Nepal, Two Weeks Later: A Young Witness on Rage, Loss, and Fragile Hope in a Country on Edge
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
By Simoni Agarwal
It’s been about two weeks since the streets of Kathmandu erupted. What began on September 8, 2025, as a protest organized by Gen-Z groups quickly spiraled into something far more dangerous and bloody. To see the events of September 8–9 as sudden eruptions is to miss the history beneath them: the rage of a generation, born into a country that had rid itself of a parasitic monarchy, finding voice after decades of disappointment. We gave twenty years to our leaders who promised us a communist safe haven – entrusting the faces that toppled the Monarchy. Yet here we are, trapped at the crossroads of capitalism and feudalism, standing in a landscape Marx himself would not recognize.
A New Face of Leadership
With the new interim Prime Minister appointed, former Chief Justice Sushila Karki, we have a leader who is educated, experienced, and morally grounded. She was chosen in an unprecedented discord-driven voting by youth organizers coordinating in real time online. Perhaps she might just be our saving grace, but placing all hope in one person is fragile.
The aftermath of the Gen Z Revolution has left grief hanging in the air. We drew the attention of people across the internet and of governments across the world, taking notes on what happens when the young take to the streets. The UN condemned the state-sanctioned killing of students in school uniforms as human rights violations. Businesses are worried about losing out on foreign investors. More than seventy lives were lost, billions in property destroyed, Parliament and party offices burned. Hospitals overflowed.
Signs of Change
The PM’s first appointments included Kul Man Ghising, the managing director of the Nepal Electricity Authority, who ended 18-hour power outages and helped Nepal become an exporter of electricity to neighboring countries. But no leader can be idolized, and those who understood this, took to the streets to demand a say in shaping the interim government.
The interim government has been moving fast, with five months to prepare for elections on March 5, 2026. The Home Ministry is drafting plans for diaspora voting. The Energy Ministry is chasing funds that may even help shrink national debt. Even a hotline to PM Karki’s office exists—and, to everyone’s shock, it works. Martyrs’ families have received compensation, roads blocked by monsoon floods are being cleared.
It feels like the Nepal we’ve always wanted, yet we remain wary. Former PM KP Sharma Oli claims that never ordered for children to be shot, while Prachanda vows to rebuild his party’s office on an even grander scale. Deuba, still recovering after being assaulted, vehemently denies corruption allegations, while the government forms a coalition to investigate the claims. The old guard circles like vultures.
The Streets Still Burn
A lot is happening in the country. Every few hours brings reports of government cleanups, efforts to rebuild, while the old parties plot to remove “the tyrannical Gen-Z” rule. They stage rallies and meetings on the same streets that still bear scars: burned buildings , broken glass, and thousands of prisoners at large after mass jailbreaks.
The rage that set the country on fire still simmers. It feels like we sit on top of a ticking time bomb. These times are disorienting and filled with fear.
Looking back to September 9, I saw the events spiraling from my home. I witnessed the burning of Hilton Hotel up close and the rest of the city from my screen. It made me realize that the Kathmandu I call home would be different the next morning. There was an army curfew imposed throughout the country to control the mobs, and it took me back to when I was in the second grade, in the early 2000s. I remember not going to school for a whole semester and my teachers running private tutoring sessions one day a week. I remember being happy then, skipping school - but when the air brought similar chaos, I felt destabilized and scared. Scared for the country, for what was to come, for a future that looked unbearably uncertain.
Revolutions as Chains
Revolutions do not happen overnight. They brew. What happened in 2025 didn’t start because people suddenly woke up to corruption; it was a direct result of what happened in 2006, which eventually led to the downfall of the monarchy, itself triggered by the former king’s assassination in 2001, following the civil war between 1996–2006 and stemming from the atrocities of the oppressive Panchayat system. Revolutions are not accidents; they are chains. And we, as a country, keep pretending we don’t see the links.
Educate, Agitate, Organize
A system that does not take accountability for its own people creates a nation alienated from its roots. Those who can leave, do. Those who stay, by choice or by lack of it, live with quiet resentments and their hopes throttled. A society so fragile creates anger that is inevitable yet valid—until it erupts into violence. But this is no ground on which a revolution should be born.
We need more than just singular stories. We need a collective embrace of education, stability, and moral clarity.
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s call still rings true: “Educate. Agitate. Organize.” Education without agitation is passivity. Agitation without organization is chaos. Organization without education is blind loyalty. Balancing these three pillars makes a resistance sustainable.
