Nepal Gen Z Protest: Challenges Corruption, Nepotism And Power

Last Monday, on September 8, as my university staff bus whizzed past the Parliament House at Baneshwor Chowk in Kathmandu, I was gripped by anxiety and nostalgia at once. This was where, in a few hours, Gen Zs would congregate for what would be the largest protest in recent times, calling for an end to corruption, nepotism, and authoritarianism. This was also where, 20 years ago, I spent my days calling for an end to the despotism of the then-monarch.

Once in a while, I recount to my students my boyhood adventures of sloganeering and stone-pelting in the heady days of the mid-2000s when I had rallied behind leaders of seven parties, calling for the establishment of a “new” Nepal. King Gyanendra had taken absolute power into his hands, thrown political leaders behind bars, posted his army men in newsrooms, and blocked the Internet. “Leave the country, you thief,” I often shouted, along with thousands of others, calling for King Gyanendra to abdicate the throne. The king relinquished the throne indeed, but he chose to stay on in the country, in the Nagarjun jungle on the outskirts of Kathmandu valley. He descends to the valley once in a while at the slightest hint of political unrest, as if he were an old jackal trying to steal chicken from households. He fails to make a kill and returns to his jungle mahal, like he did on the night of September 11, but not quite before ruffling a few feathers.

On September 8, many of my students had finally decided to descend on the streets, calling for accountability among the political leaders and their parties. The thieves on the block this time were the same old leaders who had sold me the dream of a new Nepal 20 years earlier. Those who had enlightened me with the democratic ideals of parliamentarism, democracy, republicanism, federalism, and constitutionalism had become caricatures of their own revolutionary selves as they became enmeshed in a game of thrones and left the citizens perennially disgruntled. But the kids this time said: “Enough is enough”.

But I was anxious. Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli had, just the other day, berated the Gen Z, and the police wasn’t particularly known to have restraint lately. I regretted not taking a day off to join a protest—or rather to keep a watchful eye on the youngsters as I didn’t trust my country’s police. On the bus, as my colleagues spoke about the impending protest, I pored over Arundhati Roy’s new memoir, trying to ward off the thoughts of an impending massacre. 

At the university, I did little work that day as I kept checking online news sites and scrolling through Instagram and TikTok stories of the protesters. Soon, the news of clashes broke, and a colleague entered my office, mobile in her hand, saying that the police had shot a Kantipur Television journalist in the arm. The victim was Shyam Shrestha, a veteran journalist whom I came across many times when I was a television journalist almost two decades ago. Then another staff member came in and said one protester had been killed, and that the staff bus would be leaving early to ensure everyone reached home in time because a curfew had been imposed. As we headed back to Kathmandu, the news about more killings poured in, with professors worrying for the safety of their students who had joined the protest. The death toll rose to 19 that night [it had risen to 74 by the next week, with police admitting that 13,000 bullets had been spent on the protesters over two days of the protest].

The next morning, as I stepped out to see the maahol after a sleepless night, I encountered a mob heading to the city centre, calling on the prime minister to leave the country. Behind them, the local police station billowed fire and smoke. On their way to the city, the protesters burnt a local office of the Department of Forestry, but they were kind enough to let the watchman collect his bags. I watched as the flames went up, maintaining the calm of a stoic, thinking of the perforated chests and bleeding heads of the protesters the previous day. In a few hours, the sky over Kathmandu turned black, and the air had the pungent smell of burnt tyres, vehicles, and buildings.

As the hours passed, social media was filled with videos of vandalism from other major cities, including Pokhara, Biratnagar and Birgunj, and the protesters became even more aggressive and went on to torch major administrative landmarks—the President’s office, the country’s central administrative office and various ministry offices, prime minister’s residence, the Parliament, and the Supreme Court, among others. Hotels, ATM kiosks, car showrooms, media houses, and private homes of businesspersons and leaders were turned into piles of ash. Days later, charred bodies would be found inside those buildings—some of them being workers and others who had come to loot the buildings.

Corruption Embedded in the System

It is a fallacy to think that the Gen Z protests were a one-off event targeting the K.P. Oli government. It was, rather, a culmination of generational frustration with the way things had unfolded over at least the last 20 years, when the Nepalis made the big move to oust the monarchy. What had then begun as an exercise in reinstating the dissolved parliament had led to a series of extraordinary gains—the end to the 10-year Maoist insurgency, the removal of the king, the secularisation of the polity, and the federalisation of the state.

As Nepal transitioned from conflict to peace, the Nepalis learnt to ask for their rights to self-determination and their space in the society at large. Marginalised groups such as Madhesis, Dalits, Adivasis, Janajatis, sexual minorities, and women claimed their stake in the state, often leading to their greater participation. Most of all, the people learnt to exercise their democratic rights through public discourses, riots, and elections.

