The violence catalysed the biggest urban uprising in Kathmandu’s modern history. On 9 September, enraged crowds set the capital ablaze, torching government ministries, courts, the homes of leading politicians and business magnates, police stations and businesses. Similar scenes unfolded across the country, reducing local symbols of authority to charred ruins. The upheaval drew in many more than those who had come under fire the previous day, including enforcers of political parties, as well as lumpen outfits allied to monarchists and Hindu nationalists. The foreign minister and her husband (himself a former prime minister) were beaten in their home. Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli stepped down, taking refuge in an army barracks; the country’s non-executive president was incommunicado. With the exception of the troops patrolling the streets, the state seemed to have melted away. The final death toll exceeded 70, with more than 2,000 injured.

Soon after the government fell, the military – taking an active political role for the first time in the country’s modern history – invited the protest movement to offer a representative to form a government. A retired judge, 73-year-old Sushila Karki, renowned for her professional probity, was selected via a chatroom poll on the instant messaging app Discord. Parliament was dissolved and Karki’s interim government, staffed by technocrats and officials with no party affiliation, and backed by the movement, is charged with holding an election in six months.

These developments mark an unprecedented rupture in Nepal’s politics. On the surface: the toppling of what was ostensibly the strongest government the country had seen in recent years – a coalition of K. P. Sharma Oli’s Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist), supported by the liberal Nepali Congress, with a two-thirds majority in parliament. But recent weeks suggest more tectonic shifts are underway: two generations of politicians, who have dominated public life since the early 1990s, have been sidelined, for the time being at least, straining the political order in place since the triumph of the democratic movement in 2006. The dismantling of Nepal’s autocratic Hindu monarchy and the inclusion of once-insurgent Maoists as a legitimate force in democratic politics were overseen by Nepal’s seasoned major parties, Congress and the CPN-UML, both now discredited and marginalised.

In reality, this post-2006 settlement – officially defined by the triptych of secularism, federalism and republicanism – always reflected Nepal’s unresolved regional, ethnic, caste and class divisions. The 2015 constitution, hammered out over a decade of false starts, represented an inadequate compromise. Since then, Nepal’s major parties have, for all practical purposes, converged, becoming substantively indistinguishable political oligopolies facing virtually no opposition and seemingly impervious to escalating scandals. Power rotates amongst shifting coalitions of the major parties, with the office of prime minister alternating between the same three leaders (K. P. Oli was in the role for the fourth time).

The uprising has not only swept away this system, at least temporarily, taking with it longstanding structures of political patronage, hitherto organised under party cadres; what is also unmistakable is the crumbling of an ideological vocabulary, one that had anchored political thinking and messaging in Nepal since the 1960s. This was a language of rights, redistribution and status, generated by the liberal and left groups pursuing parliamentary democracy and aiming to address class and regional divides. The establishment of a secular republic was this idiom’s great ideological success. But its key propagators – political parties, NGOs and the press – today rank amongst the least popular institutions in Nepal. Marred by association with a venal political order, these ideas have instead given way to slogans of anti-corruption – perhaps the watchword of the movement – good governance and merit.

Nepal is the third country in the region to have seen a mass upheaval bring down its government in recent years: the protests follow the uprisings that unseated the Rajapaksa dynasty in Sri Lanka in 2022 and overthrew Sheikh Hasina’s regime in Bangladesh in 2024. All three movements were led by an urban population, often recent migrants to the cities who were unabsorbed into their sharply unequal national economies. Yet the protesters in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh took strategic advantage of both newer and established networks of activists and political formations. The Aragalaya [1] attracted trade unions, student federations and various activist collectives; Bangladesh’s student-led mobilisation received support from the opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP) and Jamaat-e-Islami [2]. The revolt in Nepal, by contrast, was driven by deep antipathy to political parties and was largely disconnected from other traditional institutions of collective action – trade unions, student groups, professional associations. These have failed to offer space to Nepal’s youthful population, instead often serving as gateways into the lucrative market of public-service delivery, cornered by the three big parties, a system that has bred corruption amongst elites and resentment amongst the disenfranchised youth. In this environment, the social-media blackout that sparked the protest was an attack on the one collective space over which they felt they had some control.

The rejection of older patterns of politics has been fed by several developments. Nepal has suffered neither a debilitating economic shutdown and runaway inflation, as occurred in Sri Lanka, nor sustained government repression, as in Bangladesh. Yet per capita income is $1,400 (€1,275) a year, amongst the lowest in the region, and Nepalis have seen scant improvement in their economic prospects in recent years, despite the 2015 constitutional overhaul and its inclusionary rhetoric. As many as 80% are employed in the country’s informal sector – often insecure and poorly compensated – and over a fifth of young people are out of work altogether. Over the past three decades, the main valve for this demographic pressure of under-employed youth has been large-scale labour emigration, which the post-2006 settlement has done little to stem. Between 2008 and 2022, 4.7 million Nepalis – in a country of 30 million – acquired fresh migrant work permits. Remittances make up a third of Nepal’s GDP, exceeding the total inflow of foreign aid and investment. (Corruption cases implicating cabinet ministers have involved exploiting travel visas or refugee-resettlement schemes to traffic labourers en masse.)

The primary destination for the rural underclass, often from households transitioning out of agriculture, are the emerging economies of the Gulf and Southeast Asia. In 2023, over 770,000 Nepalis received labour permits to work in these regions. Less commented upon are the considerable numbers amongst the urban petty bourgeois and middle class who have effectively migrated to the West, usually under the guise of higher education. Indeed a significant section of the protesters were students, many hoping that a degree and a passport will secure them an upwardly mobile spot in the reserve pool of global labour. Then there is the much larger exodus of Nepalis into India, both for work and education, as well as the uncounted overseas emigration through illicit networks.

