Nepal is at a breaking point. Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli’s resignation, compelled by mere two days of mass youth demonstrations, is not simply a political episode; it is a generational reckoning. The immediate spark was the September 4 decision to block 26 major social media platforms—Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, and X—on the grounds of regulatory non-compliance. Yet to reduce the upheaval to a quarrel over social media apps is to trivialize its significance. This was never about platforms. It was about power, about dignity, and about a generation refusing to remain invisible.
For young Nepalis, the sudden blackout of digital spaces felt like suffocation. Social media is not merely entertainment—it is infrastructure: for communication, for community, for dissent. In a society where the mainstream media is widely perceived as compromised by political patronage, social media has become the one arena where young people can speak truth to power. To strip it away was as if the state had once again declared that its youth are expendable.
The rage spilled into the streets with a force that was both visceral and symbolic. Students in school and college uniforms carried placards that ridiculed the ruling class and drew stark attention to the gulf between privilege and precarity. Viral TikTok montages became protest literature in their own right—juxtaposing the conspicuous consumption of elite heirs with the grim realities of ordinary Nepalis. On one side, images of Gucci belts, designer weddings, and vacations abroad; on the other, footage of exhausted labourers leaving for the Gulf, or young men returning from the Russia–Ukraine war in coffins shrouded not by national flags but by grief. The contrast itself became the protest’s most powerful indictment of a political order that has abandoned its youth.
“Our taxes, their luxury. We pay, you flex.”
“The leaders’ children return from abroad with Gucci bags, the people’s children in coffins.”
These slogans cut deeper than satire. They were acts of exposure, stripping the veneer of dignity from an elite class whose legitimacy has long since rotted. In one line, the moral bankruptcy of the state was laid bare.
If that first wave of anger targeted inequality in broad strokes, its sharpest edge was reserved for dynastic privilege. The phrase “nepo babies”, borrowed from global internet culture, was repurposed into a weapon of subversion. Protesters named names, transforming what was once whispered criticism into public accusation. Placards and reels singled out the families of former
Prime Ministers Sher Bahadur Deuba and Pushpa Kamal Dahal, and of senior figures such as former Health Minister Birodh Khatiwada and Member of Parliament Ek Nath Dhakal. The spotlight fell squarely on Jaiveer Singh Deuba, Shivana Shrestha, Smita Dahal, Shrinkhala Khatiwada, and Sambhav Sirohiya, their lifestyles presented not as personal indulgences but as emblems of an illegitimate system. By turning individual privilege into collective evidence, the protesters made nepotism itself the defendant in the court of public opinion. The governing class is perceived as parasitic: extracting remittances and taxes from the young while investing nothing in their futures.
This language matters. By collapsing political entitlement into the globally intelligible grammar of “nepo babies”, protesters declared a new principle: legitimacy is no longer inherited; it must be earned. In doing so, Nepal’s Gen Z rewrote the moral vocabulary of politics.
What lies beneath this anger is despair. Youth unemployment stands at 19.2% for those aged 15–29. Migration is no longer an aspiration but an exodus. Nearly 33% of Nepal’s GDP is sustained by remittances—a figure often presented as resilience but in truth a scar. It reveals a state that survives only because its children abandon it.
The government’s response exposed its fragility. Security forces fired tear gas, water cannons, and bullets at teenagers, their only “weapons” the schoolbags slung across their shoulders. These images will not fade. They mark a state so brittle in its authority that it views its youth as enemies rather than citizens. A government that brutalizes its young has already confessed its illegitimacy. Authority cannot be defended by bullets; it can only be redeemed through accountability.
What is unfolding in Nepal is nothing short of a crisis of legitimacy. The exodus abroad and the protests at home are not divergent phenomena but two dialects of the same rebellion. One is silent rejection: departure. The other is explosive rejection: defiance. Both signify a generation unwilling to inhabit a political order built on corruption, nepotism, and denial.
Nepali leaders believe they are battling teenagers with phones. In truth, they are confronting a generation that is already global, networked, and politically literate. Placards, reels, and TikToks are not trivialities; they are political texts. A single meme can puncture years of cultivated image-making. A viral reel can dismantle dynastic pretensions more effectively than opposition parties. These digital montages thus become protest fuel, capturing a generational chasm: privilege versus precarity, inheritance versus hustle, Gucci versus coffins.
Nepal’s rulers may claim revolutionary histories or democratic credentials, but to my generation, those legacies ring hollow. The sacrifices of the 1990 Jana Andolan or the 2006 Maoist movement cannot justify today’s corruption. Heroism is not hereditary.
What is demanded now is structural honesty: an admission that governance cannot be sustained on nepotism, that remittances cannot substitute for employment, and that legitimacy must be earned anew. The protests are not the tantrums of restless youth; they are the verdict of a generation. We will not inherit silence. We will not accept coffins as destiny while elites parade Gucci as inheritance. Nepal’s Gen Z is forcing a reckoning.
What, then, does it mean to be Nepali today? For many, it means watching classmates depart for Doha, Dubai, or Delhi, while those who stay face tear gas and bullets for demanding accountability. The choice is exile or repression. Either way, legitimacy hemorrhages.
