The precipitous fall from the heights of power to the depths of disgrace of Khas-Arya ethnonational chieftain KP Sharma Oli has been dramatic. Just a year ago, he stood at the summit, commanding obedience and adulation. At the time of writing this column, he clings to the edge, seeking acceptance as the third-term chairperson of a party that he had managed as a personal fiefdom.

Named Khadga Prasad after birth, he reportedly got a new citizenship to shorten it to KP—perhaps on the advice of a godman, a numerologist or an astrologer—to improve his lot. He has been prime minister four times since 2015, and always on his own terms.

The then Prime Minister Sushil Koirala was the first to bow down when every wish of Sharma Oli became his command. Cantankerous by temperament and politically diminished in his later years, Koirala was manipulated into offering only nominal resistance in the prime ministerial contest following the promulgation of a controversial constitution to bring Madhesh-dependent parties back into the parliament.

His second enthronement as head of the executive in February 2018 was even more spectacular—he had forced his long-time critic and once a Maoist supremo, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, to meekly accept his diktats and agree to be relegated to a secondary role. The political vehicle Sharma Oli had created to carry himself into the good books of Beijing—the unified Nepal Communist Party subscribing to the Xi Jinping Thought—was broken to pieces due to an order of the Supreme Court. But by that time, he had already succeeded in capturing the state by placing people personally loyal to him in key positions of government.

When the Chair of the biggest party in Pratinidhi Sabha, Sher Bahadur Deuba, approached him to accept his allegiance and become the prime minister, he grandiosely agreed to do so, but once again on his own terms. On 15 July 2024, Sharma Oli took the oath of office as the leader of a coalition that consisted of the biggest and the second biggest parties in the parliament. The NC had already fused itself into the political outfit of Sharma Oli in 2014 in the name of ‘national interest’.

Sharma Oli is expected to be elected the chairperson of his party, but it’s unlikely that he would straddle the political stage of the country as he has done so far. Even though it’s too early to write his political epitaph, the Fall Protest of 2025 has succeeded not just in unceremoniously unseating him, but also in discrediting the political legacy of jingoistic ethnonationalism that he had so assiduously built over the last decade.

Chartreuse revolt

Like a lion in the winter roaring to convince itself rather than anyone else that it is still the king of the jungle, Sharma Oli thundered at the UML convention that ‘colour revolution sought to weaken Nepal’s sovereignty and my party’. The substance of his vociferation may be meekly accusatory, but at least two of his three arguments appear credible—revolts that end up in regime change are often given a colour, and weakening his party was perhaps one of the undeclared aims of the Fall Protest, 2025, as the UML–NC twinning had become the principal carrier of the rot in Nepal’s politics.

The list of colour-coded protests and uprisings, typically triggered by disputed elections and rampant corruption, since the Rose Revolution of 2003 in Georgia is indeed long. It was followed by the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, the Purple Revolution in Iraq, the Saffron Revolution in Myanmar and the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, leading to the Arab Spring. Almost all of them succeeded in toppling the government but failed to institutionalise the desired change.

It is possible to ascribe the colour Ochre of Buddhism to Aragalaya in Sri Lanka and Olive Green as in the military to the July Revolution in Bangladesh. Both succeeded in regime changes, but the institutionalisation of their successes remains to be seen.

The Rhododendron Revolution in Nepal was a partial victory—it succeeded in throwing away the Shah monarchy into the pages of history but failed to establish a functioning, secular, inclusive and federal republic. The colour of sacrifice represented in the rhododendron has faded beyond recognition within two decades. The Third Madhesh Uprising of 2015 was best exemplified by the night jasmine—like the tiny white bloom that falls to the ground as if they were tears, the Parijat Revolt bloomed, fell and failed to change the exclusionary, majoritarian and ethnonational character of the state as it was crushed without remorse.

The 36 hours of the Fall Protest, 2025, that consumed the symbolic centres of the executive, legislative and judicial arms of the state and put innumerable public, commercial and private buildings on fire all over the country deserve a colour that is emblematic of raw emotions and mindless rage. Perhaps chartreuse—a variable colour averaging a brilliant yellow green of wood catching fire and sounding sufficiently modern for a generation picking a PM on a gaming app—suits it best.

Discursive ambition

From the Lost Generation, the Greatest Generation, the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers, the Xennials (Generation X), the Millennials (Generation Y) and the Zoomers (Generation Z) to the Generation Alpha, all are historically produced political subjectivities of Western, more specifically North American, societies with little resonance in South Asia. But the politics of elite imitation has its advantages.

Occupy Wall Street was completely different from Occupy Baluwatar, and Dalit Lives Matter has only some similarities with Black Lives Matter, but the claim on globally familiar names gave local campaigns higher visibility. It’s understandable that youngsters decided to call themselves Gen Z rather than Hami Yuva (We the Youth), which would have rooted them in the ground realities of Nepal but failed to draw an empathetic reaction from the international community towards their uncontrolled rage that consumed the state.

It isn’t clear who began to call the protest of youngsters against a blanket ban on ‘asocial media’ a Gen Z movement, but it was a smart move. The politics of claiming a universally recognisable name immediately connected it to the wave of youth activism. The framing succeeded in attracting international solidarity and media attention.

Most of the so-called Gen Z protesters came from an urban background who had attended for-profit schools and were digital natives. It gave them an aura of fighting for rights through the methods of modernity. The advantage of anonymity as cyber activists offered them an edge over the “television generation,” for whom inauthenticity is hard to hide from the prying eyes of the camera.

The fundamental contestation between politicos of the UML–NC combine and the youngsters who burned the house down, figuratively and literally, is one of expectations. The old guard yearns for stability to retain its station in life, while the new claimants seek dynamism—deriving stimulation from TikTok, information from asocial media algorithms, and knowledge from AI systems. They live in different worlds. Intergenerational conversations can take place only if both sides are willing to engage in the language of social justice—the only idiom through which questions of power, exclusion and dignity can now be meaningfully negotiated.