Nepal’s Republic of Amnesia

Four months after the revolt that overthrew the government of Nepal, Kathmandu seems calm. The new interim government has officially recognized the protests, led by Gen-Z activists, as the third “people’s movement” in the country’s history. Renovations have started on some of the buildings torched this past September, although the parliament remains a charred shell. Rush-hour traffic jams are back. Government offices have reopened. The flow of tourists has resumed: in December the popular Annapurna trekking area reported record numbers for the year and Nepal’s premier T20 cricket league concluded its second iteration in Kathmandu. It is all a far cry from this past autumn, when government forces opened fire on young protesters demonstrating against a social media ban, accelerating an uprising that killed seventy-six people and left government offices and businesses in flames.

Since then new configurations have emerged in Nepali politics. After the government resigned, a presidential directive appointed an interim one in its place—led by the country’s first woman prime minister, Sushila Karki—and tasked it with holding elections in early March for the House of Representatives, the lower of Nepal’s two houses of parliament. Since then the Karki government has been working overtime to ensure that the election goes ahead; more than 900,000 new voters have registered. Nepal’s House of Representatives elects members using two parallel electoral systems: 165 members are chosen on a straightforward principle of first-past-the-post and the other 110 members via a method called proportional representation (PR). Introduced in 2008 to ameliorate the historical absence of marginalized groups in the legislature, the PR system involves electing members based on their parties’ relative vote share; this year sixty-four parties registered their candidates.

The coalition government ousted in September consisted of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) and the Nepali Congress (NC). Both parties have been at once fending off challenges from newer rivals and facing widespread discontent. Neither seemed inclined to let younger members rise in the ranks. As a result the NC has been effectively split in two: a special convention ousted the geriatric leadership and elected the younger Gagan Thapa as chair. At its internal elections, meanwhile, the UML reappointed K.P. Oli as its chair, mere months after he resigned as prime minister amid the protests.

The newer parties, twenty-five of which registered with the election commission after September, promise a break from the corruption and instability that has plagued the NC and UML’s governments since the introduction of multiparty democracy in 1990. The most ambitious among them is the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), led by the former TV presenter Rabi Lamichhane, currently out on bail after being accused of misappropriating funds from a cooperative finance scheme. The RSP came on the scene prior to the 2022 elections on an anticorruption platform that won it the fourth-largest share of seats in the erstwhile parliament. Since the protests it has tried to form a front with other popular leaders, notably Kulman Ghising, a former director of Nepal’s electricity authority who drew attention for ending the country’s persistent power cuts. So far this effort has had a rocky trajectory. Ghising, who until recently served as minister of infrastructure, energy, and water resources in the interim government, had agreed to merge his Ujyaalo Nepal Party with the RSP, only to back out within twelve days of the merger, reportedly after a split over how to allocate party positions and memberships.

The jewel in the RSP’s crown, however, is Balen Shah, the rapper-mayor of Kathmandu, who won the office as an independent candidate in 2022 in a popular campaign against the older parties. The protesters had reached out to him to lead the interim government, but he refused. This was for the best, his associate the activist Sudan Gurung, who was among the organizers of the September protests, announced on social media—the youth would rather have Shah as prime minister for the full five-year term. Shah had been conspicuously quiet about his intentions, but in December he at last agreed to become the RSP’s candidate for prime minister.

The RSP will hardly have an easy time wrenching power from the old parties. It needs to expand its hitherto urban base into a pan-Nepali movement, not to mention winning over older voters without losing its younger supporters in the process. The split between Ghising and the RSP suggests that alternative political forces, too, suffer from the squabbles over power and position that have long afflicted the country’s older parties. Even before the rift, the media and Gen-Z activists had criticized the RSP for excluding women from its decision-making process and including members of the Kathmandu elite—some of whom have since withdrawn—in its PR list.

