Dissent is Digital

About a week since the upheaval in Kathmandu, even as the stench of smoke from torched buildings has settled, and the sight of the charred remains of once grand establishments like the Singha Durbar has grown to become a little less shocking, a sense of astonishment still remains.

“People were angry and there was discontent. But even we didn’t realise things would take this turn,” says Shaswot Lamichhane, an 18-year-old who graduated from high school just about three months ago. Lamichhane was among the earliest groups of youths who had called for the September 8 protests against the government’s decision to ban social media platforms. “Right up to the night of Monday [September 8], even after all that had happened that day, the protests and the way the police responded, we thought there would be negotiations the next day, and maybe the government would eventually lose the next elections, but things would return to normalcy. We never expected the government to fall.” 

The furore over what had transpired that day, Lamichhane reasons, where the government had cracked down violently on protesters, opening fire on youths, some of whom were in school uniforms, had so outraged people, that even larger numbers took to the streets, eventually overwhelming the government. 

The protests in Kathmandu were unique in many ways. It was called for and led by what has been described as Nepal’s Gen Zs, the generation whose age ranges between 13 to 28 years (even though, as was evident from videos, older protesters also joined in). And it was one where social media came to play a vital role. The proposed ban on 26 sites like WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X and others that failed to register with the government didn’t just provide the necessary powder keg for the situation to blow up, they also became a medium where a generational disaffection against Nepal’s political culture coalesced itself into a revolution. Once a call for protests on these platforms had led to a wide-scale movement and the fall of the government, it also became a way—quite remarkably—for the young to discuss and choose, through discussions and polls on platforms like Discord, an interim prime minister that would steer the country until the next election could take place. 

“Actually, like a month or so before the ban, a trend was going on against Nepal’s ‘Nepo Babies’,” says George Gurung, a content creator, referring to the photos and videos of the extravagant lifestyles of the children of the country’s political elite that were being shared and commented upon online. The Nepo Baby conversation is part of a larger Gen Z discourse around nepotism that has spawned across the world in recent years, right from the US, where the children of Hollywood celebrities have been called out for gaining advantages in their careers because of their parents’ connections, to their counterparts here in India, and elsewhere. In Nepal, where its Gen Zs came of age nearly two decades since the monarchy was abolished in favour of a republic, one that promised change, but which in reality has failed to bring much improvement, the extravagant lives the children of the political elite essay on their social media accounts particularly rankled. “Unfortunately for the government, this trend on Nepo Babies was building just as the ban [on these platforms] was nearing,” Gurung says. 

Many content creators in Nepal were uploading posts around this campaign in the days leading to the protests. Gurung, who originally hails from Pokhara, although he lives in the UK now, from where he runs Instagram and YouTube accounts devoted towards beauty pageants, also began to post content meant to expose Nepal’s Nepo Babies, much of which went quickly viral. “There is a lot of corruption across Nepal. Money meant for the public and for public projects gets siphoned off by these politicians. And you can see all this in the lives these people and their families lead,” Gurung says, giving the example of Saugat Thapa, the son of a prominent politician from Pokhara (Bindu Kumar Thapa), whose photograph of himself posing in front of a Christmas tree made out of the boxes of designer goods became a defining image during this conversation around Nepal’s Nepo Babies.

There were underlying reasons for the protests to take off in the way they did, from the endemic corruption to the poverty and lack of jobs in the country. And Nepal’s reckoning with the nepotism of its privileged class struck at the moment when the discontentment over these issues was growing and the government’s decision to ban social media platforms, which was largely viewed as an attempt to control criticism, was coming into force. It was the perfect storm. 

The call for protests, amplified by social media influencers, grew online. Later in the night of September 8, after the clashes with the police had left many dead, Lamichhane, who was part of a Discord group that had become the meeting ground for young protesters, logged on to the platform to find a vast number of new members.. “There were about 2,000 members before the protests. Now, some 40,000 people had joined. People were furious,” he says. The protests would turn violent the next day, leading to widespread arson and the overthrow of the government. 

Once the army chief General Ashok Raj Sigde took over, and invited representatives of Gen Z protest groups for talks to put forth a potential nominee for an interim prime minister, more confusion would follow. “You have to understand, none of us expected the government to fall. When we went to the army headquarters, some 20 groups [of Gen Z protesters] were there. Even the army chief was shocked to see how decentralised the protesting groups were,” Lamichhane says. “He eventually asked us to go to a hall, and to sit together and come up with a common agenda.”

Over the next few days, faced with the daunting task of coming up with a name to potentially lead the country until the next election, the protesters turned to the very technology the government had tried to outlaw. The Discord platform now ballooned to around a lakh members, as these individuals began to discuss the potential next steps for the country. “In the beginning, it was just chaos, and there were all sorts of opinions. But it was a powerful way to listen to the people,” Lamichhane says. There were even polls conducted on the platform to find potential candidates. A consensus eventually formed around Sushila Karki, Nepal’s former chief justice, and her name was offered to General Sigdel, after which President Ramchandra Paudel would go on to confirm her as the new prime minister of a caretaker government..

There has since been occasional chaos. After Karki appointed three key ministers (Om Prakash Aryal, legal adviser to Kathmandu Mayor Balen Shah, as home minister; Rameshwor Khanal, former finance secretary, as finance minister; and Kulman Ghising, former CEO of the electricity authority, as energy minister), Sudan Gurung, the head of Hami Nepal, the most prominent of the Gen Z groups, expressed his displeasure. 

Lamichhane dismisses this disagreement. To him, while this moment is fraught with uncertainty, it is also filled with euphoria. “Who would have thought that ordinary people, who nobody ever listened to, would be talking to the president one day, discussing the future of the country,” he says. 

democracyGen ZNepal protestssocial mediayouth