Nepal’s Youth Revolt

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“Burning,” he answered. He gestured to the surrounding crowd: “Parliament burning, from we.” 

Along with the parliament building, mobs inflicted damage on the Supreme Court, local police stations, elected leaders’ homes—including those of several former prime ministers—and private businesses. The country’s largest media company, Kantipur Media Group, paused two of its digital publications after fires, set by protesters, destroyed their servers and damaged their offices. 

Later on September 9, Nepalese Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli resigned from his post, and the government repealed the social media law. By Friday, Sushila Karki—a 73-year-old former chief justice on the Supreme Court—was sworn in as interim prime minister. 

She was nominated after winning several polls, organized by protest leaders, held on the online group-messaging platform, Discord, and is the Hindu nation’s first female leader. Karki said she plans to hold the position for six months and aims to hold elections for new leaders on March 5. “I did not wish for this job,” she said. “It was after voices from the streets that I was compelled to accept.”

The struggles of political upheaval are not new to the small Himalayan nation, which has always held onto its sovereignty despite invasions from Indian, Chinese, and British forces over the centuries. Nepal “has faced political instability for 17 years,” Aparna Pande, a Hudson Institute research fellow, told TMD. “And before that, it had two decades of a civil war.” 

Most of Nepal’s younger citizens are old enough to remember the 10-year civil war that unfolded between the Nepali monarchy and Maoist rebel fighters, starting in 1996. Nepal’s King Gyanendra Shah was removed from power following a peace deal, and an interim legislature voted to abolish the monarchy in 2008—but roughly 17,000 people died in the conflict, according to a 2012 report from the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. 

Even with the passage of a new constitution in 2015, Nepal’s political state has been anything but stable. Not a single prime minister or parliamentary majority has held power for a full five-year term, and Oli and his predecessor and political rival, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, have both served several nonconsecutive terms as prime minister since 2008. Many in Nepal view elected leaders as engaged in a game of musical chairs rather than partisan politics.

“It was a monarchy until 2008, and, [in] the last 17 years, there have been 14 governments,” Pande said. “So, almost no government has lasted.”

Most importantly, the political system is viewed as corrupt. As Pande explained, “You don't get admission to school, you don't get admission to a college of your choice, you don't get a job, unless your parents are able to pay that massive, corrupt amount of bribe to that local official, the school official, or that university.”

Such a system became untenable as Nepal’s unemployment rate climbed higher than any annual mark between 1991 and 2019, clocking in at 10.7 percent in 2024, according to data from the World Bank. For those aged 15 to 24 in the labor force, unemployment was at 20.8 percent in 2024. Making matters worse, a labor force survey conducted by the Nepali government’s Central Bureau of Statistics in fiscal year 2017-18 found that 84.6 percent of jobs are in “informal employment,” which, as Pande explained, “means working from home, sort of doing something temporarily.”

According to a 2025 World Bank report, despite notably reducing poverty over the past 30 years, the country’s economic growth has been stunted by multiple factors: namely, persistent political instability, the country’s landlocked, mountainous terrain—which inherently raises trading and transport costs—and by widespread emigration of young men seeking work abroad. As the report notes, “By 2023, remittances accounted for around a quarter of Nepal’s GDP”—and though that helps struggling relatives, it doesn’t create jobs.

But Pande said that many protesters “believe that the reason they are not getting jobs is because the children of the elite get the jobs,” and most or all financial opportunities are awarded to a “small number of families and only their friends.”

Earlier this year, social media users began taking clips from wealthy Nepalis’ social media posts to form into video edits, which they then uploaded to the platforms, often accompanied with the hashtag, #nepokids, a reference to nepotism, and the trend quickly went viral. As David Gellner, professor emeritus at the University of Oxford and former head of its School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, told TMD, “Obviously, Facebook and Instagram and so on are designed partly for that: A lot of people kind of demonstrating their middle-class lifestyles and showing off their new house, or their new car, or their holiday in Thailand, or whatever it is.” That might read as anodyne to those in comfortable economies, but it’s maddening to many struggling in Nepal’s current economy.

