A well-meaning friend has sent an asocial media post—a term that suggests the amoral nature of such platforms—asking for my opinion. The text is cryptic and mentions no names, making it difficult to assess its context. Yet the message signals a worrying spiral of silence following the formation of an ostensibly ideology-free but essentially neocon government holding nearly two-thirds of seats in the newly elected Pratinidhi Sabha.

Since the content is not attributable, I assume that sharing it publicly without authentication is permissible. The quote reads: “Nepal’s top diplomat announced that he will not speak or write from today and has imposed a self-moratorium. Not only will he refrain from posting on social media, but he also told me that he will not pass any comments to the media. This applies to journalists and mainstream media, too, he said. Very tragic.”

The final remark—“very tragic”—hits the mark. Elected regimes with an authoritarian streak rely on enforced quietude, fearing the uproar that even a hint of overt control might provoke. If democratic legitimacy is wielded as a political weapon to enforce self-censorship, speaking out is no longer optional—it becomes the duty of every concerned citizen, however lonely or costly the act.

The trend of self-policing is nowhere more apparent than in the recent internal fracture within the CPN-UML. Not every party member may agree with the statement made by its parliamentary leader Ram Bahadur Thapa on the floor of the House, but the swiftness with which party functionaries distanced themselves from his observations is alarming.

Blaming the army, the bureaucracy, foreign powers—especially “the imperialist USA and expansionist India”—and NGOs for all the ills of the country has been a familiar trope for Nepali communist parties. Thapa introduced hardly any new allegations that party chair Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli had not made before. Yet the leadership seems terrified of the consequences of voicing past rhetoric in the present context.

To be sure, Thapa’s choice of words wouldn’t pass the test of good taste, but politics has fallen to such a low that Prime Minister Balendra Shah had reportedly used the f-word, ending with k, in the past. President Donald Trump uses harsher expletives. For the careful keepers of elite conscience, the ideological “bad taste” of the opposition is worse than the rhetorical “bad taste” of their new masters.

If Thapa’s conspiracy theories sounded controversial, Bhishmaraj Angdembe of Nepali Congress took shelter in repeating high-sounding clichés to mask his inability to articulate pressing concerns. The two partners of the ousted regime appear to lack the moral courage to act as fearless and outspoken protectors of public interest.

The ability of a significant section of the Nepali media to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” has been far from exemplary. It often promotes the powerful in the name of protecting national interest and parades its courage in exposing the fallen. It will take a while for many media outlets in Kathmandu to gather their wits and put up the signboards they had hastily removed.

When the traditional pillars of a functional democracy—the intelligentsia, opposition parties, and the press—fall silent or align with the state, the burden of becoming the voice of the voiceless drowning in the cacophony of conformism shifts to individual citizens and informal collectives.

Roaring ratifiers

In faltering democracies, even prominent actors often yield to the pull of power. A super majority is numerically impressive, yet it suffocates conscientious critics of the governing party even more than those on the opposition benches. Elected representatives of the opposition quickly realise they need the government’s favour to fulfil promises made to their constituents.

When governance is highly centralised, nothing moves without a nod from the top. Every ambitious politician soon learns to navigate the narrow straits between the sayable, the unsayable, the forbidden, and the cautiously phrased compliments cloaked as criticism aimed at the supreme leader—the chief executive of the country.

The media, once the self-appointed watchdog of the public interest, has begun to exercise “care”. In the lexicon of power, exercising care is a polite euphemism for the paralysis of the spine that comes from the risk of being attacked by hired hoodlums—the Kantipur Media Group being set afire during Fall Protests is too stark to ignore. Publishers and editors of small media outlets in the mofussil may have begun to contemplate closure due to the cancellation of government advertising, but what metropolitan media worry about is the denial of access to information.

Dictators employ midnight knocks to frighten the Fourth Estate into becoming an annex of the Information Ministry. Elected authoritarians are subtler—they treat independent journalists with disdain, while simultaneously pampering their fawning favourites and letting slip their own dogs of war upon any likely critic.

When political times get tough, the intelligentsia—the “thought leaders” and “opinion makers”—go angling for fresh opportunities in the swamp of power at Baluwatar. In a system where patronage is the only currency that matters, the intellectual class often finds that the path of least resistance leads directly to an advisory assignment, a lucrative consultancy, a seat on a state board, or even a diplomatic posting. Their silence is not a lack of words, but a calculated investment. The regime change may deserve a chance, but the way it has been brought about demands eternal vigilance.

The “international community”—diplomatic missions, donor agencies, and highfalutin INGOs—may talk about the merits of democracy, but it often prefers development to diversity, stability to liberty, and authority to dissent. It will be necessary to keep a close eye upon the seminar circuit as it recalibrates its rhetoric, making a U-turn from the hard-won road to the destination of dignity and rights towards the symbolism of apology and condescension.

Ratifiers are loudest in digital spaces—once promised an amphitheatre of dissent—where the addicts of Meta, Twitter, and TikTok disparage outgroup criticism while applauding ingroup excesses. The asocial media landscape is no longer a public square; it has become a digital colosseum where state-sponsored trolls and enthusiastic partisans drown out nuanced critique with the collective bark of orchestrated praise. To question the dominant majority is to be branded a jhole, a traitor, a relic, or worse, an “anti-national”—a term redolent of the royal-military regimes of the past.

Conscientious citizenry

When every institutional gatekeeper has been bought by patronage, bullied by the state, or bored into apathetic submission, who is left to hold the mirror? To borrow the refrain of Nobel-laureate Bob Dylan: “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”

It must be you—the solitary individual as the last remaining dissenter in an age of manufactured consent. Another Nobel-laureate, Václav Havel, called this calling “living in truth”. In a system where everyone is incentivised to lie or stay silent, the simple act of refusing to participate in the dominant narrative becomes a potent form of critique.

The oft-quoted and much misunderstood term “organic intellectual” refers to one who refuses to remain silent. A quip commonly misattributed to George Orwell captures this ethic well: “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”