The youth are at a crossroads of their own. The uprising was a decentralized movement, assembled online in response to the government’s authoritarian ban on social media and galvanized by the murder of nineteen protesters. But by the end of the second day—in a sign both of the depth of the people’s anger and the extent of the state’s enfeeblement—the uprising had topped the government, forcing the protesters into a position of unexpected power.

It was convenient to consider them all part of the same political movement. That was a mistake. The youth share a commitment to keeping the old guard from retaking power, but otherwise they are a heterogenous lot, reflecting the many discontents against a decade-old republic. A few demand the return of the king, others the dissolution of the constitution. Some say they favor disbanding the federal system that currently divides the country into seven provinces. A few have also called for a directly elected head of state. This range was on full display the night after the government fell, when nearly 10,000 young Nepalis listened on Discord—the online communication platform that became a crucial tool for the protests—as youth leaders proposed dramatic, often contradictory changes to the post-2015 constitutional order.

To implement these changes, the youth have no choice but to enter the legislative process. A few youth activists have been nominated for the PR lists, while other young leaders, like Sudan Gurung, have decided to run for parliament themselves. But Nepal is a fractured polity where dozens of parties have cultivated loyal constituencies spread across regions and ethnicities; no party has managed to win an outright majority in an election since 1999. Unless the electoral math shifts significantly in the newer parties’ favor, they will need to form some sort of coalition government with at least one of the parties representing the deposed, corrupt older guard, restricting their room for maneuver in advance.

Beneath all these negotiations are deeper questions. Will the third people’s movement succeed where previous movements have failed at repairing the country’s corrupt political culture? What is it about Nepali politics that makes even newer parties like the RSP revert to old ways of operating? And will the youth take steps to address the historical inequities that have burdened the country since its founding?

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Prithvi Narayan Shah, the mid-eighteenth-century ruler from a petty hill state who conquered the city-states of the Kathmandu valley and “unified” Nepal, is said to have laid the roadmap for the country’s national identity in a set of instructions called Divyaupadesh (“Divine Guidance”). Some scholars—such as Pratyoush Onta and the late Kamal Prakash Malla—have questioned this document, considering it a twentieth-century construction that projects a modern nationalism onto the past. Nonetheless two of Prithvi Narayan’s aphorisms have had a decisive influence on the dominant ideology of modern Nepal.

The first, chaar varna chattis jaat (“four varnas and thirty-six castes”), was said to be Prithvi Narayan’s strategy for assimilating Nepal’s many diverse ethnicities into a single national identity. For centuries the Himalayan region has been a “cradle of ethnogenesis,” as the linguist George Van Driem has written; one and a half times the size of Portugal, Nepal includes more than a hundred different ethnic groups and languages.¹ In some areas, particularly in the east, the early Shah rulers respected local customs and practices to a certain degree, declining, for instance, to outright ban the cow slaughter practiced by non-Hindu communities (although they did subject it to fines).

And yet the foundations of the state lay in Hinduism. Nepal saw itself as an “asal Hindustan,” or land of the Hindus, as Prithvi Narayan outlined in his Divyaupadesh. Ascetics such as Bhagavantnath were awarded large land grants and titles;² judicial decisions were informed by the Brahmanical code. As the historian Sanjog Rupakheti has noted, the early Nepali state put together “a novel Hindu polity out of a plural society.”

This system hardened in the mid-nineteenth century, when a dynastic clan called the Ranas wrested power from the Shah kings, demoting them to a figurehead role and establishing a despotic autocracy that lasted a century. The Ranas further emphasized the Hindu foundations of the kingdom, arguably to shore up Brahmanical support for their coup. In 1866, in a preface to regulations on religious endowments, the dynasty’s first prime minister, Jung Bahadur, described Nepal as “a Hindu kingdom,” adding, “In this Kali Age this is the only country in which Hindus rule.”³

Twelve years earlier, inspired by his visit to Europe, Jung Bahadur had issued Nepal’s first legal code. Known as the Muluki Ain, it stipulated that a person’s caste would determine their juridical status. The Hindu elite retained their position at the top of the social ladder, while non-Hindus and members of untouchable Hindu castes such as blacksmiths, cobblers, and tanners found themselves trapped at the bottom. Most non-Hindu ethnic groups were deemed enslaveable. Caste was also localized: the Hindus of the country’s plains down south had their own hierarchy, as did the Newar people of the Kathmandu valley.