Nepal’s lawmakers had for years identified social media as a potential risk to the country’s social fabric, leading to a wide-scale, anti-government backlash. This contributed to their decision to pass a law banning social media access to platforms over which the government had little to no control. The law didn’t prohibit these social media platforms from operating in the country outright, but required them to register with the government so that, as Gellner explained, the government would “have some kind of control or limits on what people can use the platforms for.” 

The government pitched the law to the public as a safeguard against cybercrime, explaining that such restrictions would help prevent not only online criminal fraud but also hate speech and misinformation. However, the public largely didn’t buy it. Government leaders “were trying to ensure that nothing happens with challenges [against] their hold on power,” said Pande. Hence, the solution was to have “access to who's going online.” 

“In their attempt to prevent what they thought may happen, they actually instigated what happened,” she said.

The backlash should not have been surprising. By taking away the public’s access to the most popular social media platforms, the government removed one of the few “things they have,” Pande said. “They may not have a television, they don't have a landline, they have a smartphone. Their smartphone is their access to news, contacting people, everything, and so Facebook, Meta, WhatsApp, [and] YouTube are very important for young people.” It’s not just socially vital, but as Gellner said “for many of them, it's absolutely central to their livelihood, because they conduct business over these platforms.” 

As Pande explained, “They saw it simply as the iron fist of the state coming down to impose restrictions on them without giving a justification which they would be willing to accept.” And so, within five days, the public had taken to the streets, burned down the parliament building, and nominated a new leader.

Thousands joined funeral processions in Kathmandu this morning, honoring the young protesters who died last week. The new government officially declared them “martyrs,” according to the Kathmandu Post, and will pay their families a million rupees each (roughly $7,095 USD at current exchange rates), plus an additional 500,000 rupees to cover other expenses.

But with a caretaker government and a lagging economy, the situation is far from settled. “If the young people do not have jobs, they are unable to get jobs domestically or internationally,” Pande said, “in a few years, we'll be back to where we are, maybe [with] a bigger protest.”

Ever since Charlie Kirk’s murder on Wednesday, partisans have been working overtime looking for a “they” to blame. The Trump administration has pinned it on the left; others like writer Heather Cox Richardson blame the right; and many on both sides blame Jews. (Will Sommer has a good round-up of MAGA conspiracies in The Bulwark). Freddie DeBoer, in his Substack piece titled “Constituent Parts of a Theory of Spectacular Acts of Public Violence,” tries to provide a deeper explanation for this particular moment of public violence: “The 21st century school shooter (for example) does not murder children in an effort to pursue some teleological purpose; the 21st century school shooter exists in a state of deep purposelessness and, at some level and to some degree, seeks to will meaning into being through their actions. This is part of why so many of them engage in acts of abstruse symbolism and wrap their politically-incoherent violence in layers of iconography; they are engaged in cargo cult meaning-making, the pursuit of a pseudo-religion. The tail wags the dog; acts we have grown to see as expressions of meaning are in fact childish attempts to will meaning into being through violence. Conservatives will of course go on saying that Tyler Robinson was an antifa soldier trained in a George Soros-funded BLM terrorist cell. … Clearly he had some sort of ideological urge, some sense that his violence should contain meaning, but his impulses and influences are incoherent; indeed, that urge has been inculcated in online communities that are defined by nothing so much as, well, nothing …” He continues, “The Kirk murder, in this context, is not an act of political terrorism; it is a desperate, violent assertion of personal meaning by a pathetic, immoral agent operating in a system experiencing a collapse of meaning. The assassin is the ultimate product of a society that has become a cacophony of contradictory signals. Unable to process a single, clear purpose, the individual becomes a tragic automaton, compelled by a violent impulse and forced to invent a narrative that can, however briefly, make sense of the carnage. The ideology is not the map to the violence; it is the bewildered commentary on a journey that has already begun.”

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