Revolts have exploded onto the streets
Parliament in flames, surrounded by furious yet joyous young people, the lavish houses of the political elite looted and in ruins.
Such images have come from Nepal. But in recent times they might easily have been from revolts in Indonesia, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka. Everywhere the ruling class is trying to make the poorest pay for their crisis, through cuts and intensified exploitation.
No wonder a wave of revolt is spreading through Asia and other parts of the Global South.
In each country the triggers are specific but behind them stands a hatred of neoliberalism.
Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world, with its population of 30 million people sandwiched against the mountains dividing India from China. In this Himalayan country, questions of state brutality, corruption, inequality and lack of democracy have been thrust to the fore.
Yet much of the press reported the rebellion as a “Generation Z” protest, a cry of rage from young people fed up with being ruled by the old.
But the frustrations of the young go deeper than that.
Over 20 percent of under-28 year olds are out of work, almost double the national average. That horrendous figure hides the thousands of people in occasional jobs, and the many thousands more forced to move abroad.
Economists estimate that six million Nepalis, one in three of the population between 15 and 65, work abroad.
The millions of people who live in remote, rural poverty—the majority of Nepalis—are also under-represented in the statistics. Here, many families barely survive but their unemployed young are unlikely to be counted.
Not everyone shares this fate. A new breed of the rich has emerged. Often the children of the country’s political elite, these “Nepo Kids”, as they are known, enjoy the best life—and are not scared to show it.
A viral video made during last week’s protests showed the children of various politicians flaunting their lavish lifestyles, designer jewellery and palatial houses.
Vikram Tripathi, one of many who shared the video, wrote simply, “Power belongs to the people, not the privileged few politicians. It’s time to kick out politicians who have enjoyed power and the people’s money for the last 30 years. #NepoKid”.
The wealthy in Nepal are just like the rich everywhere—obnoxious and hated.
Yet disgracefully, the coalition governments since the end of the monarchical dictatorship in 2008 have done little to improve matters.
The latest, led by the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist-Leninist (CPN-UML), was part of the problem.
All the left parties in Nepal call themselves communist or socialist, but in practice they act exactly the same as the right wing parties. And just like them, when the Communists faced popular opposition, they turned to repression.
Earlier this month, when the government moved to clamp down on the internet, it lit a fuse under decades of anger.
There were two days of furious demonstrations, and rioters burnt down parliamentary buildings and some elite mansions.
The police brutality against the protests has killed some 51 people. It forced 73 year old prime minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli—known as KP Oli—to resign. On the streets there was elation despite the now heavy army presence.
“People are hopeful now, after this revolution,” said Rakesh Niraula, who lives in eastern Nepal. “There is hope for better governance—we feel like it was a lesson for leaders to improve themselves so the country can have a bright future.”
But the nature of the successful revolt, and who benefits from it, is already being contested.
The protest movement itself formed around loose coalitions of students and other young people. Many of those who joined it did so spontaneously. But those leading groups now claim that their peaceful marches were hijacked by “political” forces.
Right wing parties, including monarchists who want the return of the king, are keen to take advantage of the situation. One of them, the Rastriya Prajatantra Party, hopes to emulate India’s far right BJP party and form part of the next government.
Other opportunists are also suspected of involvement, reflecting the way Nepal is embedded in imperialist dynamics.
The United States has long meddled in Nepal’s politics, arming the royal dictatorship in the 1990s during its civil war with communist rebels, for example.
More recently, the US has used investment funds to influence Nepal’s state policies. Its government is angry at Nepal’s moves towards the US’s arch enemy, China. And, after KP Oli’s recent meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, it will surely be glad to see the back of Oli.
China too has deployed economic levers in Nepal, using its “Belt and Road Initiative” as a way to bend government policy. In 2024, the countries signed a massive deal to build new infrastructure and trade links.
Both domestic right wing forces and foreign imperialists are circling Nepal in the wake of the revolt. Its a sign of just how badly the
post-dictatorship governments failed.
Today the left, which led most of them, is in disgrace, but it didn’t have to be that way.
From 1990 until 2006, the meagre forces of the Maoist Communist Party of Nepal (CPN-M) fought an ultimately successful “people’s war” against dictatorship.
The party ruled much of the countryside and had the support of millions of peasants and city dwellers. It was seen as the main defender of the people.
But even then, the Maoist vision of the future contained a kernel of defeat.
In common with Communists across most of the Global South, Nepal’s Maoists believed their country was “not ready for socialism”. Instead, their aim was to create what they called “Naulo Janbad”—or New People’s Democracy.
This, it argued, would finally break the hold of feudalism and complete the bourgeois revolution. In other words, the Maoists thought they should prepare Nepal for liberal capitalism as a necessary precursor to socialism.
This “stages” approach was needed, it said, in part because the working class was too small to make socialism a possibility. But it was also because Nepal was too underdeveloped and overly dependent on foreign powers.
CPN-M spokesperson Krishna Bahadur Mahara spelt this out in an interview with the Financial Times newspaper in 2005.
“We envisage a two-step revolution,” he said. “First, a multi-party democratic republic. If it was a genuine democracy, then we would work for the peaceful transformation of the state.”
But the second stage of transformation of the state never came.
Instead, Maoist policy meant holding back the demands of the peasant majority and the urban poor. And it limited itself to action that forces on the right would accept.
That meant Communists in office merely continued the neoliberal policies that imperialism had imposed on the country since the 1990s.
There was no significant land reform, no moves to transform agriculture, no effort to break the power of the landlords or to expand production in the public sector.
That’s not because the left tried to implement radical reforms and failed, but because they ruled out such an anti-free market policy from the beginning. And since the communists were now implementing neoliberal policies like the other parties, why not join in and enrich themselves too?
Nepali left academic Khagendra Prasai noted in 2023 that this process was already well underway. “The parties of the left and their candidates spend huge amounts in elections which are opaquely and stealthily funded by the rich or, if they themselves are rich, by the candidates,” he wrote.
Despite the massive poverty, and the power of Nepal’s landowning class, there was always another way for the left. As the People’s War brought an end to the king’s rule, the Maoists could have used the massive prestige they had accumulated to push for more.
They could have demanded the immediate breakup of the landlords’ estates and their redistribution, for example. Rather than stopping at a bourgeois revolution, they could have detonated much more thoroughgoing social change. But a “stages” approach extinguished a workers’ revolution.
Now the rage that once backed the Maoists against the monarchy has moved on.
The sheer energy and imagination of last week’s street protests show the power that the left should have harnessed. The new movement does not need to stop with the fall of the government—it can go on to target the system that created the country’s poverty.
As the protests rage on, in Nepal, the old left is dead. Our hope is that last week marks the birth of a new one.
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