Jaqueline Katherina Singh
Images of the burning Singha Durbar, the palace that houses the Nepalese government, are circulating around the world. Videos show demonstrators beating up the chairman of the Nepalese Congress Party and his wife, the acting foreign minister; demonstrators on barricades waive Jolly Roger flags. After images of mass protests in Indonesia went around the world, Nepal is now following suit.
While Western media are trying to romanticise the unrest as a ‘Generation Z protest’ against the social media ban, this is more than an oversimplification. Those who set fire to government buildings and the private homes of the rich are not fighting for the right to doomscroll on social media, but against an entire system of corruption and inequality. The central question is: how can the protest be won? Before we answer this question, let’s take a look at the course and background of the uprising.
A brief outline
In less than a week, the situation has escalated dramatically:
Thursday, 4 September 2025: The Nepalese government announced a ban on 26 social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Snapchat. This was followed shortly afterwards by a nationwide power cut. Officially, the companies had refused to register and submit to state control.
However, the ban did not come as a complete surprise. Back in September 2024, Nepal’s Supreme Court had ordered all platforms to register so that the state could monitor “undesirable content”. On 28 August, the ministry finally issued an ultimatum: seven days to register or face shutdown. Some companies, such as TikTok and Viber, complied (after TikTok had previously been banned for a short time). But others refused to comply with the requirements – and so, on 4 September, 26 platforms were blocked in one fell swoop, including Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. Critics, however, see another trigger: In the weeks leading up to this, TikTok videos had exposed the “Nepo babies” of the political elite – sons and daughters of ministers who boasted about their luxury cars and villas in a country where the average annual income is $1,400.
Monday, 8 September 2025: Tens of thousands took to the streets in Kathmandu, mainly at Maitighar Mandala (monument) in the city centre and around the parliament in New Baneshwor. Originally organised as a peaceful rally by Anil Baniya of the NGO Hami Nepal, among others, the situation escalated when a protester hit a surveillance camera with a stone. The regime’s response: live ammunition. The toll for the day: at least 19 dead, 347 injured. Some of the protesters who were hit were schoolchildren in their school uniforms!
Baniya later spoke of a “hijacking” of the protests by external forces and party cadres – but even if that were true, it does not justify the brutal crackdown. The army’s bullets turned a demonstration into a massacre. In the evening, the government tried to calm the situation: the social media ban was lifted, Home Minister Ramesh Lekhak resigned, and curfews were imposed. But it was too late – the movement was already demanding the fall of the entire government.
Tuesday, 9 September: The protests continued. Young people disregarded curfews and gathered around the parliament building. Some even set fire to Gurung’s house, a hotel, early on Tuesday morning. Also engulfed in smoke: the presidential palace, the prime minister’s residence, the private home of Prime Minister Oli, the interior minister, and the home of the opposition leader of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). The party headquarters of the CP-UML (KPN-United Marxist-Leninists; KPN-VML) was also attacked.
The result: Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli resigned, and several ministers and members of parliament also stepped down. That same night, the Nepalese army announced that it would take “control” to ensure “law and order”. At the same time, the military invited protesters to peace talks. According to a BBC representative, student leaders were working on an updated list of demands.
Since then, the army has taken over and is attempting to regain control through a combination of offers of incorporation (e.g. student representatives) and repression.
Background
Since the end of the monarchy 17 years ago, Nepal has seen 13 different governments – political instability, corruption and economic stagnation have dominated the country.
In the 2022 House of Representatives elections, the three communist parties – the KPN-VML, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre; KPN-MC) and the Communist Party of Nepal (United Socialists) – together won almost 44 per cent of the seats and 40 per cent of the votes – a good sign, one might think.
But since these elections, there have been four different coalitions within 19 months – until the protests, the government was formed by the CPN-ML and the Nepali Congress Party. This also means that an entire generation of activists has grown up in political instability, which they are forced to endure. In 2024, youth unemployment stood at around 20%. Every day, around 2,000 young Nepalese leave the country to work in the Gulf States or Southeast Asia. Between 2008 and 2022, more than 4.7 million new work permits were issued. Officially, one million Nepalese work in India, but most agree that the actual number is higher. It is estimated that around 6 million people (32 per cent of the working-age population between 15 and 65) are employed abroad.
The majority of Nepal’s population live in rural areas and work in agriculture, which accounts for almost 62 per cent of the workforce but only a quarter of GDP. Just under 17 per cent of the population is employed in industry, but its share of GDP is only 13 per cent. The service sector accounts for the largest share of GDP, at 52 per cent, but only 20.5 per cent of all employees work in this sector. The protests, on the other hand, have so far been concentrated in the cities, especially Kathmandu.
Massive migration from the country, an economic structure that essentially reflects dependence on imperialist finance capital, and the country’s division between the influence of Indian, Western and Chinese capitalism form the backdrop to the country’s ongoing social and political crisis, which has been erupting explosively since the beginning of September.
Leadership crisis of the movement
However, the massive movement is also suffering from a deep leadership crisis. The policies of Nepal’s communist parties are not part of the solution, but part of the problem. The false, bourgeois programme of the Maoist parties is also reflected in the current protests. Bourgeois or even royalist “oppositionists” are now also trying to position themselves.
On the one hand, there is a chance that former King Gyanendra could gain momentum from the royalist side, which opposed the Marxist-allied governments after the civil war. In the past, he was presented as a “symbol of resistance” for all those disappointed with the current political system. At the beginning of the year, several thousand monarchists demonstrated for a restoration – these protests were crushed, with at least two people dying. The Kathmandu district administration imposed a two-month ban on central government districts. According to the order, public gatherings of more than five people were prohibited – including hunger strikes, demonstrations, protests and rallies. At the same time, discussions about the return of the King of Nepal have flared up again.
