Anarchy engineered in Nepal — Is India immune?

Unlike Nepal, India’s institutions still buffer against collapse — but flashpoints remain.

The anarchic Gen-Z protests in Nepal, which spread like wildfire across the country, are being described as the spontaneous reaction of youngsters to corruption, maladministration, unemployment, and the rampant nepotism of the political elite.

Parallels have also been drawn in terms of tactics, symbolism, and the momentum of the Nepal protests with Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya movement led by youth in 2022, and the student-led July revolution in Bangladesh in 2024.

All of them used targeted violence to create massive social disruption. The lead demographic of the protestors and the outcome, in terms of regime change with elected chief executives resigning and fleeing to safety, were also the same. The acts of symbolic victory were eerily similar: swimming in the president’s pool (Sri Lanka), dancing in front of burning buildings (Bangladesh and Nepal).

Do these similarities suggest that they were engineered by external forces, as some analysts have suggested or were they copycat revolutions? With such instability in its neighbourhood, does India have reason to be worried?

Several facts suggest that the Nepal Gen-Z movement was not a flash protest. It was organised and planned. Perhaps it began as a response to the blocking of 26 social media platforms for regulatory non-compliance on September 4. Public protests began on September 8.

The protests were planned over TikTok, one of the platforms that had complied with government regulations, and using VPN (the subscription to the popular Proton VPN went up 8,000% between September 4 and 9), encrypted chat groups, and alternative apps like Telegram, Signal, and Viber. VPNs allowed the protest co-ordinators to hide their geolocations, making State surveillance difficult.

A leading role in co-ordinating the protests digitally was of an NGO called Hami Nepal. Hami Nepal mapped out protest routes and created groups on Instagram and Discord under the umbrella name ‘Youths Against Corruption’ to co-ordinate the protests. It also instructed them to wear school uniforms and carry books to represent that it was a peaceful protest. Besides several volunteers and protest escalators of Hami Nepal, the other person lending open support to the youth was Balendra Shah, the 33-year-old non-political mayor of Kathmandu.

Official permission was sought and granted for the protest on September 8. As the protest march was moving towards Parliament, sources in Nepal say, Home Minister Ramesh Lekhak was attending the meeting of the State Affairs Committee of Parliament and assured everyone present that the students were peaceful protestors and they had nothing to worry about.

However, motorbike riders broke the police barricades, and within hours, violence began. Police initially responded with tear gas shells, batons, rubber bullets, and finally live ammunition, leaving 19 dead. By nightfall, videos of the violence were shared through VPNs. By the next day, protestors were attacking political leaders, their homes, and government buildings with military precision.

There are other indicators that the protests were planned and synchronised. Mere athleticism cannot explain how youngsters climbed barricaded eight-foot walls of the Parliament Building, protected by a detachment of the Nepal Army, before setting the building on fire.

The multiple attacks on different symbols of the State — including the Secretariat at Singh Durbar, Parliament, the Supreme Court and police posts — were designed to overwhelm security and disrupt the State’s command structures.

Sophisticated techniques of disruption, crowd surges as protestors gathered in waves, motorbike riders to break police cordons, and the simultaneous protests across the country suggest a social media co-ordinated disruption of the State apparatus.

The answer to who engineered the fall of the regime in Nepal will not be in the public domain any time soon. In Bangladesh, the role of a Western country in training the students who led the July protests, and taking them for off-site consultations to West Asia is slowly coming out.

This is not to deny that objective conditions existed for the explosion of youth anger. The Nepalese political elite — itself a product of democratic, and often armed, uprisings — had become deeply corrupt, nepotistic, and self-serving. Unemployment and economic inequality were acute, and the youngsters were deeply apprehensive of continuing systemic failures.

The protests harnessed the chronic emotional distress of the youth amplified by digital tools, but their execution was engineered as State symbols and property were destroyed with dramatic military precision.

Conditions are as ripe in India for the explosion of youth anger as they were in Nepal. Is India apprehensive of similar developments?

Social disruption focussing on the alleged corruption of the political class was already attempted most recently in 2011-2012 with several NGO activists and youth leading the nationwide ‘India Against Corruption’ movement. Youth and middle-class anger were largely channelled by the alleged notional loss of Rs 176,000 crore in the 2G ‘corruption scam’, a product of the fevered imagination (found to be fake later) of the then Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Vinod Rai. That moment of social disruption facilitated the rise to two demagogic, self-righteous, and authoritarian leaders: Narendra Modi at the Centre and Arvind Kejriwal in Delhi. India, in a sense, has already been there and done that.

However, the current Indian dispensation seems to fear regime change based on social disruption again. This was amply evident in its attempt to crush the farmer’s movement (August 2020 to December 2021) before capitulating to their demands. The anti-CAA protests of 2019-2020 were also youth driven, but collapsed with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

India’s ruling party, however, is no stranger to social disruption. After all, social disruption through religious polarisation catapulted it to power, and kept it there. What it fears, however, is social disruption engineered by outsiders — whose choreography it cannot control. Sri Lanka earlier and Bangladesh and Nepal bring the prospect closer home.

However, unlike Nepal and Bangladesh, the guardrails of the State have not collapsed completely: the courts, periodic elections, federal structure of the polity, and sections of the media still offer partial redress. In addition, extensive surveillance, tight policing, and reluctance to fire on protestors have kept street agitations contained.

The Indian system is built on institutional churn, not on institutional collapse. Street-sponsored anarchy of the kind witnessed in the neighbourhood is unlikely. Any regime change in India is likely to come from parliamentary dissent, amplified through public protest but still resolved through parliamentary processes.

However, the flashpoints are there. In addition, the government finds itself on the wrong side of an increasingly irrational, erratic and impatient United States administration.

Bharat Bhushan is a New Delhi-based journalist.