The protest movement – many of whose participants were from provincial, often lower-caste, backgrounds – represents a convergence of these socially heterogenous segments. Their spontaneous, horizontal approach is partly the upshot of generational experience. Their defining memory of collective action was not the Maoist insurrection of the early 1990s and 2000s, but grassroots volunteerism in response to the 2015 earthquakes. Aided by the global donation economy and Nepal’s overheated NGO culture, youth-run non-profits have mushroomed, addressing everything from food shortages and sexual harassment to caste discrimination. Amongst the coordinators of the September protests was one such NGO, Hami Nepal [3], which was born after the earthquake and expanded during the COVID pandemic. For those estranged from politics as usual, these decentralised mobilisations have become a way to be political without professing a politics per se.

Ideologically, the imaginary of the protesters has also been shaped by a radically altered information ecology. Greater access to smartphones and cheaper data have eroded the dominance of traditional journalism and commentary, spawning an alternative media space that skews reactionary, and easily veers into the conspiratorial. Platforms featuring anti-establishment voices dwarf the mainstream media in influence and engagement. Domestic politics, in these spaces, is often seen as an extension of great power competition, and politicians and journalists as beholden to foreign intelligence agencies. It was notable that the properties of Nepal’s largest corporate media house were amongst the buildings torched on 9 September. Incubated in this transformed public sphere, Nepal’s youth are often deeply sceptical of mainstream politics. Since politics is no longer viewed as a means to mediate between competing interests and ideas in society, a political demonology of ’agents’, ’infiltrators’ and ’traitors’ dominates. Fringe theories that explain away the world, and inflate Nepal’s position in global affairs, maintain a seductive grip on many.

The outcome of the political transition underway, though impossible to forecast with certainty, will in part depend on the interplay of the forces and interest groups vying for influence. One corner of the political arena is occupied by Karki’s caretaker government, whose officials maintain backchannel links with the protesters; in another sit the disgraced but also disgruntled and potentially uncooperative three major parties. Given the deadly failures of their geriatric leadership, internal scrambles for party control are expected. Yet despite their unpopularity, their organisational reach remains unmatched. A third key bloc consists of recently elected independent mayors, some of whom have accrued national followings, and a handful of newly formed parties, whose social-media celebrity compensates for their lack of organisation and coherent ideology. Though rivals, they share a common aim: the fall of the old guard. Also waiting in the wings are monarchists and Hindu nationalists. Backed by well-financed provocateurs, they have sought to turn crisis into chaos, hoping to erode public confidence in the secular republic. Finally, there are various ’regional’ parties, which claim to represent marginal ethnic communities. Born from the post-civil-war promise of decentralisation, these once-potent forces remain wary of any threat to Nepal’s federal structure. And lastly there is the military, poised to step in again if public order collapses.

Although the Karki government enjoys a good measure of public confidence, it is fragile. In part, this is a consequence of the nature of the leaderless movement which in theory guides it. Whether those claiming to represent it defer to chatroom polls, read the mood of the street or simply make their decisions amongst themselves is anyone’s guess. The government is also burdened by diverging, sometimes contradictory, public expectations. Whilst its chief purpose is to hold elections, it will also be expected to investigate the killings of 8 September and the riots of 9 September. Many hope it will launch inquiries into major corruption scandals and prosecute the offenders. Most critical, however, may be the government’s position on the 2015 constitution. Birthed by the three parties that today stand chastised, the soundness of its key provisions is increasingly contested, some arguing the constitution should be scrapped altogether. The use of proportional representation in electing the parliament, and the establishment of provincial governments under a federal structure, have come under particular criticism. Representatives of the movement, for their part, demand that a popularly elected executive replace the parliamentary prime minister, the former presumably less captive to party politics. Such constitutional initiatives could open up new cleavages, including between the caretaker government and the protesters.

Non-state actors may also present difficulties. Since the eruption of the protests, traditional media, opinion makers and influencers in the region and beyond have gone into overdrive, attributing regime change to the US, India or China, depending on whom you ask. The far-right news anchor Arnab Goswami [4], for example, preoccupied by India’s declining relations with the US, divines an American role in the protests, seeing in them more evidence – after Colombo and Dhaka – of India’s encirclement and strategic isolation. The power of this discourse in shaping political attitudes in Nepal should not be underestimated. Militant Hindu nationalists from India’s northern states – who have actively sought partners in Nepali politics – pose concrete threats of another order.

But Nepal’s immediate political future depends as much on the evolution of its ’Gen Z’, a term that mystifies more than it explains. On 8 September, it was a loose collective of high-school and college students, some online, some on the streets. By the next day, with the country on fire, the word had become a political category, and the diffuse young crowds demonstrating against a social-media ban suddenly found themselves at the centre of an existential revolt. As the heat of rebellion subsides, however, and lacking the organisational structures and ideological ballast of more conventional movements, the coalition of the young may be prone to dispersal or even fracture, particularly if immigration pipelines contract. Since the protests, the United Arab Emirates has stopped issuing both work and travel visas to Nepali nationals. Meanwhile, Australia, Canada and the US have tightened policies affecting both international students and prospective migrants. Shrinking economic opportunities may strain political solidarities, even as they increase the need for them.

Calm has returned to Kathmandu’s streets, but it is the calm of collective despair as much as of a triumphant aftermath. Disenchantment alone is a risky thing to build alliances on. Yet the fact that young men and women of very different social backgrounds have decisively entered the terrain of politics may be a sign of better things to come, or so many hope. The next six months will tell.

Shubhanga Pandey