On the other side is Balendra Shah, the independent mayor of Kathmandu. While Al Jazeera described him as the face of the protest movement, the Times of India speculated that he could run for prime minister either as an independent candidate or through the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP; National Independence Party).
These two tendencies are only examples at this point and are intended to show that mass protests such as these rarely have a homogeneous character and that it is still unclear which forces will prevail. This raises the question: how can the fight against corruption be won?
Lessons from the past
So far, many of the demands of Nepal’s protest movement have not reached the international press or social media. If you really want to fight corruption, you have to dig deeper – symbolic actions or individual demands are not enough. It is worth learning from the past: in 2024, students in Bangladesh stormed the Congress to fight corruption. But what remains of the uprising? The head of government was driven out of the country, power was taken over by a transitional government, and former activists were integrated into the apparatus – now they have to defend themselves against allegations of corruption.This shows that demands that do not aim at systematic control of power end in subordination to bourgeois structures.
The Maoists in Nepal also demonstrate the danger: they won the civil war in 2006 (though not only because of guerrilla warfare, but also because of massive uprisings among the urban population). But from the outset, they refused to establish a workers‘ and peasants‘ government, arguing that Nepal was not yet ready for such a government and first had to undergo a “democratic”, “anti-imperialist” (especially anti-Indian) capitalist development. Consequently, they joined a bourgeois government (initially still formally under the monarchy). Land reforms were postponed, large landholdings remained untouched – the capitalist economy remained in place with the argument that “the first step was to raise the living standards of the impoverished masses through a bourgeois intermediate stage”.
The policy of the KPN-Maoist Centre is thus a classic example of the compatibility of an armed, petty-bourgeois struggle with reformist parliamentarianism. Within a few months and without any major internal disputes, the party switched in 2006 from partisan struggle to a government coalition with openly bourgeois parties in order to realise the concept of establishing a bourgeois republic based on a capitalist economy.
But what do both examples have in common? They illustrate that corruption cannot be stopped by appeals or selective actions – as well as the impossibility of developing full “democracy” within a national framework while simultaneously maintaining the capitalist economy. The theory of separate stages, as practised by the Maoists, only serves to preserve the status quo and contribute to the management of capitalist misery.
For years, the various “communist” parties in Nepal have been integrated into the state apparatus, closely linked to businesses and land ownership, and many have themselves risen into the propertied class. They themselves advocate the market economy. For example, the Nepalese Communist Party, which emerged in 2018 from a merger of the KPN-VML and KPN-MZ and formed the government, emphasised that the private sector was the “engine of growth” for the country and must be promoted accordingly.
Limiting oneself to abstract democratic demands that are directed “into the void”, that is, without specifying that it should be the workers and farmers who implement the demands and link them to the struggle against capitalism, ultimately leads to subordination to bourgeois forces. Anyone who wants to fight corruption successfully must tackle the problem at its root: attack the power of the elites, name the structures of control and challenge the imperialist system as a whole. At the same time, it is clear that the liberation of Nepal cannot be achieved in isolation at the national level – it requires solidarity and perspectives in the international struggle against exploitation and imperialism. But what does that mean in practice?
Tasks for revolutionaries
The task for revolutionaries is to argue within the movement for strict independence from bourgeois parties – and to fight for a revolutionary programme with a proletarian class standpoint that can meet the most urgent needs of wage earners, peasants, the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie and students. Action committees are needed in neighbourhoods and in the countryside to discuss current events and defend against arrests by the army. Otherwise, there is a risk of the movement becoming fragmented due to differing class interests, allowing bourgeois or petty-bourgeois forces to take over the leadership of the movement, or of “pacification” by the military – extinguishing the fire that brought “Generation Z” onto the streets.
That is why the question of self-organisation, of building one’s own structures and self-defence committees rooted in the working class and among peasants, is so important. The actions of the military in particular raise this question. The initiative ‘Independent Marxists,’ which founded the ‘Safal Workers‘ Street Committee’ to defend protesters against state violence, proves that there are approaches to this. This is a step in the right direction. Their demands: arrest of the government, disarmament of the state, expropriation of property owners, arming of the population, dissolution of parliament and elections to workers‘ assemblies.
These demands would undoubtedly have to be combined with other important and urgent demands against large land ownership and the fight against unemployment. But this will not happen overnight. To fight for this perspective, it is necessary to build a revolutionary working-class party composed of revolutionary workers, students and youth, and equipped with a programme of action to complete the revolution by overthrowing capitalism and establishing a workers‘ and peasants‘ government based on councils of workers, soldiers and peasants, defended by an armed militia.
Such a government would address the immediate needs of the masses by introducing an emergency programme against inflation and poverty, financed by the expropriation of the rich, the financial sector and big capital, in order to establish a democratic planned economy.
The uprising in Kathmandu in April 2006, like the current protests, showed that even in countries with a numerically small proletariat, the urban masses can come to the fore during the revolution. Both show that there is the possibility of a real socialist revolution – and it is the task of revolutionaries to show the way forward through a revolutionary programme that combines immediate demands such as the fight against corruption with elements that point the way to socialism, for example through workers‘ and peasants‘ control. The principle of such a programme is also clear: lasting liberation is only possible if it happens internationally. Socialism in one country is not possible, so it must be linked to the building of the international workers‘ movement – and of a new International!