The result of this process was that being “Nepali” came to mean being—or behaving like—an upper-caste Hindu and speaking Khas Kura, the language that eventually became Nepali, which was closely identified with the Khas-Arya, the highest ethnic groups in the caste hierarchy. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Rana dynasty banned the public use of Nepal Bhasa, the Newar language; those who wrote in it were imprisoned. In 1959 the teaching of Nepali was made compulsory in all schools in the hope that, as the National Education Planning Commission put it, “other languages will gradually disappear, and greater national strength and unity will result.” Nepali remains the language of power—what the novelist and essayist Manjushree Thapa has called an “instrument of national unification and cultural assimilation.” Not to know it immediately marks you as an outsider.

Similarly, although each of Nepal’s four constitutions since 1962 have formalized social equality in the letter of the law, caste and ethnic hierarchy continue to dominate Nepali society. Almost all the country’s prime ministers since 1816 have been Bahun or Chhetri men from the Khas-Arya ethnicity, who also dominate the judiciary and bureaucracy. Caste violence persists. This past October the home of a Dom family—a Dalit caste from the Terai plains—was bulldozed to make way for a mahayagya, a public Hindu ritual; in 2020 six men, four of whom were Dalits, were killed by a mob in western Nepal because a Dalit had fallen in love with a high-caste girl.

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The second of Prithvi Narayan’s influential aphorisms was that Nepal is sandwiched between the giant states of India and China like dui dhunga bich ko tarul—“a yam between two stones.” In the Divyaupadesh he warns his descendants to protect the country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty from encroachment by its larger neighbors: “They will surely arrive here one day.” He was particularly concerned about the British, who did arrive with an army a day’s march away from Kathmandu during the war with the East India Company in 1816, which culminated in the treaty that established Nepal’s modern borders.

This sense of ever-looming threat did much to shape modern Nepali nationalism, breeding more antipathy toward minority groups. The Himalaya was seen as a bulwark against the “Bhoteys,” a pejorative term used to describe Tibetan ethnic groups who live in the mountains of northern Nepal. To the south, the vast lowlands were once dominated by thick malarial jungles, a natural defense against a marauding army, but after the 1816 treaty the ruling hill elite cleared out the forests for arable land. To cultivate it they relied both on migrant labor from India and on the communities—such as the Tharus—who had long called the plains home. Under the Muluki Ain both the Tharus and the Bhoteys were categorized as “enslaveable alcohol-drinking castes.”

In 1951 Nepali democrats threw off the yoke of the Ranas and restored power to the king, assisted by Jawaharlal Nehru and a newly independent India. But the members of Nepal’s new political class were eager to reject Delhi’s influence, and to emphasize their independence they refined an ideology that saw the monarchy as the embodiment of the nation, organized around the high-caste, hill-dwelling elite.⁴ Under the Rana dynasty Nepali political culture had developed a particularly strong tradition of sycophancy and subservience (what became known as chaakari), and now the kings replaced the Ranas at its center. Nepal’s first elected prime minister, B.P. Koirala, was also a writer, and in 1949 he published a story that diagnosed this tendency acutely. A hanger-on to a general turns paranoid when he fails to acknowledge the military bigwig on the road: “If my glasses were not faulty, I would have greeted him. That would have been enough for my chaakari.”

