A glorious revolution one year ago once more destroyed and recreated the state in Nepal, yet another iteration of a historical process which has included monarchy, communism, parliamentary democracy, and a military junta, and all of these overlapping in time and interdependent in co-evolution and cataclysms of change.

      My interrogation of the Revolution of one year ago, how it unfolded and what it means, closes with the essay written by Slavoj Zizek regarding the Dalai Lama’s command to a boy under a formal audience to “Suck my tongue”, as it beautifully exposes the core relationship between the human need for Authority and sadomasochism, which scholars of cult deprogramming refer to as The Ecstasy of Submission. It explains why America is now ruled by a mad idiot tyrant, Russian agent, and Rapist In Chief whose mission is the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America as a guarantor state of our universal human rights, and why Nepal suffers Nietzsche’s principle of Eternal Recurrence in her return again and again to forms of tyranny.

     Such processes represent and illuminate universal principles of the dynamic tension between chaos and order as creative forces, a subject which remains to be fully explicated in terms of human societies and history.

     Why do liberation struggles become tyrannies? How do systems of oppression reconstruct themselves as a consequence of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force? For when the fear is great enough, especially when it is pervasive and overwhelming and given a target by Authority, we all of us behave as beasts and not as human beings.

     In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.

      What happened during and in the wake of the September 2025 Revolution, as civil authority collapsed, the state unraveled, and power shifted to a military junta and along with it the responsibility of forming a new nation, with the September 8 Massacre when the police opened fire on protestors killing 21 citizens acting as the trigger event?

      As written by Matrika Dahal & Tufan Neupane in The Kathmandu Post, in an article entitled Five days, five questions: How Army Headquarters became Nepal’s political centre: The Gen Z uprising brought down the government and left Nepal in a political vacuum. Here is how the five days that followed unfolded, as Army Headquarters emerged as the centre of efforts to restore order and form a new government; “It was past 11 pm on September 11 last year. President Ram Chandra Paudel sat on a sofa at Sheetal Niwas, both hands pressed against his cheeks.

     This was not the usual room where Paudel held his meetings. It was Kanchanjunga Hall, in a separate building behind the President’s Office. To the President’s right were Pushpa Kamal Dahal, Madhav Kumar Nepal, Narayankaji Shrestha, Ramesh Lekhak, Badri Pandey and others, seated in that order. To his left sat the President’s legal adviser, Baburam Kunwar; political advisor Sunil Bahadur Thapa; Chief of the Army Staff Ashokraj Sigdel; Secretary of the President’s Office Deepak Kafle; and others.

     It was a high-stakes meeting. By then, scores of unarmed young protesters had been killed, while the state itself was coming apart. On September 8 and 9, Parliament, Singha Durbar, Sheetal Niwas and the Supreme Court had been set ablaze.

     Then someone raised a question that had barely featured in Nepal’s political conversation for the previous decade and a half: Should former King Gyanendra Shah be brought into the discussions?

     The proposal came from Army Chief Sigdel. President Paudel, also the Supreme Commander of the Nepal Army, remained pensive, his hands still pressed against his cheeks.

     A high-ranking Army source, speaking to Kantipur on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that no one in Kanchanjunga Hall objected to the proposal.

     “No one asked why he [Gyanendra] should be made a stakeholder,” the source said. “What the [Army] Chief proposed did not mean restoring the monarchy. He was simply proposing that the former king also could be brought into the discussion as different options for finding a way out of the crisis were being considered.”

     A senior official from the President’s Office was then sent to Nirmal Niwas, Gyanendra’s residence about a kilometre from Sheetal Niwas. But the former king replied that he could not come unless the major political parties formally invited him in writing.

     What transpired in Kanchanjunga Hall that night was not simply a conversation about whether to bring a former king into the discussions. It was one episode in a frantic series of discussions, proposals and negotiations unfolding as the state struggled to determine what would happen next after the protests had upended Nepal’s politics and triggered a constitutional crisis.

     The constitutionally elected government had fallen. The President stood as the guardian of the Constitution. Yet the irony confronting the country was that the very Constitution he was charged with protecting also constrained his room to act.

     And so the Army, an institution itself shaped by Nepal’s long transition to democracy, suddenly found itself at the centre of the country’s political crisis. For five days, Nepal’s political centre of gravity shifted from Singha Durbar to Jangi Adda — the Army Headquarters.