Nepal is at a stage where we need to strategically educate the masses, not just make them literate. This means building political literacy, critical thinking, the ability to question narratives, and the courage to imagine alternatives. The power vacuum and constitutional crisis created after the former PM exposed the hollowness of our agitation. We spent hours on Discord trying to elect a new interim PM, with jokes, fact-checkers, and long conversations. But a country cannot function like a chatroom. We witnessed hijackers here as well, for a movement cannot become a parliament overnight—especially without grounding in history, process, and vision. The energy of agitation scatters like sparks in the wind.
The agitation also felt hollow because of how unorganized it was. The protests were seen as demonstrations of youth frustration rather than something that would change the political map of the nation so quickly. Case in point: the movement lacked a proper leader. There were so many different groups doing different work, and when everything started going down in flames, a seemingly humanitarian leader emerged. The movement appeared vertical, but in truth it was horizontal. Horizontal movements carry strength in numbers, in collectivity, in shared power. But they also carry fragility when faced with state repression and opportunists who know how to exploit chaos. If we are to make this uprising matter, education, agitation, and organization must be deliberately woven together, not left to chance.
Capitalism’s Favorite Child: Alienation
Karl Marx warned us: capitalism alienates workers from their labor, from their communities, and eventually from the self. Nepal is no exception. A political system built on a capitalist society turbocharges the alienation that festers among the people. It leaves no space for questioning. The fight then becomes about survival instead of solidarity.
Within urban Nepal, young people often work 9–5 jobs, and rural youth migrate because the land they till no longer sustains them. You see it in Kathmandu, where neighbors no longer know each other’s names. Alienation is capitalism’s most effective weapon because it convinces us that our struggles are personal failures, not political design.
Like a revolution that has links, alienation too does not happen overnight. It builds up through years of betrayal, through unkept promises, through a culture that rewards selfishness over solidarity. Taking care of people and not being afraid to question those in charge, those who promise a “Switzerland in Nepal”, isn’t minuscule. It is irreverence towards moral bankruptcy. It is the refusal to accept the alienation that has been sold to us as progress. And unless we resist it, we will keep producing revolutions that fizzle out, because alienated people do not sustain struggle—they burn out or sell out.
The Politics of Grey
Even after electing an interim PM, the streets carry the echoes of our martyrs. They echo the frustrations of the protesters and the violence perpetrated by opportunists. The memory of smoke, fire, and blood does not vanish simply because a leader has been appointed.
If we can take one lesson from movements across the world, it is this: revolutions collapse when everything is painted black and white. We need spaces that can hold contradictions, disagreements, and dialogue without slipping into violence—the shades of grey. Without nuance, we risk reducing our struggle to binaries of good versus evil, people versus state, young versus old. But societies are layered and messy.
A nation cannot heal if it silences complexity. Nor can it heal with the blinding rage we continue to see after the interim government has been formed. Rage has a purpose in igniting change, but when it becomes the only language, it devours the very people it was meant to liberate.
Nuance means accepting that the interim PM may be both hope and compromise. It means acknowledging that protesters were both brave and at times reckless. It means calling out opportunists without dismissing the anger that brought thousands to the streets. Without such spaces, we become easy prey for old forces that thrive on division, and every uprising risks dragging us back to where we began.
After the Flames
As the fire at the Hilton Hotel fizzled out over 4–5 days, it left a scorching reminder of how September 2025 held up a mirror to the state mechanisms of Nepal—showing us everything we have refused to confront for decades. This is not mourning for a flashy building, but for the blood on the streets, the voices that cracked from screaming. They are reminders that revolutions are not moments; they are processes. They are chains, and unless we learn to see the links, we will keep breaking under their weight.
We cannot believe that one leader can erase decades of betrayal. Nor can we believe that anger alone will carry us forward. If we want a different Nepal, we must practice discipline, embrace nuance, and resist the alienation that power and capitalism thrive on. We must educate, agitate, and organize—not just for a season, but for a lifetime.
Revolutions are never pretty, but they do not have to be hollow. If we hold complexity, resist alienation, and build hope as a discipline rather than sentiment, then maybe this time the fire will not just burn us. Maybe this time, it will light the way.
About the Author
Simoni Agarwal is a psychologist, and a researcher based out of Kathmandu, Nepal. She earned her Postgraduate from TISS, Mumbai. She has a myriad of interests and is passionate about social causes, particularly in the domain of political and feminist issues. In her free time, she co-runs a book club and finds joy in consuming various forms of media. She is perpetually curious about everything which often translates to her work.
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