Koirala himself was evidently not subservient enough, for in 1960 King Mahendra Shah, who had taken the throne four years earlier, dismissed his government and imposed an autocratic system called the Panchayat, a form of absolute monarchy meant to correct the “failure” of Nepal’s democratic “experiment in Western forms.” Under this pyramidical model, which lasted for nearly three decades, a 125-member national assembly sat at the top of the country, 15 percent of whose members were nominated by the king. “Class organizations” such as the Nepal Peasants Organization and Nepal Youth Organization filled the void left behind by political parties.

Ostensibly meant to ensure that ordinary Nepalis could participate in politics without party mediation, the Panchayat instead effectively gave local elites control over who could access the top levels of governance. It was during this period, too, that modern Nepali nationalism fully consolidated: “the Nepali language, Hinduism and monarchy,” as Onta has written, were now firmly established as “the triumvirate of official Nepali national culture.” In the coming years the country’s ruling class came to mistrust Nepalis who lived in the plains and had intimate familial and cultural ties across the border, who “looked” and “behaved” like Indians and did not speak the language of the hills.

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Decades of autocratic rule eventually became too much to bear. In 1990, when a mass protest movement took to the streets, the monarchy relented and reinstated multiparty democracy. That movement was led by a coalition of the NC and communist forces; two of the latter merged in 1991 to become the UML. Most of these parties assimilated fairly quickly into the new status quo and spent the following years unseating one another’s governments: the longest during this decade lasted for a little more than three years, the shortest for scarcely more than six months.

The revolution hardly displaced the ruling elite. Political party leaders came from the same social strata as they had under the Panchayat—what the political scientist C.K. Lal has termed the “Permanent Establishment of Nepal”, or PEON— and still cultivated loyal constituencies by promoting them within the party’s networks, including the bureaucracy and security services. The result was a string of corruption scandals, such as the Lauda Air scam, in which the state airline leased a Boeing 767 from an Austrian company at inflated prices. The tourism minister and the airline chief were both charged with costing the exchequer 160 million Nepalese rupees—about 1.1 million in today’s dollars—but largely escaped punishment.

The militant Maoists, some of whom had participated in the 1990 movement, were hardly satisfied with this sort of constitutional monarchy. Their cadres recruited heavily among Nepalis from long-marginalized castes and ethnicities, and although most of the group’s leaders were Brahmins, they too were convinced that Nepal needed nothing less than a people’s republic. In 1996 they launched a guerilla insurgency that would last for the next decade.

For the first few years the state treated this armed uprising as a problem of rural law and order, creating a new police force to suppress the revolutionaries. But these operations resulted in gross human rights violations, only encouraging more people from impoverished rural communities to join the Maoists. The guerillas, for their part, recruited child soldiers and targeted civilians they deemed “class enemies.”

In late 2001, having assumed the throne after a palace massacre that killed much of the royal family, King Gyanendra Shah brought in the military and dramatically escalated the war. Rights groups were soon accusing the state forces of still more widespread abuses. Here, too, the old hill chauvinism was evident: although Tharus make up only 7 percent of the population, the International Crisis Group (ICG) reported that Tharu men were more than a third of the Nepalis disappeared during these years.  

By 2004 the war had spread across the country. That year the Maoists besieged the town of Beni in western Nepal, in one of the war’s biggest attacks on a district center. In 2005 they detonated an IED on a bus in a southern village called Badarmude, killing thirty-five civilians and three security personnel. Facing increasing criticism from opposition parties for the escalating violence, in February Gyanendra dismissed the government, declared an emergency, and suspended all fundamental constitutional rights. This had the unintended effect of rallying the opposition around the insurgency: political parties that the Maoists had once labelled class enemies now turned to them as allies. In 2006 the second people’s movement—still the largest in the country’s history—took to the streets and overthrew the monarchy. Two years later Nepal became a republic.

The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), as it was then called, found itself in the political mainstream, buoyed by a surprisingly resounding victory in the first Constituent Assembly election in 2008, where it won 229 seats in a 601-member house. And yet, lacking an outright majority, it still had to govern in coalition with the UML and other parties. Fissures soon emerged. First the Maoists refused to support the NC leader Girija Prasad Koirala, the chief architect of the 2006 revolution, in his bid to become the new republic’s first president; the position went instead to another senior NC figure, Ram Baran Yadav.⁵ Then, in an attempt to assert civilian supremacy over the military, the Maoist prime minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal (known as Prachanda), sacked the army chief.