     To understand how the transition unfolded during those critical days, Kantipur over the course of four weeks interviewed more than 25 people — including officials from the President’s Office, Army and police personnel, civil servants and politicians, and those involved in negotiations — for more than 40 hours. Kantipur also examined the answers given to the Gauri Bahadur Karki Commission by five senior Army officers, including the Army Chief; statements by the then Chief Secretary, Home Secretary, Kathmandu Chief District Officer and other officials; reports of the Karki Commission and National Human Rights Commission; and records of meetings and decisions made at the time by the Council of Ministers, National Security Council, Central Security Committee and Kathmandu District Security Committee.

     The events of that night had begun unfolding hours earlier.

     Earlier in the day, Paudel held a meeting at Nepal Army’s Bhairavnath Battalion, situated just opposite Sheetal Niwas, where he had been lodged since September 9, when parts of Sheetal Niwas were set on fire. Present were his legal advisor Kunwar, General Sigdel, and the chiefs of the Nepal Police, Armed Police Force and National Investigation Department — Chandrakuber Khapung, Raju Aryal and Hutaraj Thapa, respectively.

     Paudel told the chiefs of the security agencies that a solution had to be found within the framework of the constitution.

     According to people familiar with the discussion, Paudel floated three proposals: appointing a former chief justice or a non-parliamentarian as prime minister, with a mandate to hold elections within six months; summoning meetings of the House of Representatives and National Assembly, amending the Constitution to accommodate this arrangement, and immediately approving the constitutional amendment bill; and declaring a state of emergency for the period required to complete the process, allowing the security agencies to manage the situation.

     Sources told Kantipur that all of them, including the Army chief, expressed a different view. They said the Gen Z protesters were demanding the scrapping of the constitution, an interim government, an interim constitution and elections, and questioned whether Paudel’s proposal would be enough to bring the situation under control.

     When no concrete agreement emerged, at around 3:30 pm, in an episode that had not previously been made public, Paudel, accompanied by Sigdel, boarded an Army helicopter and flew to the Chanwan barracks in Makawanpur. Oli, the sitting prime minister, was there. He and other senior leaders had been helicoptered to the barracks by the army on September 9 amid violent protests in Kathmandu.

     According to sources at the President’s Office, the two spoke for about an hour and a half. Paudel proposed a state of emergency as a way of avoiding the dissolution of the House of Representatives. He told Oli that if he, as the caretaker prime minister, recommended an emergency declaration, he was prepared to make an immediate decision. Oli would not agree.

     Paudel, however, obtained Oli’s consent for the formation of a new government. He returned from Chanwan with an understanding that, even if Sushila Karki, the former chief justice, had to be made prime minister, the House would not be dissolved.

     Hours later, he was back in Kanchanjunga Hall. In the adjoining Saipal Hall, Sushila Karki was waiting with Om Prakash Aryal, an advocate and longtime confidant of hers.

       In an interview with Kantipur, Kunwar said the President wanted democracy to survive. “He was overwhelmed with tears. He was extremely worried, saying that democracy, the system and the achievements were at stake,” Kunwar recalled.

     The September 11 meeting continued almost till dawn, but without any resolution.

     Another meeting was held at the President’s Office after 9 am on September 12. Karki, Aryal, Sudan Gurung (now home minister), Kunwar, and Kafle took part.

     But the morning meeting again failed to produce an agreement on forming an interim government without dissolving Parliament. Kunwar and the security chiefs briefed him that the situation had already deteriorated beyond that possibility. They also informed him that the Gen Z protesters were opposed to keeping Parliament in place.

     The deadlock finally broke: Parliament would be dissolved, and the country would move on to an entirely new course.

     On the evening of September 12, Paudel appointed Karki prime minister of the interim government in front of the burnt presidential palace, stating that the appointment was being made “…on the basis of the Prime Minister’s recommendation and consent…”

     UML leader Pradeep Gyawali told Kantipur that during the discussion with Oli at Chanwan, there had been an agreement that the House would not be dissolved after Karki’s appointment as prime minister, but that the President and Army Chief failed to uphold that agreement.

     “The way an open call was made for a prime minister — as if recruiting someone — and the way that was done inside Army Headquarters raised questions about the purity and integrity of that institution,” he said. “On one hand, the Army Chief took the initiative and Army Headquarters became active; on the other, the prime minister was selected through voting on an app like Discord. This was an extremely serious contradiction.”

     Gyawali’s criticism points to a broader set of questions that have been raised repeatedly over the past year about the Army’s overall role during the crisis: Did it go beyond its constitutional mandate in the name of managing the political transition? Did it assume a role that properly belonged to civilian political institutions? Some criticism has gone even further, alleging that the Army failed to protect certain state structures during the upheaval.

