The saying that it is too early to judge the French Revolution is often attributed to Mao, but it is actually Zhou Enlai who first said it in 1972 to his American visitors. Chas Freeman, who was in the room, later noted that the conversation was probably about the student uprising of 1968 rather than the 1789 revolution. It is tough to judge a revolution when its effects are still unfolding, and sometimes it is best to hold off on making a judgment. Nepal makes this difficult, having tried the experiment four times in seventy-five years.
On 8 September, Nepal marked its inaugural Gen-Z Martyrs’ Day, a public holiday approved by the cabinet just five days prior. The memorial at the charred remains of the old parliament in Baneshwor was a sombre affair, partly due to the country’s ongoing recovery from the devastating Bhote Koshi floods. The state had been painstakingly recovering bodies. A year earlier, initial frustration over the blocking of 26 social media platforms had escalated into a far more profound crisis. By the evening of 9 September, the situation had reached a critical point with at least 76 lives lost and over 2,500 injured. Furthermore, K.P. Sharma Oli had resigned, and parliament, Singha Durbar, the Supreme Court complex and Sheetal Niwas were engulfed in flames.
On the measures typically employed in Nepali politics, the uprising proved successful. Sushila Karki assumed control of an interim government, and elections were held on 5 March. The Rastriya Swatantra Party secured over two-thirds of the 165 directly elected seats, and Balendra Shah became prime minister at the age of 35. However, the anniversary felt more like an audit than a celebration. This remains an unfinished project, as all of Nepal’s revolutions have been, simply replacing the people in office while leaving the institutions governing them largely unchanged.
The Congress was the first to discover this. Braving Rana’s rule, they fought until it finally ended. Then they reached a settlement in Delhi, allowing the Shah monarchy to remain as a mediator rather than being completely removed. This settlement was reached in February 1951. In December 1960, Mahendra dismissed B.P. Koirala eighteen months after he took office. This marked the beginning of thirty years of Panchayat. The Panchayat itself was an experiment in partyless democracy under the crown, and it exhausted that possibility just as the Congress had exhausted the negotiated transition. The Jana Andolan restored multiparty parliamentarism in 1990, but this was tested to the point of destruction within a decade. No government completed a full term between 1991 and 2002. The burgeoning Civil War started in 1996, and a palace massacre in 2001 created a permanent rupture in people’s imagination of monarchy, and the behaviour of the new monarch, Gyanendra, was also quite revealing as he went on a huge power grab. The Maoists then argued that the parliamentary route was closed, and their war from 1996 claimed more than seventeen thousand lives before transforming an insurgency into a republic.
After the abolition of the monarchy, the first constituent assembly was dissolved in 2012 without a constitution. The second one was drafted in 2015, when the spectre of a deadly earthquake and the Herculean task of reconstruction was already mounting, and when Madhes (the Terai region of Nepal) people, unhappy with the constitution, began agitating against it, which also resulted in an unofficial blockade from the southern side. Despite the constitution in hand, some burning questions like federalism and secularism have been far from settled. So what exactly did political elites get from the changes? If one has visited any part of Nepal, one may very easily find out that it is a country of democratic enthusiasts. People value democracy, but how much of that the elites understand is a different question altogether. An example of the same was visible from the 2017 elections of Nepal, where the left alliance of KP Sharma Oli and Maoist hero Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ got an overwhelming two-thirds majority, but that arrangement failed, and so did the gimmick of stability.
This is where the present moment differs. The political class has tried almost everything: monarchy, partyless rule, multiparty competition, elected communism, armed revolution, the unitary state and the federal republic. Each has been discredited in practice rather than argument. This limits the scope of change available to whoever comes next. The Gen Z movement demanded resignations, the suspension of those who ordered the firing, dissolution, an interim government and fresh elections. These are personnel remedies, not a lack of imagination on the protesters’ part, but an accurate assessment of what was left.
The societal impact of the crisis is significant, and the arithmetic of shock is crucial. A country that has endured a decade of war, the 2015 earthquake, a blockade, seventy-six street killings and now devastating floods that killed over 1,300 people and caused damage estimates of nearly two hundred billion rupees, has little appetite for deliberate disruption. Reform is a form of deliberate disruption, and shock crowds out change. It also makes swift action attractive, which is why a government promising results without the delay of the parliamentary process finds a receptive audience.
Under all of it sits institutional decay, and the decay is procedural rather than criminal. Constitutional bodies were turned into bhagbanda, shared out among coalition partners as routine. Judge-led commissions were appointed after every episode of state violence, and their reports were then never published, which is what Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the ICJ warned in February would happen again. It has. The Karki Commission handed over roughly a thousand pages on 8 March. The report has still not been released, a review in July found the evidence insufficient for criminal liability, Oli and Ramesh Lekhak were arrested in March and released in April without charge, and between nine hundred and sixteen hundred people, most of them poor and without patronage, are still in custody for arson.
The past year matters because the instruments of decay have passed intact to the party elected to end them. Shah summoned a session of parliament for 30 April, postponed it days later, and used the interval to push through around eight ordinances carrying more than a hundred and fifty separate provisions, covering procurement, money laundering rules, the removal of public office holders and trade union rights for civil servants and teachers. One cut the Constitutional Council’s quorum from five members to four and allowed decisions by a majority of those present, so that three people could make a constitutional appointment, and the Council duly met and recommended a new Chief Justice. Another proposal was to dismiss 1,594 officials appointed under earlier governments, retroactively. The quorum manoeuvre is the one Oli used in December 2020. What has changed is the speed, the majority behind it, and the fact that RSP’s own lawmakers are now asking their prime minister to turn up in the House, one of them warning that Nepal is drifting toward an executive that does not answer to the legislature at all.
Democratic enthusiasm is not what Nepal lacks. It has produced 1951, 1990, 2006 and 2025 elections and will produce whatever comes after. What has never been built is democratic stability, which depends on institutions holding at precisely the moment they become inconvenient to the people in power. Whether September 2025 amounted to anything is, therefore, a question about work that has not yet been undertaken. The report from 8 March has not been published, the prisoners remain in custody, and ordinances continue to be issued.
So what the subsequent government that came to rule Kathmandu did, and why revolution is still an unfinished business, are the two major questions we are dealing with in the current state of affairs. Subsequent governments in Nepal have used this democratic enthusiasm for electoral entrepreneurship to overpromise and, most of the time, underdeliver. This has caused widespread mistrust among the country’s citizenry, which is why a generational change in political elites occurred in 2025. Now coming to the second part of the same question on why revolution is still an unfinished business, while commemorating struggles is an essential part of making and remaking a state’s identity, the creation of another symbol without real change will only remind the people of the failures of the political elites, making the democratic space narrower. The narrowed space will only help populists, demagogues, and non-democratic actors take what is left, and this is the crisis the current government must focus on to avert.
Harsh Pandey is a PhD Candidate at the School of International Studies, JNU, New Delhi. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace Studies, New Delhi
Harsh Pandey is a PhD Candidate in the School of International Studies, JNU. For his thesis, he examines theoretical and practical aspects of nationalism in the European Union, with Central Europe as a Case Study. Apart from that, he is also interested in India’s Foreign and Security Policies, with the neighbourhood in mind. He regularly writes analytical columns and Policy papers for indian and International Newspapers and Think Tanks. He has published with Frontline, The Diplomat, India’s World, Financial Express and Visegrad Insights