The response was swift. The UML abandoned its coalition with the Maoists. President Yadav—the head of state under Nepal’s new system—likewise refused to back the firing, forcing Prachanda to resign. The other parties had been contesting the Maoists’ efforts to induct 19,000 of their cadre into the Nepali army, and mutual suspicion deepened when the Maoists started cultivating an urban militia, the Young Communist League. To their political rivals it was further evidence that they had designs on taking over the state.

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Trouble was also brewing in the plains. The region’s people—known as Madhesis—had been demanding a federal system that would mitigate their historical marginalization by giving them proportional representation in parliament and a certain number of guaranteed posts in the civil services and the armed forces. But progress was slow. After four years of infighting, in 2012 the constituent assembly finally collapsed, and the next round of elections went in the NC’s favor. The Maoists toned down their radicalism to negotiate with the other parties, but only when the devastating 2015 earthquakes exposed the hollowness of the Nepali state did the men in power feel the need to fast-track a constitution so that reconstruction could begin.

In their rush, they glossed over the historical inequalities the constitution was meant to redress. Four major parties—the NC, UML, the Maoists, and a Madhesi party—agreed on a text that watered down the interim constitution. The Madhesi demand had been for two provinces in the plains without any hill districts, which would, they argued, secure them a cohesive voice in the country’s national politics. Instead, a preliminary map of the country’s internal boundaries under the new constitution divided the southern plains over six provinces and arranged all but one of those provinces in a way that combined parts of the north and south, recalling the country’s administrative division under Panchayat rule.

The Tharu community, too, were ill-served by the new constitution, which absorbed the districts where they enjoyed a majority into a hill-dominated province, consigning them to permanent minority status. It was a choice that clearly reflected the concerns of the hill-based parties, which had argued that drawing provinces on the basis of identities would, in the ICG’s summary, “create ethnic ghettoes and could even threaten the breakup of the country.” When the midwestern hill elite demanded a new province to keep their region intact, the government agreed, without addressing the Tharu community’s concerns. Communal relations deteriorated, with leaders from the hills and the plains using inflammatory language and forces on both sides escalating hostilities. In August 2015 almost 20,000 Tharus gathered in protest in the country’s far west. Soon the demonstration turned violent, and by the end of the day a mob had killed eight police officers and another officer’s eighteen-month-old child. In response Tharu homes and businesses were torched; Human Rights Watch reported that security forces repeatedly threatened Tharus with more violence.

The plains likewise broke out in protest. The state responded with deadly force, killing at least fifty people across the region in two months, including children as young as four. None of this stopped the constitution from taking effect in mid-September, prompting Madhesi political parties to obstruct customs points on the India–Nepal border. Having earlier expressed concerns about the constitution, India now halted all fuel supplies and shipments of other provisions—an unofficial blockade that lasted for six months. As the ICG wrote at the time, the protests by the Madhesis had to be read “as a huge outpouring of resentment against a history of discrimination and an articulation of the desire to be treated with dignity as full Nepalis.”

Another provision in the constitution prompted immediate outrage: it forbade Nepali women from passing on citizenship independently to their children in their name and declared that children of Nepali women and foreign men could only become “naturalized” citizens, barring them from holding certain government positions. These laws reflected not just the persistence of patriarchy and sexism in Nepali society but also conservative concerns about the demographic change that would ensue from Nepali women marrying Indians. As Manjushree Thapa wrote at the time, in an essay explaining why she renounced her Nepali citizenship after the new constitution went into effect: “Nationalism beats, as a final refuge, in the hearts of Nepal’s Hindu patriarchs.”