     The questions about the Army’s role actually began on the second day of the protest. Protests intensified across the country on September 9, there was growing anticipation that President Paudel would come forward to address the nation. Instead, at around 9 pm, Army Chief Sigdel appeared on television.

     “…A great deal of loss of life and property has already occurred during the course of the movement,” he said. “…In order to prevent further losses, we appeal for negotiations.”

     An hour after that address, the Army formally came onto the streets. Other security agencies were deployed under its command.

     By then, 51 people, including three police personnel, had already been killed. Much of the state had been left exposed: the Parliament building, Singha Durbar, the Supreme Court, the President’s Office at Sheetal Niwas, party offices and the homes of political leaders had been burned, along with dozens of private and commercial establishments in Kathmandu.

      At around 3:15 pm, Balendra Shah, the then Kathmandu mayor, posted on Facebook, urging protesters to “be prepared to negotiate with the Army Chief.” His post swiftly brought the Army into the political process.

     Around the same time, then-chief secretary Ek Narayan Aryal, Army Chief Sigdel, home secretary Gokarna Mani Duwadi, Nepal Police chief Chandrakuber Khapung, Armed Police Force chief Raju Aryal and National Investigation Department chief Hutaraj Thapa flew by Army helicopter from Baluwatar to Jangi Adda.

     From there, Jangi Adda became the country’s administrative nerve centre. Aryal, who has since retired, said he led Zoom meetings from Army Headquarters with the civil service apparatus across the country, arranged physical security for critical government facilities, and worked to keep supply chains essential to the daily lives of ordinary people functioning.

     On September 10, talks with various Gen Z groups began at Jangi Adda, with the Army Chief himself present.

     Retired Major General Purna Silwal, who had been invited to participate in the talks, recalled arriving at the Tribhuvan Army Officers Club and seeing Durga Prasai, the controversial former Maoist and UML activist turned pro-monarchy campaigner, seated with around seven other Gen Z representatives.

     “After I entered, Chief Sab [Sigdel] said, ‘You all talk among yourselves for a while,’ and stepped outside,” Silwal told Kantipur in an interview. “There were other Gen Z groups outside as well. Om Prakash Aryal was with those groups.”

     “Chief Sab said ‘We should not prolong this any further. I want the name of the prime minister by tomorrow,’” Silwal recalled.

     Sudan Gurung, representing the Gen Z groups, then said, “We cannot gather the Gen Z people by tomorrow. We will select [someone] through Discord,” and left.

     The Gen Z groups were divided over who should lead the government. Army personnel eventually had to make an announcement outside Jangi Adda, asking representatives of the various groups to come forward with their names and phone numbers.

     “Those of you who are leaders, tell us who you are and how many of you there are. Please contact us tomorrow morning with the name and phone number of your group,” an Army representative announced over a loudspeaker outside Jangi Adda on the evening of September 10. “Write down the name of each group leader and give it to us.”

     But the name of Sushila Karki had already been put forward.

     Om Prakash Aryal, who later became home minister in the interim government led by Karki, told Kantipur that he had proposed her name as prime minister at Jangi Adda that very morning. He said he had gone there after being invited by some Gen Z groups to participate in the talks.

     “I proposed her name because I felt that, in that situation, she was the person who could provide the country with the necessary guardianship,” he said. “There was a broader agreement among the Gen Z groups at that point, but they later formalised it by voting on Discord.”

     Aryal said that on the afternoon of September 9, he and Karki, accompanied by some associates, had visited protesters injured the previous day who were receiving treatment at Civil Hospital in Min Bhawan. They then went to a house in Mid-Baneshwar. It was around that time, at Aryal’s suggestion, that Karki spoke to the Army Chief by phone.

     The conversation, Aryal said, was about how to deal with the destruction unfolding across the country, not about Karki becoming prime minister. The call took place before Oli resigned.

     Silwal also confirmed that Karki had met the Army Chief at Jangi Adda, accompanied by her husband, Durga Subedi.

     “The Army was facilitating the process,” Silwal said.

     Yet the process failed to move swiftly because President Paudel was still trying to persuade Gurung, Aryal, Karki and others to accept the agreement he had reached with Oli to keep the House intact.

     He failed.

     At one point, an angry Gurung accused President Paudel of working in the interests of the Nepali Congress. He warned that if Karki was not appointed prime minister immediately, they would come and surround the President’s Office. A video that became public around that time captures Gurung saying that he was in communication with the Army Chief and that, if a decision was not made accordingly, he was prepared to “take the bullet” but would not back down.

