KATHMANDU, Nepal — The Nepal Parliament building is a striking mix of old and new: a sprawling structure of steel and concrete capped off by a two-tier pagoda. But last week, its white walls were covered in soot and graffiti. "You picked the wrong fight," reads one message, signed: "Gen Z."
It's the fallout of the most dramatic upheaval the Himalayan country has experienced in years — where in less than 48 hours, protesters forced the overthrow of the government.
Nepal's government is only the latest in South Asia to be overthrown by protesters, and it underscores the profound generational change shaking the world's most populous region and testing governments' ability to meet their citizens' expectations.
The turmoil in Nepal began in earnest on Sept. 8, when police in the capital Kathmandu opened fire on anti-corruption protesters as they tried to breach Parliament walls. Mobs retaliated by torching buildings, looting banks and shops, and attacking politicians in their homes. The violence killed more than 70 people and wounded thousands more, according to Nepal police spokesperson Ramesh Thapa.
Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli resigned on Sept. 9 and has not been seen publicly since. The army imposed a curfew.
By Sept. 12, the country had a new interim leader: Sushila Karki. The 73-year-old was Nepal's first female chief justice — and is now its first female prime minister. Her appointment by Nepal's president followed online polls on the chat portal Discord, where thousands supported her citing her judicial record of taking on the corrupt and the elite.
"Our movement was motivated by two things," says Abhiyan Sapkota, a 27-year-old civil engineer who participated in the protests, "unemployment and government corruption."
For months, young Nepalis sought to highlight the stunning contrast between the country's masses and its wealthy elites, pulling together montages of social media images and videos uploaded by the children of prominent politicians. One image showed a young woman posing with a Prada bag worth $2,600, in a country where the average yearly income in Nepal is less than $1,500 a year.
They zoomed in on Nepali elites vacationing in Europe, a contrast to the travels of most citizens — who work abroad in low-paying jobs as porters, soldiers and construction workers.
The campaign, using variations of hashtags like #NepoKids, came amid mounting frustration with politicians who are widely seen as using public money to enrich themselves. "Over the last 10 years, all three individuals who have traded the prime minister's chair have had pretty serious corruption allegations against them," says Ashish Pradhan, an expert on Nepal at the International Crisis Group, a think tank.
Investigators never pursued the cases seriously, he says. "Instead, the anti-corruption watchdog was used to go after political opponents rather than to tackle systemic misuse of funds."
But on Sept. 4, the government abruptly suspended most social media. It was widely seen by anti-corruption activists as an attempt to quell their campaign exposing the poolside luxury lives of Nepal's elite. That led to thousands protesting in Kathmandu on Sept. 8.
In the days after violence, army personnel fanned out across the country. On major roads of Kathmandu, they set up checkpoints every few hundred yards and checked IDs. When curfew was relaxed for a few hours every day, youths cleaned the streets, visited hospitals to check upon the injured and held candlelight vigils for protesters who'd lost their lives. Outside a burnt-down police station in Kathmandu's Darbar Marg, someone scrawled an apology: "Sorry dada," Nepali for an elder brother.
The attacks on mainstream political parties also prompted introspection among some cadres.
Nepal has seen over a dozen coalition governments in the past two decades. But the top office has mostly rotated among the same set of leaders, most of them in their 70s. Now, some are demanding a change in leadership. Pratima Gautam, member of the Nepali Congress party's central working committee, says the protesters had a message for the old guard: "Step back a little."
The uprising has come at a time of revolutionary fervor across South Asia.
"There are certainly some common threads between what we've seen in Nepal in the last week and what we seen in recent years in South Asian other countries, like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, especially with cases of elite, long-standing regimes being deposed after crises that involved level of economic pressures that were being felt by citizens," says Pradhan, of the International Crisis Group.
The youth, he says, were spurred by rising costs of living and inflation, and reeling from the impact of climate change and COVID-19 lockdowns. Pradhan says the governments used force because they thought they could get away with it.
"The kind of international order and the checks and balances that were there in the glory days of the 1990s and parts of the 2000s have slowly eroded over time. The global picture now resembles a little bit more of a wild, wild west where might is right, and force and transactional diplomacy and mercantilism rule the day," he says.
Nepal is scheduled to hold elections early next year. Analysts say the challenge in front of the interim government is to maintain order and refrain from politics of retribution.
There's optimism among the youth. When the interim leader took an oath a week ago, many defied curfew to sing and celebrate on the streets. The popular Instagram account Genz.Nepal summarized it in a pithy post: "PM Sushila Karki… SLAYYY 💅🏼." The slang is a compliment.
But long-time Nepal watchers advise caution.
Political analyst Chandradev Bhatta says Nepal has a long history of regime-change through street protests. The national government has changed hands more than a dozen times in the last decade.
The instability has often been a result of tensions between democrats, monarchists, the Maoists and political parties. "If it was happening for the first time, I wouldn't have minded because we needed the change. But we've written seven constitutions in more than 70 years," Bhatta says.
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