Come September, painful memories of 9/11, 2015 in Madhesh—when forces of the state had gone on a shooting spree, killing young and old alike in Janakpur—ooze out of the heart like a deep wound that refuses to heal. Perpetrators were never brought to book, and impunity of the security forces was masked as authority. But when it was repeated in the Chartreuse Revolt in 2025, the conscience of civil society was shaken, the political class yielded, and the old order was set aflame at its symbolic headquarters, Singha Durbar.

Has society and polity learnt any lessons? Perhaps, but it remains doubtful. Ultimately, nobody learns anything from human or natural failures. The disastrous mishandling of Covid-19 failed to provoke even a fleeting reflection on institutional capacity.

The Gorkha Earthquakes of 2015 were as unpredictable as any tremor anywhere in the world. But unlike geologically quiet and stable intraplate regions, the unpredictability of earthquakes in Nepal is a known phenomenon. In school geography, students are taught that the Indian plate is continuously sliding north into the Eurasian plate, pushing the Himalayas upwards.

Settlements on the continental collision zone carry a high earthquake risk. There must have been a reason no urban civilisation has remained stable in this region for millennia except for the Nepal Valley that has somehow maintained its ability to rise again after every catastrophe. People have lived like friends with nature rather than sit upon it like victors. Modernity treats mountains not as living organisms but natural resources for exploitation. Has the country built sustainably better after the tremors? The answer isn’t even blowing in the wind.

Floods in Kathmandu Valley have become regular affairs. Climate change has changed the nature of the monsoon: more rain pours over unstable edges in shorter timeframes, streams erode the ground, and rainwater rushes past the impervious ground of settlements with heavy bedload, emptying debris into Manohara, Vishnumati and Bagmati, and raising their bed levels.

With their floodplains constricted by human intervention—roads, buildings and dump yards—ferocious rivers rise, and sewers dumping their waste into overflowing banks are pushed back to spread the effluent on streets. Have the concepts of the sanctity of rivers, the inviolability of green cover in the catchment, and the design parameters for disposing of household waste and rainwater separately changed? Floods in September 2024 showed that the only thing that has remained constant for over centuries is the ability of affected people to pray in the face of every calamity—the respectable word for such widespread fatalism is ‘social resilience’.

Developmental determinism

It seems no development planner in Nepal has paused to think why much of this country has remained poor throughout its history. Perhaps one of the many reasons is its geography. The geology being relatively new, the likelihood of economically extractable mineral deposits is low. Except for the valleys in the Mahabharat, the Chure-Shivalik Ranges and the thin strip of Tarai-Madhesh, soil fertility is low.

After the transformation in shipping, the importance of land entrepôt diminished. King Prithvi Narayan Shah probably found out soon after annexing the Valley that he had vastly overestimated the importance of Indo-Tibetan trade passing through Kathmandu. The strategic location of Kathmandu was important, but minting coins for Tibet didn’t translate into minting money for the Shah treasury.

The stucco palaces built amidst thatched huts of Nepal—the vivid comparison owes its origin to meticulous archivist Mahesh Chandra Regmi (1929–2003)—were financed with extractive taxation and forced labour rather than the productivity of land. The lavish lifestyle of Rana rulers owed its extravagance to the blood and sweat of Gorkha mercenaries in the service of the British Empire and the massive forest clearance that went into the expansion of railways in British India.

Let alone innovation, trade and industry, not even art, craft and tourism played any role in helping transform exploitative feudal lords into imaginative capitalists with the infusion of economic surplus into creating or enhancing the means of production. The consumer base has since widened, but the profit sector that sits upon it remains opulently small.

A cunning ruler, it’s extremely unlikely that King Mahendra—or his geopolitical handlers during the Cold War—were unaware of the inapplicability of developmental determinism in the Himalayan topography. The Western-style capitalism of a linear path leading from primary mode of production to rapid industrialisation through modernisation was unlikely to work with land in hostile terrain, a labour force that hadn’t been allowed to learn new skills for centuries, a very low rate of capital formation, primitive technology and a complete absence of institutions that enjoyed public trust.

Things have changed since the winter of 1960, but only in appearance. The essence remains the same. Consequently, even economic infrastructure—transportation, communication and energy—produces more for consumption than the creation of wealth. Let alone contribute towards their replacement, most infrastructure facilities fail to help increase production and thereby raise the cost of their maintenance and upgrading.

It is easy to point fingers. From the wrath of gods through the cycle of nature to climate change, something can always be found to disown the responsibilities for faults in the political economy. Carbon emissions, global warming and climate change are evolving challenges where Nepal can do very little to ameliorate the imminent suffering of the vulnerable population of the world. Perhaps what it can do is accept its limitations in all humility—Nepal isn’t sun ko tukra; it’s a fragile land where hardy and stoic people live with tenacity, aware of everyday challenges. It needs to rethink its development priorities, prepare better coping strategies and dump the dream of becoming Switzerland or Singapore.

Delusional expectations

When a tragedy strikes fellow human beings, sympathy towards the sufferer is a natural response. The reaction is at least partly propelled by an emotional sense of relief: “It could have been me”. Perhaps that explains the flow of contributions to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund. Institutional responses, especially of other countries, follow their own logic.

Sometimes, crises in countries with weak institutions become an opportunity for influential countries to advance their geopolitical interests. Those who criticised the government’s hesitation in immediately accepting international assistance after the Bhotekoshi deluge need to remember on whose insistence British Chinook helicopters were sent back home—after awaiting clearance in India for several days—and who benefitted most from the fast-tracked constitution that laid the groundwork for the evolution of kakistocracy in the country.

The saturation coverage in the international media can perhaps be attributed to the fact that a large number of Indian pilgrims, Western and East Asian tourists and Chinese citizens were caught in the catastrophe. The area that was swept away in the debris flow had the most important trans-Himalayan trade route and a hugely popular trekking destination. Finally, better sense prevailed in all quarters, and rescue teams with training and technology are there in the affected area. Commitments of bilateral aid—especially from neighbouring countries—are extremely important. What is less clear is the intent of Prime Minister Balendra Shah’s first foreign trip after becoming the head of government to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York.

Institutions that control actual capital and structural leverage—like the World Bank, the IMF and the UN Security Council—are heavily influenced by Western powers. Primarily a deliberative and moral forum, the UNGA lacks enforceable teeth. It cannot pass legally binding taxes on carbon emitters, nor can it force industrialised nations to hand over checks for ‘loss and damage’ based on ‘polluters pay’ principle.

Grandstanding at UN forums seldom changes realities on the ground, as Cuban leader Fidel Castro found after the longest-timed speech in UNGA history. Sadly, the only lesson of history is that no one ever learns anything from it until history repeats itself.