The political parties have all along not only been the catalysts but the avant-garde of these changes, establishing the fundamental fact that political parties are essential to a democracy. Since 2008, when the first elections for the Constituent Assembly were held, people continued to faithfully participate in elections, periodic or otherwise, and negotiate with the political parties and state functionaries to strengthen their hard-earned democracy. In between, the Nepalis put up with the game of thrones being played out in the political arena, as no party gained a majority in the elections owing to the proportional representation system, which allowed voters to choose their favourite political party apart from their favourite candidate through first-past-the-post voting. 

What was intended to be a progressive remedy to an unequal society became the Achilles’ heel, as no single party could gain the majority votes, leading to a perpetual cycle of making and breaking coalitions. This turned the three major parties—Nepali Congress, Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist), and Maoist Centre—into a permanent establishment. And so, no matter whom the people voted, they were condemned to be ruled by the same old men—Sher Bahadur Deuba, K.P. Sharma Oli, and Pushpa Kamal Dahal. The government that fell last week was formed by two of the largest political parties in Parliament, a complete disregard of the democratic principle that they should be in Opposition. The Maoist, a distant third, was in the Opposition only because its old tactic of using a political void to its advantage didn’t work this time around.

This was political corruption at its best, and people had had enough of it. And then came the series of corruption scandals, in cash and kind. Fake Bhutanese refugee certificates were sold to Nepal citizens for third-party repatriation to the United States of America; government land next to the Prime Minister’s land were illegally sold to politicians and businesspersons at insanely cheap rates; 343 bighas of land at the Giri Bandhu Tea State was allowed to be swapped with plots elsewhere; millions of dollars in commission went into the pockets of politicians and bureaucrats during the purchase of wide-body aircraft for the national carrier; one company was allowed to monopolise the purchase of Covid-19 kits; hundreds of bighas of land were given on lease for decades at extremely low rates; and so on. The passive sentence above sums up the cycle of corruption in the past decade: there was no single actor who could be pinpointed, as everyone was involved; and the people seemed to have seen no option but to watch passively. And then the Gen Z decided to deal with this cycle of corruption head-on.

After the Hijack, a Headway

The day after Kathmandu burned, I found myself in the middle of at least three Gen Z groups who were either creating a list of demands with the President as they sat at the negotiation table or were trying to understand what had just happened to their uprising. They had started to realise that their uprising had been hijacked both during the protest and the negotiation. The initiators of the social media campaign against corruption had been taken aback by the infiltration of their protests on September 8 and 9 by violent groups who clashed with the security forces and vandalised public property. But when they reached the Nepal Army Headquarters, they were confronted with groups that wanted to reinstate the monarchy, dissolve the Parliament, and, essentially, scrap the constitution.

I hurriedly WhatsApped them a list of non-negotiables: constitutionalism, parliamentarism, republicanism, constitutionalism, federalism. After two days of verbal spats, exchange of blows, debates on discord, and conspiracy theorisation on social media, there was finally a deal to appoint Sushila Karki, an ex-chief justice of the Supreme Court, as the Prime Minister and dissolve the Parliament. Whether Gen Z agreed to this depends on which group you ask.

After initially lambasting the dissolution of the Parliament, the top three political parties have reluctantly begun preparations for a comeback through the elections scheduled for March 5, 2026 even as they grapple with the question of intra-party reforms and change of guard. This has given some semblance of certainty about a peaceful transition into a parliamentary democracy six months from now.

On the streets, in Kathmandu and in other parts of the country, people have started to go about their daily lives as if nothing happened last week, as if it were just a nightmare. The apocalyptic scenes of large government buildings and business houses in flames have given way to images of people coming together to clean, paint and rebuild those buildings and houses. With the economy perennially in peril—economists estimate the losses at Rs 3 trillion, almost 150 per cent of the country’s total budget for the ongoing fiscal year—it will be years before Nepal rebuilds its infrastructure. But something fundamental has shifted in the Nepali mentality—that you can rebuild the country from its ruins.

Back at my university, students had pried the photographs of all of the university’s past Chancellors—most of Nepal’s universities have the Prime Minister as the Chancellor—from the Vice-Chancellor’s office building and placed them outside the main gate. No vandalism, no ‘no entry’ notices for university leaders—just two pairs of shoes neatly placed beside the photographs, perhaps just a reminder that we must start unshackling our minds from existing power structures not just in politics but in all spheres of national life.

(Views expressed are personal)

Dinesh Kafle is a Kathmandu-based writer and academic. A columnist for the Kathmandu Post, he teaches media studies and creative writing at Kathmandu University

(The article appeared in the Outlook Magazine's October 1, 2025, issue Nepal GenZ Sets Boundaries as Ok Boomer, Time’s Up)