Nobody in Nepal believed that a somewhat ideologically confused ‘Gen-Z’-led rally against the government would amount to much. When the protests began, many dismissed them as inconsequential, even if many understood that they were driven by widespread corruption and elite impunity. Even on early 8 September 2025, when tens of thousands of the country’s young marched towards the Federal Parliament, the Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli dismissed the event as a ‘staged drama.’

By the end of the next day, his government was overthrown. Oli and most of his cabinet had resigned and fled the capital, afraid for their lives. Oli’s private residence, as well as those of multiple former Prime Ministers, were torched. The most powerful man in the country, Sher Bahadur Deuba – a five-term former Prime Minister and the head of Nepal’s largest political party, the Nepali Congress – was almost beaten to death by a mob that broke into his house, as was his wife, Arzu Rana, the incumbent foreign minister. The Parliament, the Singha Darbar (Seat of the Executive), and the Supreme Court were set ablaze by rioters, as were several lower courts, police stations, tax offices, businesses, luxury hotels, and even the largest media house in the country.

In those two fateful days, over 75 civilians died, and over 2,000 were injured. Yet, six months later, the rapid downward spiral into mass violence by afternoon is hard to explain. Early on the first day of the demonstrations, the mood was cheerful, even jubilant, as teenagers and students danced and sang patriotic songs on the streets of Kathmandu. The leaders and organisers of the protests, as well as independent journalists and eyewitnesses, claim that peaceful demonstrations were ‘hijacked’ by unknown and malicious elements, who infiltrated the crowd and breached the gates of the Parliament. Today, conspiracy theories about their identities are rampant across Nepal, and many blame a mysterious foreign hand (the United States, China, India, or even Russia, based on who you ask) for the chaos, even though it’s unclear how any external power has benefited from the situation, and no concrete evidence of interference has yet materialised.

What is clear, however, is that the state brutality unleashed on 8 September was unprecedented in the small Himalayan country’s democratic history, in which large public demonstrations have been frequent, considered legitimate, and institutionalised by civil society. On the first day alone, 19 people were shot and killed – more than the death toll of the entire 2006 pro-democracy movement. Forensic reports have since revealed that nearly all gunfire victims were shot above the waist – a violation of Nepal’s crowd control protocols. The deposed Prime Minister Oli has denied that his government had ordered the police to open fire, but it’s nearly impossible to believe that officials could have carried out such violent suppression without clearance from the leadership, even if it was covertly issued.

The structural roots of the upheaval in Nepal run deep across its modern history. Protracted political instability has long been the norm in the country, not the exception. Since 2008, when the first ‘post-monarchy’ elections were held, Kathmandu has witnessed 15 governments in 17 years. A handful of septuagenarian leaders – most prominently Deuba of the Nepali Congress, Prachanda of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist-Centre), and KP Oli of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) – have dominated the political landscape for decades. Deuba first assumed the office of Prime Minister in 1995, and Prachanda has essentially remained the leader of the Maoist party since 1994 and headed the insurgents’ military operations in Nepal’s decade of civil war (1996-2006). In the last decade and a half, all three party supremos have formed coalitions with each other and abruptly switched alliances in every combination available to ensure their ascent to the top many times over.

In parallel, economic distress and vulnerability in Nepal have grown sharply, especially among the country’s aspirational and very well educated youth (the youth literacy rate in Nepal is over 92 per cent). More than half of Nepal’s 30 million citizens are under the age of 30, but it has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world – it reached almost 21 per cent (compared to 13 per cent globally) in 2024. In terms of GDP per capita, the country ranks in the bottom 30 worldwide. With no opportunities at home, a significant chunk (14 per cent) of the country’s labour force has fled abroad to find work, primarily in Gulf states, Malaysia, India, South Korea, and Japan. Consequently, remittance inflows account for close to one-third of the country’s GDP.

Much of the country’s economic woes are blamed on entrenched and endemic corruption. As recently as December, Nepal’s anti-corruption watchdog charged 55 officials with corruption after an investigation revealed that they had colluded with contractors from the Chinese construction company CAMC to inflate the cost of the Belt and Road Initiative’s ‘flagship project’, Pokhara International Airport, by $75 million (one-third of the entire project cost). This is just one of several high-profile corruption scandals that have rocked Nepal over the last half-decade, and all three major parties have been complicit.

Widespread cronyism and a system of political patronage across each successive administration in Kathmandu have slowly but surely hollowed out independent institutions and courts. Meanwhile, the party supremos treat governance as a game of musical chairs. The result is a pervasive suspicion among ordinary Nepalis that the political elite are all in cahoots with one another to enrich themselves.

Expressions of large-scale discontentment in Nepal have been visible for some time. In the 2022 elections, a political party formed in June 2022 campaigned for five months on an anti-corruption agenda and suddenly emerged as the fourth largest party by November. In the Kathmandu mayoral race that year, a 32-year-old civil engineer-turned-rapper ran as an anti-corruption independent candidate and won a landslide victory against candidates fielded by the dominant parties. This was no small feat when you consider that nearly 10 per cent of the country’s population lives in the capital city. In late 2024 and early 2025, an incipient movement to restore the monarchy held mass rallies attended by tens of thousands; at least one of these, held in March 2025, spiralled into violence.