A 2025 constitutional amendment finally allowed women to pass on citizenship in their name, even in the case of an unknown father. But citizenship laws are still unequal, and it remains to be seen how this legal expansion will improve the conditions of motherhood in Nepal. In 2025 a twenty-two year old woman who gave birth at sixteen committed suicide after spending six years in a bureaucratic labyrinth trying to get a share in her husband’s property, to which she would have been legally entitled. Her grieving father committed suicide days later. These deaths suggest that equality in practice remains far off.

The new constitution had envisioned that each of Nepal’s seven new provinces would soon have the power to levy its own taxes, create its own administrative bodies and state police, and form its own public service commission to appoint civil servants. But these powers never devolved. Subsequent governments, dominated by the NC, UML, and Maoists, began a new round of centralization. K.P. Oli, who had three stints as prime minister between the constitution’s promulgation and his administration’s ouster this past September, was the architect of the new republic, bringing several government agencies directly under his office’s control, interfering in provincial-level disputes in his party, and reducing provincial autonomy by replacing chief ministers at will. The UML had merged with the Maoists in 2018 to create the Nepal Communist Party, which suddenly had a majority: 174 members in the 275-strong house. But in December 2020, facing a revolt and a no-confidence vote from his own party, Oli dissolved parliament; months later, when the Supreme Court reinstated the house, Oli connived with the country’s president to dissolve it once more. The top court stepped in once again, foiling Oli’s plans. But the rot in the republic was plain to see.

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In the last decade Nepal arrived at a certain measure of political stability, for which its people had paid a heavy price. The state had been remade by a small cohort of old men who acted, in effect, like republican kings. The leaders of the three main parties played musical chairs with the prime minister’s office, taking turns occupying it in various coalition governments; some, such as the NC chair Sher Bahadur Deuba, had previously served in the royalist administration. The provinces were weakened, their leaders either whittled down to size or coopted into the center. The parties doled out promotions in the bureaucracy and the security apparatus based on loyalty. Infrastructure contracts for airports and road projects were marked by corruption and delays. Bridges were built to nowhere, and those that were finished often failed to meet safety standards. Local budgets went to watchtowers on hill summits rather than to necessary infrastructure.

Those in power operated with near-complete impunity. Cronyism ran wild: close allies, such as the owner of Prachanda’s residence in Kathmandu, were awarded lucrative infrastructure contracts. An investigation into a gold smuggling racket implicated the son of a former vice president, a former speaker of Parliament and his son, and other officials. It became a regular affair for the government to procure goods and services at inflated costs from loyal businesspeople: during the Covid-19 pandemic, for instance, a private supplier with close ties to Oli sold medical supplies to the state at almost double the usual price. Members of Parliament and elected local government officials were accused of embezzling a total of 49 billion in Nepalese rupees—some $340 million—from savings-and-credit-cooperative finance schemes across the country.

Economic reform came to a standstill. Unemployment soared so high that millions of Nepalis—many of them young—left to work abroad, mostly in the sweltering heat of the Gulf countries. Some became mercenaries in the Russia–Ukraine war. Others tried to pretend to be Bhutanese refugees to move abroad. Meanwhile the granddaughter of the Maoist party chair flaunted her designer handbags on Instagram.

The youth felt increasingly alienated within a country in which they were now a majority. By September—when social media companies refused to register themselves with the government and Oli’s administration responded with a blanket ban on the platforms—they had had enough. Thousands of protesters took to the streets in Kathmandu. For many it was their first experience of challenging the state; they sang and danced, biked and skateboarded. But the government, having perfected its techniques of violent repression in the plains, replicated them in the capital, opening fire on protesters when some of them charged at the gates of Parliament. By the end of the day seventeen people were dead in the capital and two more in eastern Nepal. There could hardly have been a clearer sign that the country’s political leadership considered its citizens disposable.

