Pradeep Giri was among the very few politicians my generation looked up to. He embodied the spirit of BP Koirala and Pushpa Lal, who had shaped the anti-(crypto)colonial consciousness and defined democracy for Nepal. It is on this political legacy that my generation is building responses to technological globalisation and corporate capitalism facing us today.

Giri’s passing left a palpable void in our political praxis, and this realisation has sunk in, three years since his passing. What troubles me more is that the generation after us may not quite feel or recognise this reflexive void. Today’s political and intellectual culture no longer allows for the reflexive, personalised and messy space that Giri and the generation before him represented. Today’s leaders, who were supposed to carry on the baton from his generation, unfortunately, are submerged in careerism and wokeness, which tends to repackage democracy as a tool of corporate power and state arrogance.

Giri was a son of the Nepal-India borderlands. Echoing the everyday lives in the region, Giri was always vocal in criticising the ruler-centric state politics, just as he resisted the confines of party straitjacketing.

There is a growing reckoning on how the 21st century has witnessed Janus-faced nationalism, which is becoming the greatest constraint on freedom and social justice. Yet social science theories on postnationalism and cosmopolitanism fail to recognise the Euro-American hegemonies of Westphalian nationalism as the roots of these constraints. An influential German theorist, Ulrich Beck, wrote, “At a time when the world is growing closer together and becoming more cosmopolitan, in which, therefore, the borders and barriers between nations and ethnic groups are being lifted, ethnic identities and divisions are becoming stronger once again.” He went on to name the supposed enemies of Euro-American cosmopolitanism: Various minorities …—blacks, women, gays, Hispanics, etc [for example, in America]. The contradiction is jarring—and dangerous. The hypocrisy of this kind of theorisation needs to be called out.

Here, I borrow novelist Mithu Sanyal’s sharp observation on a recent statement made by German President Friedrich Mertz, who invoked threats of “imported antisemitism” to justify the tighter curb on non-white migration into Germany his government wished to impose. Sanyal referenced a Mitchell and Webb sketch featuring a man with a heavy German accent and a Nazi family background harping about, ‘These foreigners, coming over here, importing their antisemitism.’ She highlighted the dark irony at play–how the humour hinges on the speaker’s obliviousness and denial. Yet, as Sanyal hauntingly observed, “Only this was not a comedy.”

We need to return to an old but pressing call: Decolonise theory and provincialise Euro-America. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism, like so many theoretical frameworks, must be rethought from the ground up. Anthropologist Faye Harrison, known for her work on African-Americans, called this task “theorizing in ex-centric sites” or writing theory from the margins of the world. This is precisely why connecting learning in Africa, Latin America and South Asia feels so crucial. The Nepal-India border towns and figures like Pradeep Giri have thus become two protagonists in countering the dogma about nationalism and cosmopolitanism—an alignment I found meaningfully affirmed at Giri’s third death anniversary, organised in Birgunj last week.

Politicians and leaders often look up to Europe for validation on regional integration and cross-border freedom. As a scholar, I feel it is my duty to put up a reminder that the first visa-free cross-border movement and customs union did not begin in Europe but in Africa. Seventy-five years before Schengen provisions came into being, the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) had already been in place in 1910. Not only this, but the southern African borderlands built the foundations of the anti-racism struggle at a time when Europe was caught in the violence of the Holocaust and its aftermath. The race theories in the textbooks everywhere in the world indeed have their roots in the shebeen gossips and school-university debates among the activists crisscrossing the African border towns. Europe stands to benefit from recognising theories from the Global South. Non-Europeans certainly can make our worldview and logic less parasitic on European hegemonies by shedding our own biases in the way we imagine world development and human civilisation.

The speakers at Giri’s commemoration rightly reminded us about the Nepal-India cosmopolitan solidarity during the 1940s anti-colonial struggle. Politicians from Champaran—who had long-standing ties with Giri and other bordertown freedom fighters, including BP Koirala and Phaniswarnath Renu—spoke about how they fought colonialism and crypto-colonialism together. They reminded us that BP Koirala was not only a Nepali politician but a respected intellectual whose contributions to India’s independence were valued greatly by the Indian state at that time. And that Giri was a political heir to that legacy.

Today’s politicians and intellectuals have forgotten about the legacies of Satyagraha staged in the Champaran borderlands, a site that transformed Gandhi from a diasporic Gujarati negotiator into the Bapu who gave India azadi. Their Indian counterparts reminisced about how theories from Champaran have been lost within India today, even as Gandhi goes on being eulogised as a global celebrity.

I hope that this provincial adda reverberates into wider discourses. We are living in a time when corporatist, parasitic national identities are being reshaped to double up on exclusion and domination. Even more worrying is the reality that observers are beginning to note—the rising tide of communitarianism and the ideological vacuum gripping these very borderlands. We need both new perspectives and engagement that can expose the biases embedded within what is too often accepted uncritically as the mainstream.

Lives like those lived by Giri give us hope that alternative politics may endure. In reflecting on Giri’s cross-border engagement, we can forge not just a legacy to commemorate but an intellectual foundation from which to think and theorise something new and radical about being Nepali in the fractured world we face today.