By Imlisanen Jamir
Nineteen people are dead. Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli has resigned. Parliament in Kathmandu was set on fire, and the army patrols the streets under curfew. These are the results, in their most brutal summary, of Nepal’s latest upheaval.
It would be easy to dismiss this as a quarrel about social media. That’s how much of the coverage abroad has framed it: young Nepalis supposedly rioting because their TikTok was taken away. To stop there would be facetious. The ban was not the fire. It was the spark.
The truth is uglier and more familiar. Nepal’s crisis is rooted in decades of corruption, patronage, and the hollowing out of democracy. Its young people — restless, unemployed, increasingly cynical — no longer believe that the system can deliver anything meaningful to them. This is the generational fracture at the heart of the protests.
Nepal’s rulers were shaped by the Maoist movement, the fall of the monarchy, and the drafting of a fragile federal constitution in 2015. For them, history is still heavy with revolution and transition.
But the youth filling Kathmandu’s squares do not carry those memories. They are digital natives who came of age after the fighting, in an era defined less by ideology and more by unemployment, migration, and political decay. For them, the debates of their parents’ generation feel like distant theatre. They want jobs, they want accountability, and they want dignity in daily life.
The discontent runs deeper than any single issue. For Nepal’s youth, corruption is not a headline; it is lived experience. The bureaucracy is a market of favors, the economy a tangle of contracts and patronage. When opportunities are scarce and public life is defined by impunity, the street becomes the only space where rage can take form.
This isn’t unique to Nepal. Across South Asia, young populations are losing faith in elites who recycle the same promises while hoarding the same privileges. The details differ but the pattern is recognizable. When hope collapses, protest becomes not just an expression of dissent, but a strategy for survival.
The burning of parliament in Kathmandu was not an accident. It was a blunt symbol. When formal institutions no longer command legitimacy, the street steps in to fill the vacuum. In Nepal, the crowd became the only functioning legislature: messy, dangerous, but real. Oli’s resignation was not delivered through debate in the chamber, but through pressure outside its gates.
For people here, Nepal’s crisis is not a distant drama. It is a mirror. Both Nepal and Nagaland are societies where young people feel trapped between inherited legacies and present-day stagnation. Both know what it means when politics leans on history while ignoring the future. Both know how quickly the street becomes the last remaining stage for democracy.
The comparison is not exact, and it shouldn’t be forced. Nagaland’s situation is not Kathmandu’s. But the questions are similar. What happens when corruption calcifies? When youth are alienated? When democracy becomes a performance rather than a lived experience?
Nepal’s upheaval is a warning, not only for its own rulers but for the region. When politics fails to deliver, when corruption becomes the air everyone breathes, when the young no longer see a place for themselves in the system, the reckoning always comes. Sometimes, it looks like a parliament in flames.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
