Just like in Bangladesh, we witness the same pattern in Nepal. Unwise groups of youth, armed with social media channels and a distorted sense of justice, have manipulated the sentiments of entire communities, transforming moral outrage into instruments of disorder. At the conclusion of Bangladesh’s upheavals, the country found Muhammad Yunus and a semblance of reconstruction. Nepal, in its own chaotic moment, now looks to a ‘messiah’ in former Chief Justice Sushila Karki. The so-called ‘Gen-Z Movement,’ which emerged after days of violent protests and consultations with the Chief of Army Staff, recommended Karki to lead the interim government.
Their initial agenda includes the dissolution of Parliament, the formation of an interim administration, and comprehensive revisions to the decade-old Constitution. Representatives of the movement emphasised that her name had been proposed through online votes within their networks, a mechanism that, in its ambition, perfectly captures the illusion of participatory democracy in the digital era, even as it dangerously divorces decision-making from political prudence.
The images that emerged from the streets of Kathmandu are seared into memory: former Prime Ministers stripped and paraded, political leaders’ residences set ablaze, and government buildings reduced to ruins. The ostensible trigger — a fleeting ban on social media platforms- quickly morphed into a grotesque pageant of street vengeance. Rajyalaxmi Chitrakar, wife of former Prime Minister Jhala Nath Khanal, sustained severe burns when protesters set her house alight.
The protests, led by Generation Z, began ostensibly as a campaign against corruption and social media restrictions but soon escalated into unmediated retribution, public humiliation, and mob rule. Moral fury, amplified through social media, cannot substitute for governance or revolutionary action; it generates chaos, raw and untempered.
Nepal’s historical record reveals a society perpetually perched on the edge of instability. From the monarchy’s overthrow in 2008 to repeated constitutional crises, political upheaval has been a recurrent feature. Young Nepalese have long been marginalised by endemic corruption, nepotism, and economic stagnation. Their frustration is neither new nor unfounded. Yet, the mode of expression reveals a generation more attuned to digital signalling than strategic political thinking.
The role of social media in this generational turbulence cannot be overstated. Platforms such as Facebook, X, and Instagram, celebrated in the West as engines of freedom of expression, have acted as accelerants in contexts like Nepal. Western powers, insisting that digital liberties be “respected,” frequently overlook the fact that these tools, when exported to nations with fragile institutions, can destabilise society. Unlike in established democracies, where legal frameworks, media literacy campaigns, and accountable institutions moderate the impact of virality, in Nepal, social media created a feedback loop of outrage. Tweets, reels, and viral posts replaced dialogue, planning, and institutional oversight.
The outcome was inevitable: moral indignation manifested as tangible destruction, exemplified by the torching of Nakkhu Central Jail and the release of thousands of inmates into an already fraying social fabric. Historically, revolutionary movements that produced durable change combined moral urgency with strategic intelligence. Hannah Arendt warned that “power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.” In Kathmandu, the crowd wielded violence without authority: government offices burned, leaders were humiliated, yet no coherent political programme emerged to channel the energy constructively. Chaos is not power; spectacle is not reform.
Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and the role of “organic intellectuals” is instructive. He noted that societies in crisis produce “morbid symptoms” when old orders collapse but no new leadership is ready to emerge. Nepal’s Gen Z movement exemplifies this: the political elite had long lost legitimacy, but the young insurgents, despite their moral outrage, lacked the organisational and intellectual framework to propose coherent alternatives. They replaced strategy with chaos, reform with humiliation, and governance with digital validation.
Alexis de Tocqueville provides another pertinent lens. He argued that democratic energy, unchecked by deliberation and institutions, is volatile and potentially destructive: “In a democracy, the people are both the most powerful and the most vulnerable; their energy can create freedom or chaos.” In Nepal, it created chaos. The rage of the crowd, born of decades of nepotism, corruption, and youth unemployment, was real. Yet, channelled through the unregulated architecture of social media, it yielded immediate destruction and public degradation rather than structural reform.
Stripping former leaders, assaulting public servants, and burning civic institutions were not political statements; they were barbaric actions mistaken for revolution.
Everyday resistance further highlights the dilemma, as incremental, often invisible acts of defiance can produce more enduring change than spectacular uprisings. In Nepal, however, the spectacular violence overshadowed any prospect of sustained reform. The participants may have felt righteous, but without political intelligence, their actions were transient, leaving governance structures in shreds and citizens exposed. This embodies the “Gen Z illusion”: the belief that moral indignation and digital virality suffice as instruments of political change.
The consequences extend far beyond immediate destruction. Thousands of prisoners escaped from Nakkhu Central Jail, including juveniles, highlighting the state’s failure to maintain order. Government offices, court records, and historical archives were obliterated. A society once bound by legal and civic frameworks now finds these pillars weakened, and social trust eroded. Social media, with its selective outrage and punitive display, has supplanted due process, turning justice into humiliation. Former Prime Ministers accused of corruption were stripped and paraded before any judicial examination — social media acting as jury, judge, and executioner simultaneously. Freedom of expression, when taken to extremes, has morphed into a tool of social barbarism.
Western insistence on “respecting fundamental rights” has exported digital liberties without the accompanying institutional infrastructure. The result: moral outrage weaponised, social cohesion fractured, and state authority eroded. The Nepalese experience illustrates how digital tools, unmediated by governance, can inflame human psychology to uncontrollable levels, producing what Arendt might term violence masquerading as power. Nepal’s Gen Z movement is not revolutionary in the classical sense. It is an emotional, performative eruption, fuelled by outrage and frustration, yet devoid of the strategic foresight, institutional knowledge, and political acumen essential for genuine reform.
To claim otherwise is to conflate destruction with progress. Burning jails, humiliating political elites, these are acts of vengeance, morally rationalised only in the imagination of a digital mob. They signal not the birth of democracy, but the collapse of civility.
The writer is a columnist based in Colombo