Ruchira Gupta | Lesson of Nepal’s Gen Z Revolt: Can A Small Democracy Be Kept ‘Clean’?

I first covered Nepal’s struggle for democracy in the 1980s. I remember the bans and jailings, the absolute poverty that pushed families to the edge, and the exploitation that greased trafficking routes across borders. I saw courage at close range: students, workers, farmers and journalists defying a palace and a party-state that tried to control not only what people said but what they imagined possible. That memory shapes how I read Nepal’s latest uprising: led by a new generation, ignited by a social media shutdown, and nearly hijacked by royalists and religious nationalists.

Nepal is small and landlocked, but it has a stubborn democratic spirit. Over decades, Nepalis have forced open political space through nonviolent mass movements. They also did something rare in South Asia: they absorbed an armed Maoist insurgency into the constitutional mainstream. The Maoists surrendered their weapons, came out of the jungles, and were allowed to contest, and even join the government. But some who once spoke for the poor calcified into elites themselves. Their children flaunted branded handbags and luxury lifestyles while ordinary youth were told to wait their turn. That hypocrisy -- “Nepo Kids”, as the students call it -- poisoned faith in the republic.

The spark this time was a government order that blacked out dozens of social platforms in the name of “compliance.” In principle, Nepal wasn’t asking for anything radical: registration, a local point of contact, a grievance officer. The EU, India and others have demanded similar accountability from tech giants. But in practice, the state reached first for the bluntest tool -- a blanket block that silenced millions at once -- when young people were already seething about corruption and inequality. For them, the shutdown didn’t seem boring regulatory housekeeping. It spelt censorship.

What followed was both familiar and new. Familiar, as students again poured into the streets, claiming civic space that previous generations had carved out with blood and jail time. New, as their organising grammar was digital: discord servers, encrypted chats and Instagram Lives replaced mimeographed flyers. They marched against impunity, not for a monarch. Yet by the second day, the protests were invaded by lumpen mobs and royalist-Hindutva cadres who burned and looted behind a thicket of rudraksha rosaries and saffron slogans. Some Indian media headlines amplified their frame -- “Gen Z wants a Hindu Rashtra” -- as if willing a kingdom back to life. But the students wanted something else: a reset toward accountability within the constitution.

That’s where the elders stepped back -- the battered, stubborn cohort who built Nepal’s democratic muscle memory. Rather than let a palace restoration ride the chaos, they brokered a constitutional exit ramp. The President refused to throw away the republic. In parallel, student moderators polled thousands of peers and surfaced a non-controversial caretaker: Sushila Karki, a former Chief Justice whose public life has been defined by incorruptibility, hard rulings, and a willingness to call out her own party when it strayed. Ms Karki’s appointment as interim PM isn’t the end of the story. But it is a declaration of intent: elections will be under the constitution, not a crown.

None of this erases Nepal’s structural vulnerabilities. A landlocked economy lives at the mercy of cross-border supply lines; many Nepalis still remember the 2015-16 shortages that followed tensions with India. When ports of information are shut and roads of commerce constrict, it is the poor who pay first and longest. That is why platform governance in small states must be precise, proportionate and grounded in due process, not spectacle. The goal is not to let Silicon Valley rule by default, but to avoid handing censors and demagogues a pretext.

There is another unfinished reckoning too. The republic’s most corrosive wound is not only illegality but impunity -- the sense that power insulates, and lineage absolves. When the children of revolutionary ministers brandish luxury goods while public hospitals run short of gauze, no amount of patriotic rhetoric can paper over the insult. The students saw that. They stitched their anger to a simple demand: rules for everyone, especially for those who write them.

This is why I see hope in how the transition was chosen. In a week when palaces flickered in some imaginations and arsonists tried to claim the streets, Nepal’s youth and its old democrats chose a judge. They chose a woman who made her name by refusing to bend, including when it would have been easier to close her eyes. That choice says something profound about the country’s civic instincts.

It is not romantic to admit that danger still stalks the path ahead. The death toll from the clashes is grievous; investigations must be independent and fast. Compensation must reach families without the humiliations that too often accompany state relief. Platform “compliance” must be rebuilt as rights-respecting regulation rather than mass outages. And the election machinery must be protected from both palace nostalgia and party capture. Any lag -- in justice, in clarity, in credibility -- will tempt the worst actors back into the breach.

But I have watched Nepal come back from worse. I have seen its citizens, over and over, refuse to be reduced to a buffer state, a playground for oligarchs, or a footnote between China and India. This month’s uprising belongs to Gen Z, but it stands on the shoulders of many who marched before them. If the interim government keeps faith with that lineage -- if it delivers truth for the dead, dignity for the living, and a fair fight at the ballot box -- then a small democracy will have done something very large: it will have reminded all of us that the hardest part of freedom is not seizing it, but keeping it clean.

Ruchira Gupta is the author of The Freedom Seeker & I Kick and I Fly, founder of NGO Apne Aap and a professor at NYU. Follow her on insta: RuchiraAGupta