On a day of countrywide protests against rampant corruption and control over freedom of expression in Nepal on September 8, 2025, “19 killed and almost 400 injured in police firing” reads like a dispatch from a distant land. Numbers without stories lose their power—and numb the audience.

Since its October 2023 invasion of the Gaza Strip, Israel has killed more than 60,000 people—nearly a third of them children under 18—including several journalists. It’s a staggering toll that many human rights experts and advocacy groups have characterised as genocide. But the deafening silence of most world powers and only muted or cautious responses from the international community show that the full force of a tragedy hits only when it’s close to one’s heart or home.

There is no way to know what made Shriram Chaulagain, aged 19 and a student at Global College, join the protest at Baneshwar. Sulabh Raj Shrestha, aged 21 and from Nepalgunj, was a civil engineering student at the Kathmandu Engineering College. It’s not sure whether he went out to be at the protest site out of curiosity, solidarity or genuine rage against the system that had silenced the voice of his cohort that mostly expressed itself through the asocial media. Sriram and Sulabh were two among the 19 who lost their lives in police firing.

The dead tell no tales. Guesswork about the causes of flash protests will continue to be made for quite a while. In perennially insecure societies, conspiracy theories hold immense lure. The proud nationalists will probably attribute the tragedy to some foreign conspiracy against the most stable government of the decade with almost 2/3 majority in the parliament.

The pundits invited to the radio and television discussions were predictably preachy. Retired police officers, many of them charged previously for using excessive force themselves, were telling the audience that the security personnel posted to guard the parliament building should have exercised restraint. The consequences of storming the parliament building are perhaps too complex to comprehend for those who have spent their careers in obeying orders.

Almost all politicos in Nepal owe their place in public life to some or the other form of violence. The Maoists used bombs to blast civilians. The UML radicals, including Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, established themselves through targeted killings of so-called ‘class enemies’ in the 1970s. Way back in 1951, the Nepali Congress had raised an anti-government army.

Many of politicos were heard saying that protestors against corruption in Baneshwar should have been careful about infiltrators in their ranks. Little do they realise, or remember, that only trained cadres in a crowd—such as the ones during the Maoist march in November 2009—can remain resolutely peaceful despite provocation.

Monday’s protests may have started spontaneously, but their descent into targeted arson across the country shows a method in the madness. On Tuesday afternoon—the second day of unrest—as a surveillance helicopter flies by, gunshots rent the air and the acrid smoke of burning tyres hangs heavy in the atmosphere, it’s difficult to say where it all would lead even after the resignation of Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli.

Predicting the course of an ongoing upheaval is no easy task. Will it be satisfied with toppling the government or simply wither away for lack of coherent ideology, organisation and leadership? Either way, the political bigwigs of the post-2015 order—specially the trio of UML Supremo Sharma Oli, NC strongman Sher Bahadur Deuba and Maoist Supremo Pushpa Kamal Dahal—are facing a moment of reckoning.

Black September

September is a month of mourning, and the memories of ‘9/11 in Madhesh’ still sear the mind with grief. A long quote from the Human Rights Watch report can be paraphrased to convey its full force: On September 11, 2015, police opened fire on protesters in Janakpur, chasing them into homes and killing 14-year-old Nitu Yadav at point-blank range, while another protester, Sanjay Chaudhari, was shot dead while fleeing the scene.

Earlier, on September 1, 2015, at least four protestors had been killed and two children among 12 others injured in police firing in Birgunj. The cruelty didn’t end there. On September 15, 2025, four-year-old Chandan Patel fell to police bullet in Rupandehi. A year later, 52 killed during the Madhesh stir were declared martyrs and a seven-member probe commission headed by former Supreme Court justice Girish Chandra Lal was formed to investigate all incidents. The government hasn’t made its report public yet. Impunity has not only been accepted but institutionalised.

The post-2015 political class of rulers failed to address the aspirations of Madheshis and came to believe they could get away with anything. Now, being hounded by some of their own rather than by ‘them Madheshis’, their fear is palpable. No tears are likely to be shed in Madhesh for their fall; but if they take the republican order down with them, the country risks reverting to unpredictable instability.

The frustrations of youngsters, even from the hegemonic ABCD (Aryan, Bahun, Chhetri and Dashnami) community, aren’t hard to understand and empathise with. They wanted a future but have been fed with invented glories of an imagined past. Education has become meaningless. Jobs are scarce and unremunerative even when available. The flow of foreign aid is turning into a trickle with the closure of USAID. The wind has gone out of the sails of the Windustry that attracted middle-class kids. How long could Sharma Oli fool all the people all of the time with his screed about Gaidas being Gaidas and not rhinos?

Geopolitical angle

Even though conspiracy theories divert attention from simmering discontent within, the role of geopolitical forces in abrupt political eruptions cannot be ruled out. Precedence from South Asia over the last few years offers some pointers.

When protesters stormed Colombo’s presidential palace in 2022 and toppled the Rajapaksa family, many thought it was a one-off. Two years later, Dhaka replayed the scene almost frame by frame. Students angry over job quotas turned a campus issue into a national revolt. The storming of Sheikh Hasina’s residence sealed the fall of a leader who had once seemed unshakable.

The echoes are striking. In both Colombo and Dhaka, it was the young who lit the fire. In both, narrow grievances morphed into regime-shaking demands. And in both, the capture of symbolic spaces—palaces, residences, state buildings—marked the point of no return.

Repression only sped up the collapse. Sri Lanka used tear gas and arrests. Bangladesh went further with live bullets, curfews and blackouts. Instead of cowing dissent, the use of force to silence multiplied it. Protestors weaponised asocial media. What began as scattered protests became unstoppable movements.

The lesson was stark. In South Asia, as elsewhere, power built on fear is brittle. Once people’s patience breaks, even elected dynasties and despots aren’t safe— Rajapaksa and Hasina yesterday, Sharma Oli today. Leaders across the region should heed the warning: Legitimacy lost in the streets cannot be regained at gunpoint. But what has happened in Colombo and Dhaka afterwards also holds a lesson or two: Fear the rise of ‘Marxist Nationalism’—meaning ethnonational fascism—such as the one in Sri Lanka or creeping anarchy as in Bangladesh. Both South Asian regimes kept afloat by their patrons perhaps in the West.