-largest party in Parliament, the monarchist RPP. And then he has some businessmen cronies who have supported the restoration of the monarchy, and there seem to be some links with the political-religious nexus across the border in India—the Hindu nationalists.

Then there are the ex-Maoists who are disgruntled with the Maoist party itself, who feel that the revolution should never have been abandoned back in 2006. So, disparate elements.

WS: And do you think that it was organized?

KD: In March this year [the monarchists] had a rally. And that time the police also overreacted, and two people were killed, including a journalist, when a building was set on fire. And one of these cronies of the radical royalists actually tried to drive his pickup through the police barricades towards the Parliament. He was stopped by police and even went to jail.

My conjecture is that if that rally had gotten through the barricades in March, it would have reached Parliament, and we would have had then what happened on September 9. So September 8–9 was a continuation, a second episode, of what happened in March.

A lot of Gen Zs feel that on September 8 their rally was infiltrated by radicals with whom they had nothing to do. And after September 9, they have gone on social media to say, “Look, we never wanted to do this, we feel really guilty about this destruction, it was never our intention.” Because on September 9, all hell broke loose.

That’s another layer of this, the class rage. The inequities, the gap between the superrich and the poor. And in Nepal, unlike other countries where the rich live in enclaves and the poor live far away, and the cities are segregated, here in Nepal—and in Kathmandu, especially—we live cheek to jowl with each other.

WS: On the class question, would it be fair to say much of the Gen Z movement are students and college graduates or aspiring college graduates, who represent the middle class—the sons and daughters of the middle class?

KD: Definitely. If you saw the original posts calling for the September 8 rally, they were mostly in English. So that shows you the international connection, the cosmopolitanism, the fact that students seem to have been inspired by the #nepokid movement in the Philippines and Indonesia. But then some of the people who were driving it, maybe not all the leaders, were about 30 years old, not necessarily students anymore.

Many people are asking, if the Gen Z group had stopped with its planned sit-in near Parliament, would all this have happened? Probably not. I think they’d have gone home, maybe there’d be a water cannon or two, and that’s it. But the massacre on September 8, and the resulting anger and destruction that escalated the next day, that is why we have this change now.

I guess countries that are facing such contradictions have to go through a cathartic [event] like this to bring about change. Change that can be meaningful, but it is full of pitfalls.

WS: I remember we talked last year about what it would take to get these old guys to give up power. Now we know: You have to literally burn down their offices.

KD: Well, across the region now, like in Pakistan, in India, and even beyond, commentators are saying, “Look, take your lesson from Nepal now.”

The other message that has gone out, despite the tragedy, has been that Nepalis don’t take their freedoms for granted. They rose up against the social media ban. Every time there has been an effort by the government to control the press or free expression, there’s been immediate pushback from the citizens.

WS: You wrote in your editorial that the damage isn’t just physical, as in buildings burned down, but it’s also to the national psyche. Is there a fear that this will all break down?

KD: I wrote that before [the interim PM was sworn in]. Before that, there were all these rumors that the Army was going to bring back the monarchy. There was terrible uncertainty. If that had happened, we would have gone back to 1960, not even 2006 [the end of the insurgency and eventual abolition of monarchy]. So what I meant by national psyche was, people looked around and the three arms of the state—the judiciary, executive, and legislature—were gone, physically. MPs were not there. The PM had resigned. The president’s house had been firebombed. So there was nothing.

WS: A true vacuum.

KD: The uncertainty of it all was hitting people. Will the violence carry on? Will this go on into another civil war? But then the appointment of Sushila Karki as interim prime minister defused the whole situation. There was a great sense of relief when this was announced and with the swearing-in on TV.

WS: And Nepal now has its first woman prime minister, which is a cause for celebration in its own right. Symbolically, at least, that must be enormous. The fact that there was a figure like Karki ready to step in.

KD: It’s very symbolic. She is a former chief justice, courageous, known for her integrity and simplicity. And she’s Nepal’s first woman prime minister. Also, on the morning of September 9, when everyone was out there baying for blood, she was with the crowds, saying the killing of the young demonstrators was an atrocity. So she was with the Gen Z crowd, being interviewed by the media and everything else. She was accepted by the youngsters as a grandmom leader.

WS: If this is a revolution, it doesn’t appear to be driven by any radical left ideology. This isn’t like the Maoist insurgency. That was ideological.

KD: Right—by the Red Book.

WS: Exactly. The Gen Z movement appears to be more of a middle-class, liberal-democratic movement. Is that right?

KD: They say they believe in open society, freedom of the press, transparency, accountability. All those values that we say a democracy should have—and has forgotten.

No one should be fooled by the names of our political parties. The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) is no longer Maoist. It’s crony capitalist. The Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) is neither unified, nor Marxist, nor Leninist, nor communist. And the Nepali Congress, which was center-left social democratic when it started in the 1960s, is no longer that either. It would now be center-right, but in quotes, “center-right.” Because if you look at the way these three alpha males behave, it’s identical. They have their cronies. They have their ways of making money; there’s the corruption, they’re all into each other’s networks. It’s the end of ideology.

WS: To the extent that the old guard is gone, how much do you think ideological divisions may resurface and come into play? Socialists versus right-wing populists versus neoliberals.

KD: Well, any party in Nepal when it comes to elections has to at least voice socialist rhetoric. Equality, social welfare, social safety net, they have to say it, even if they don’t practice it. Because the majority of Nepalis are poor, and if you want their votes, you have to say those things. Same in India. But when they come to power, they forget all about that.

And same for Gen Z. They’re talking about equity, inclusion, representation, and everything else that is almost socialist in a way, but they don’t call themselves socialist. I would say political labels are not trusted anymore. And I think that’s the way it should be, that you judge them by what they do, how they perform when they get elected, not the ideology they say they espouse.

And the challenges are great. Because how do you deal with 500,000 youth coming into the labor market every year? You need something like a Marshall Plan right away to manage that level of unemployment and frustration among the youth. Part of it is defused by them going abroad to work. But it’s a time bomb with a very short fuse.

We’ve been saying this for the past 25 years, since our paper was founded. Elected leaders have to be accountable. You have to deliver, otherwise the public frustration will rise, and one day it will reach a tipping point. In a way, I expected this to happen much earlier. In fact, the Maoist insurgency was in part [such an] eruption. But now 20 years after the war ended, nothing really has happened to address those underlying structural problems of society.