The response was instantaneous. September 9 began with disbelief, then rage. Angry mobs roamed the streets, torching any symbol of the state they found: the Parliament, the prime minister’s office, the president’s office, the supreme court, police stations, municipality and ward offices, and provincial assemblies. Politicians’ homes were attacked, as were businesses believed to be close to the establishment. Luxury hotels and car showrooms were gutted. By 3:00 PM Oli had resigned, but the fury had scarcely subsided. Huddled in our home, we watched flames engulf Nepal’s largest media office. The air was thick with soot and smoke. Gas cylinders exploded in our vicinity regularly. Multiple branches of Nepal’s biggest retail chain was ransacked, then burned. Even now at least seven of the seventy-six people who died over the course of those two days remain unidentified, their bodies found charred beyond recognition inside the stores.

At 10:00 PM the army assumed control of security and mobilized its troops. Oli’s resignation had left only the president—until then a largely ceremonial role—as steward of the constitution. Over the next two days Gen-Z leaders were asked to nominate the head of an interim government. On Discord, thousands of young Nepalis voted for Karki, a former chief justice known for her anti-corruption stance, who was sworn in three days later. The old Parliament was dissolved, creating the political vacuum that only the forthcoming elections will fill.

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In The People’s Republic of Amnesia, her study of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and their aftermath, the journalist Louisa Lim argues that China finds itself stuck in a historical loop, “a Mobius strip of crushed aspirations, cycling from one generation to the next.” She could have been writing about Nepal. When the young protesters asserted their rights as citizens, demanding accountability and an end to corruption, they were doing much the same as the generation of democratic activists who launched an armed struggle against the Rana prime ministers, the generation who challenged royal autocracy forty years later, the Maoist guerrillas who advocated for an end to the monarchy, and the civil society activists who hoped for greater inclusion and representation when the constitution was being promulgated. All these revolutions remained incomplete, because none of them managed to undo the country’s entrenched hierarchies—the concentration of power in men from the hills, the inequalities of caste, ethnicity, and gender, and the continued dominance of the Nepali language. Too often they ended up absorbed into those hierarchies themselves.

Could the September 2025 protests succeed where these efforts failed? The youth seem to think so. Most older observers are reserving judgment. Some of the young activists share with their predecessors a tendency toward hero worship, pinning all their hopes on individual contenders such as Balen Shah and Kulman Ghising. Some activists have advocated for greater representation of Nepal’s ethnic, religious, and caste diversity. But the movement also includes a cohort of populist hardliners who seem susceptible to the old nationalism. A naturalized Nepali citizen who was to be appointed as a minister in the interim government faced scathing attacks from self-proclaimed nationalists both in traditional outlets and on social media about her Indian antecedents; her appointment was withdrawn. A few weeks later the same nationalists accused another ministerial candidate from the high mountains of being a Tibetan activist; she too was not appointed. Nor are newer parties like the RSP immune. Its decision-makers are all men, and women in its ranks have expressed dissatisfaction with its selection of candidates. Particularly now that the country’s politics are heavily determined by social media, where leaders like Balen Shah have followings in the millions, dismantling the old inequities will take nothing less than redefining what makes a Nepali.

In 2010 I met a few young Maoists who had arrived in Kathmandu after a daylong bus journey in the muggy heat of May. The Maoists had declared an indefinite strike to protest their exclusion from government, and these men had descended upon the capital along with thousands of others who supported the party. Many of them were suffering from dysentery as a result of staying in a packed dormitory with a single toilet and no drinking water. The smell of unwashed bodies and sickness lingered in the air. But they believed they had lit the fuse of a successful revolution. For them the other parties represented the old state, and they were more than willing to put their lives on the line to defend the new republic.

I thought about those young men after the protests in September. Had they returned to the streets and joined the wave of collective discontent? Were they part of the mob that burned down the state? Or had they become politicians themselves, coopted into the cycle of corruption and sycophancy like the others? Will the younger Nepalis fare better at making the republican dream a reality? It is too early to say, but it is never too late to hope.