The past five years have seen unexpected and radical change in South Asia. The year, 2021, saw a military coup in Myanmar and the Taliban triumph in Afghanistan. June 2022 saw the Aragalaya in Sri Lanka in which a popular civic insurrection overthrew the government of Gotabaya Rajapaksa. In 2023, Pakistan saw what was a failed anti-military insurrection against Imran Khan’s arrest. Last year, in July-August 2024, another civic insurrection-cum-popular protest swept away Sheikh Hasina and an entire governance architecture in Bangladesh.

Nepal has joined the list with a revolt against not just the government but its political class as a whole. This popular insurrection is generally described as being led by Nepal’s Generation Z — essentially the country’s youth. The sequence of the crisis this week is well-known: massive protests against a ban on social media platforms, numerous casualties in police firings, a violent insurrection with public buildings burnt and vandalised and prominent political figures assaulted. Prime Minster K.P. Sharma Oli resigned and the administration appeared to have collapsed. The only institution equipped to deal with the spreading anarchy and mob rule was the army.

By the time the ban on social media platforms was reversed, the genie was out of the bottle. The proximate cause of the mass civic insurrection is not unimportant. A ban on popular social media platforms like WhatsApp, YouTube, Instagram or Facebook is bound to appear provocative in a country with a young population — Nepal has one of the lowest median ages in South Asia. It is also, what can be described as being, a highly globalised country in terms of outward migration. Some 25% of its GDP comes from external remittances. For Nepal’s younger generation, being connected to the external world thus appears essential.

While the social media ban was the trigger, it is not a full explanation of the cause of the crisis. Some structural oddities of Nepal’s politics have to be kept in mind as well. The country formally abolished its monarchy in 2008. In the period since, there have been as many as 14 different governments and several prime ministers. The new Constitution, adopted in 2015, has not imparted any real stability to the country. The consequences of these factors are evident — short-termism in the form of constantly shifting coalition politics, lack of accountability, and, finally, massive corruption.

There is, however, an additional, unusual feature to this rapid turnover of prime ministers and governments over the past decade and a half. Political instability in Nepal is akin to a pack of cards being reshuffled constantly with much the same faces and persons in an endless loop of musical chairs. Three individuals — Pushpa K. Dahal, Sher Bahadur Deuba and K.P. Sharma Oli accounted for nine tenures out of the 14 prime ministerial stints since 2008. Each has also faced major allegations of wrongdoing and corruption.

In brief, the picture that appears is of a kind of elite stability and continuity in the midst of major structural and political instability. It is not too much of a stretch to see all this creating an environment that reinforces echo chambers and divorces political leaders from reality.

The violent protests of the past few days represent a massive civic outrage against this ecosystem of privileged elitism in a deeply splintered polity and an overall
environment where unemployment and lack of opportunities breed despair. This violent rejection of a corrupt political elite with visibly luxurious lifestyles amidst
an overall lack of development should not be entirely surprising.

Where does this leave Nepal? Perhaps the army will be able to restore order quickly and thereafter a new government will emerge to keep the system going even as it tries to reform and learn lessons from what has transpired. This appears to be the trajectory although it is still early days. This is obviously the best-case scenario and follows to some extent the Sri Lankan template after the Aragalaya of 2022.

But the scale of the rupture of the past few days does also suggest that some more radical restructuring is inevitable. Public anger, unlike in the Sri Lankan or even the Bangladesh case, appears more generalised and not just focused on a single person or political party. Both the ruling coalition as also the Opposition parties were targets of the acute public anger and distrust so visible in the past week.

How will Nepal deal with this broader cynicism and disillusionment with its political class and what dangers does this pose for its still fledgling democracy? It is difficult to answer this question at this early stage of such a massive churn in that country. But clearly, if democracy is to survive, it will need some new faces and not just a tired, old elite passing the parcel amongst themselves. It is also a fact that given Nepal’s many challenges and its huge diversity, a system that is not pluralistic and democratic will end up facing even stronger headwinds and the country will plunge deeper into crisis.

How should we in India view this latest explosion in our neighbourhood? There will certainly be questions raised about the extent and the quality of our neighbourhood assessments and intelligence. Regardless of whether we can control events or not, and usually we obviously cannot, being caught off guard or being surprised in our own backyard requires examination and introspection.

It is also always tempting to look for a single, unifying explanation to explain the unanticipated as happened in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka and now in Nepal. Such explanations will be forthcoming and these will range from technological determination — the role of foreign social media platforms — to external powers and their geopolitical imperatives. It is nevertheless vital that we in India avoid a narcissistic approach and not see Nepal through an India-centric prism. Similarly, seeking comfort from an imagined past — such as the old monarchy providing stability — would be self-delusional. The sheer intensity and the spontaneity of the upsurge strongly suggest an independent local dynamic, and this must be clearly understood and appreciated by us.

Of all our neighbourhood interfaces — except Pakistan — it is the India-Nepal relationship that is possibly the most complex, even the most intimate. It is also a notoriously volatile relationship and this volatility may ironically spring from the close ties that bind the two countries. The issues and the sentiments that arise from the obvious asymmetries here mean that the onus has to be perennially on us to manage the relationship optimally. The portfolio of problematic bilateral issues is also formidable — from territorial disputes to river waters to complex geopolitics given Nepal’s location between India and China.

All this means that we must step very carefully indeed. Not getting sucked into Nepal’s domestic churn would be a considerable achievement. That in itself appears a good enough priority for us for the immediate and the medium term.

One final thought: do the events of the past week also have a more subtle message? Notwithstanding all the compulsions of the global churn, is there a need for India to restart thinking regionally? This appears low key as compared to the insurrectionary dramas being staged repetitively in South Asia but it may provide a channel for a collective rethink about our region’s overall current trajectory.

T.C.A. Raghavan is a former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan and Singapore