Nepal’s Gen Z revolution faces its first reckoning

Ten months ago, Nepal’s young anti-corruption protesters ousted a prime minister from office, and the Gen Z–backed rapper led the new government to a landslide election victory. Now, hundreds of those same protesters have returned to the streets, protesting against the government they once helped bring to power. Balen Shah, who was seen as the avatar of change, vowed to bring sweeping reforms in the country, but 100 days have passed, and the youth see little change as they expected. Just three months may not be enough to judge a government and see changes, but the youth of Nepal are becoming increasingly frustrated with his administration as their expectations from him are high.

Last Sunday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Singhadurbar Secretariat carrying placards that read “End atrocity against the poor” and “Respect human rights". The chants were not for the old guard. They were for Shah. Opposition leaders and demonstrators, mostly youths, demanded the resignation of the prime minister.

The protest was triggered after a ride-sharing driver set himself on fire. On July 9, a 25-year-old ride-hailing driver named Ganesh Nepali set himself on fire outside Kathmandu’s passport office, in what witnesses described as a dispute with municipal police over a wheel lock placed on his parked motorcycle. He died the next day. It is the kind of small, absurd cruelty that a country recognises instantly as being about something much larger than a wheel clamp. In the following two days, two more individuals, Ashwin Raut from Buddha Nagar and Vivek Mandal from Sarlahi district, also attempted self-immolation. Traffic police have since publicly disputed the account that a fine or clamp prompted Nepali’s act, saying no citation was issued and that a formal investigation into the actual cause is underway.

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This incident landed on a wound that was already raw. A nationwide eviction drive launched in April has cleared riverbank settlements and displaced more than 2,600 families, often before any resettlement plan existed to receive them. The government defends the drive itself as overdue: the settlements sit on public land and flood-prone riverbanks that decades of governments were too timid to clear, and Shah’s administration argues it is finally doing what earlier ones would not. The complaint of protesters and opposition MPs is not that the land was cleared but how holding centres meant to be temporary, including one in Kirtipur, flooded. When Gen Z activists went to inspect conditions there, they were baton-charged and arrested and were later hospitalised with facial injuries. Two days later, vehicles were mysteriously parked to block the entrances of three major Kathmandu media houses — an episode now under investigation and raised on the floor of the House of Representatives.

And layered underneath all of it is a piece of bureaucratic absurdity: municipal police and national traffic police enforce two separate laws, with two separate fines, for the identical offence of illegal parking. That confusion is not incidental. It is the very seam along which Ganesh Nepali’s fatal dispute tore open – even if, as the traffic police now insist, no fine was actually the proximate cause that day.

A hundred days cannot undo decades. Kathmandu’s tangle of overlapping police jurisdictions, its unresolved squatter law, and its riverbank settlements are inheritances of governments long before Shah’s. But his administration shouldn’t have rushed and should have provided better alternatives before the eviction. Now they are in holding centres and are protesting against the government.

Over the past three months, there have been hasty arrests of politicians in corruption-linked cases, and later they were released by the court soon after. This also caused frustration in the youth of Nepal.

An administration elected to clear the old rot of the country has an obligation to act and quickly. The failure here was never the goal of clearing the settlements; even critics of the government largely accept that illegal encroachment on public riverbanks needed addressing. The failure was the sequence — eviction first, shelter later, if at all.

The Shah government should stop defending the sequence of its eviction drive and start correcting it: pause further clearances until verified housing exists to receive the displaced, resolve the jurisdictional standoff between its own police force and the national one, and treat the investigation into who blockaded three newsrooms as a test of how seriously it takes press freedom.

Nepal’s Gen Z did not march last year to install a government it would never question. It marched to install one it could question and be heard. That it is back on the streets so soon is not evidence the experiment has failed. It is evidence the experiment is still being run. The expectations of people are high, but the government shouldn’t rush on everything and make hasty decisions. The government should address this frustration and genuine demands of people before another deadly protest takes place.

(The writer is a columnist. His articles have appeared in various publications like The Independent, The Globe and Mail, South China Morning Post, The Straits Times, etc. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)