It was not supposed to be a revolution. Really, it wasn’t.
The young Nepalis all chafed at the government’s abrupt ban on social media. They all wanted an end to corruption in a country where families of Communist, Maoist and social democrat leaders alike paraded their wealth while the rest of the population seemed to slide into hopelessness.
But a wholesale change in government? Security forces shooting dead at least 19 protesters, including students in school uniforms? The coordinated burning and looting that in a few hours robbed a nation of the physical manifestations of a state — majestic government buildings, police stations and ward offices — all in smoldering ruins, along with hundreds of homes and businesses connected to the political elite?
In a handful of days in September, Tanuja, Misan and Mahesh, Sudan, Rakshya and Dipendra would find their lives transformed. One would be elevated as a leader of the Gen Z movement, even though he was a millennial a decade or more older than the others. Another would watch the protest she helped organize devolve into unrecognizable chaos. Several would bicker about what it was they really wanted. All would be hunted. Two would be shot. One would die.
Across the world, Nepal’s youth have been celebrated as spearheads of a Gen Z revolution, the first to so rapidly turn online outrage at “nepo kids,” as privileged children of the elite are called, into an overthrow of the political system. The trajectory of Nepal’s Gen Z — economically frustrated, technologically expert, educationally overqualified — is part of a wellspring of youthful dissent that has flowed in recent years from Indonesia and Bangladesh to the Philippines and Sri Lanka.
It is rooted in the same dissatisfaction that spurred rebellions and revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East 15 years ago. In 2023, a distraught Nepali businessman set himself on fire in front of Parliament, an echo of the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit seller that ignited the Arab Spring.
But interviews with dozens of young Nepalis, in the wake of the government ouster, make clear that the country’s abrupt and violent shift was not what they envisioned. Someone, somehow appears to have steered the movement in unexpected ways, leaving its youthful engineers dazed, even as they now scramble to help the new government run. A mysteriously sourced call for another anti-corruption protest on Oct. 9 has been met with both excitement and anger from Gen Z groups that say they desire no more upheaval.
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