In the months ahead of September, anti-corruption groups and posts proliferated on social media as scores of self-styled online activists formed organic networks to reveal and call out corruption. The ‘Nepo-baby’ trend online, in particular, went viral routinely and drew enormous attention towards the opulent lives (often in European or American cities) of the children of Nepali political leaders. The posts were seen as clear evidence of corruption and were often juxtaposed with the hardships faced by the majority of the country’s youth, which further fuelled resentment.

Such resentments are not unique to Nepal, and there were warning signs for the Nepali government that smouldering discontent might turn into open revolt. In South Asia alone, popular and bloody revolts have seen governments overthrown in Sri Lanka in 2022 and Bangladesh in 2024. In both countries, common factors were youth unemployment (of above 20 per cent), entrenched corruption, and brazen authoritarianism.

Yet, the Nepali leadership remained fatally apathetic to the steady buildup of frustration, both offline and online. When the government decided to ban popular social media apps, ostensibly for non-compliance with regulations, this action was widely viewed as a brazenly authoritarian attempt to shut down criticism. Just two days before the first day of organised protests, on 6th September, the car of a provincial minister from the party in power ran over an eleven-year-old girl outside her school in Lalitpur. The occupants of the vehicle did not get out to rush her to the hospital; they simply drove off. When the Prime Minister was questioned by the press, he shrugged it off as a ‘normal accident’ and warned journalists not to ‘politicise the incident.’

For the country’s youth, the episode further substantiated what they already suspected: that their government believed it could act with complete impunity. When they were met with deadly state brutality on 8th September, they were tragically proven right.

On 10th September, the only national institution that had survived the mayhem, the Nepali Army, took over the country and cautiously mediated talks between Gen-Z representatives and the President of Nepal to discern a path forward. Ironically, tens of thousands of the country’s youth gathered in a chatroom hosted on an previously banned social media platform, Discord, to debate the country’s future and vote for an interim leader. On 12 September, Sushila Karki, a former Chief Justice of the Nepali Supreme Court and an anti-corruption activist, made history when she became the first female Prime Minister of Nepal (albeit an interim one) and the first executive head of government chosen online. That very day, she dissolved the Parliament and announced fresh elections for March 2026.

In the aftermath of the events of September, the ‘Gen-Z revolution’ has been officially heralded by the interim government as ‘Jan Andolan III’ (The Third People’s Movement). In doing so, the revolutionaries deliberately invoked two earlier moments of political change in Nepal’s recent history, each of which had profound consequences. The Jan Andolan I in 1990 forced the religious monarchy to cede partial power to political parties. Yet when enfeebled civilian governments proved unable to make up for centuries of impoverishment, a Maoist insurgency broke out in 1996 and claimed the lives of over sixteen thousand Nepalis. This ended with Jan Andolan II in 2006, which led to the restoration of multi-party elections, brought the Maoists into mainstream politics, ended the absolute monarchy, and established Nepal as a Federal Democratic Republic.

Yet many of the revolutionaries today raise a challenging question: will their movement really amount to much? Karki’s interim government, in consultation with Gen-Z representatives, has announced a range of electoral, political, and constitutional reforms to instil transparency and accountability in Nepal’s political system ‘with immediate effect.’ But, in reality, it lacks the legitimacy and political weight needed to see any of them through. Over 10 writ petitions in the Supreme Court contest the formation of the interim government, and at least eight political parties in Nepal have publicly denounced it as ‘undemocratic and unconstitutional.’ Worse still, well-respected civil society organizations such as the Federation of Nepali Journalists, and even a handful of Gen-Z groups, have joined the criticism.

Ultimately, the March elections will decide if and how any reforms are implemented, but they are likely to result in a fractured mandate. 137 political parties are in the contest, nearly one-fifth of which are entirely new formations that sense opportunity in the breakdown of the old order. Yet, while Deuba has stepped down, the ousted former prime minister Oli himself remains very much in charge of his party and plans to stage a comeback.

If the anti-establishment vote splinters, and any of the old parties manage to win a significant number of seats, they will deal a heavy blow to the legitimacy of the Gen-Z revolution itself. And given their entrenched interests, they are more than likely to either dismiss, endlessly delay, or, at the very least, dilute the reforms. Even if the old guard loses, it is still hard to imagine how a new actor could muster up the political capital needed to change the constitution without their support.

While the Jan Andolan III has successfully demonstrated widespread public disenchantment with the status quo, and even offered a cautionary tale against impunity and indifference, it may ultimately fail to build a new kind of socio-political contract in the country. The Nepali youth cannot reasonably be blamed for this; their revolution was born of real grievances. Yet the fact remains that it has as yet no real alternative vision for the country. And in the absence of fresh political imagination, democracy cannot reinvigorate itself; and without a coherent project for national renewal, any proposed institutional solutions, however innovative, will remain lifeless.