     Gurung’s reference to his communication with the Army Chief was revealing. By then, the Army’s role had extended well beyond managing security and protecting state institutions; it had become part of the political negotiations over who would lead the country.

     The Army, however, maintains that even before the question of its deployment — and its role as a facilitator — arose, the scale of what was coming had been badly underestimated.

     On September 7, on the eve of the protests, the Central Security Committee met at the Home Ministry but made no decision on a security strategy for the following day. The prevailing assessment was that the demonstration, called against the social-media ban, would be small and peaceful — around 8,000 people, according to the estimate presented to the Kathmandu District Security Committee.

     “We all failed at intelligence, including the Nepal Army. On both days — September 8 and 9. No one had information that something like this would happen,” a senior military officer told Kantipur on condition of anonymity.

     The Army Chief, however, later told the Karki Commission (the Gauri Bahadur Karki-led panel formed to investigate the state crackdown and violence during the Gen Z protests) that the National Investigation Department and other security agencies had warned that the movement could become widespread. What began as a peaceful demonstration at Maitighar on September 8 turned violent after protesters broke through a police barricade near the Everest Hotel and moved towards Parliament. At 12:30 pm, Kathmandu’s chief district officer imposed a curfew.

     Normally, curfew orders are issued in advance so that protesters already inside the curfew area have an opportunity to leave, while those outside the area cannot enter.

     Immediately after issuing the curfew order, the District Security Committee, under the leadership of the Chief District Officer, decided to request assistance from the Army.

     Lieutenant Colonel Ganesh Khadka, commander of the Narsingh Dal Battalion at Singha Durbar and himself a member of the District Security Committee, deployed troops under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Santosh Dhungel. The troops left the battalion at Singha Durbar at 12:45 pm but did not enter the compound of the Parliament building in Baneshwar until 2:50 pm.

     In other words, the force deployed to enforce the curfew took two hours to travel less than two kilometres. By then, approximately an hour earlier, a protester had already been killed by police gunfire in New Baneshwar.

     The Army’s delay raised considerable questions.

     Lieutenant Colonels Khadka and Dhungel, the commander of the military team deployed for additional security at the Parliament building, both said the delay had been caused by obstruction from protesters.

     In his response to the Karki Commission, Khadka said: “The movement of the force was difficult because prior notice of the curfew had not reached [the protesters], and most routes towards Baneshwar had been blocked by demonstrators.”

     UML’s Gyawali, however, does not agree with the Army’s explanation.

     “The Army was mobilised after the curfew was imposed. It does not appear that the duties required under the curfew order were carried out by the Army,” he told Kantipur

     “Their argument is that they could not reach Baneshwar because vehicles were stopped at [nearby] Thapagaun. How can anyone be convinced by the argument that even when the Army itself wanted to, it could not reach its destination? Either you have to say: ‘Our state has failed; we are in the condition of Haiti or Sudan.’ If that is the conclusion, then I can agree. Therefore, it appears that the Army failed somewhere.”

     But that raises another question: what had the elected government been doing as the crisis unfolded?

     The decisions made by Cabinet at its 6 pm meeting on September 8 reveal how lightly the government regarded the events of that day. The Cabinet made no decision concerning scores of dead or injured protesters. It did not address the movement in any way.

     Instead, it decided to promote two technical under-secretaries of the Ministry of Agriculture, Gangadatta Acharya and Rajendra Kumar Malla, to joint-secretary and grant them voluntary retirement.

     It also decided to transfer Police Additional Inspector General Dan Bahadur Karki (now Inspector General of Nepal Police) from the Human Resources Development Department at Police Headquarters to the Kathmandu Valley Police Office in Ranipokhari.

     Dan Bahadur Karki had been assigned there under a verbal order. He received the formal transfer letter only on September 13, after the new government had been formed.

     After the Cabinet meeting, the then government spokesperson Prithvi Subba Gurung said that relief would be provided to the families of those killed, arrangements would be made for the treatment of the injured, a judicial committee would be formed to investigate matters including the search for anarchic groups that had infiltrated the movement, and immediate steps would be taken to restore social-media services.

     However, an examination of the decisions of that day’s Cabinet meeting shows that none of these matters was actually decided upon.

     What the Cabinet decided that day becomes even more revealing when compared with its decisions following the incident six months earlier, on March 28, 2025. During a pro-monarchy demonstration in Kathmandu’s Tinkune area, police had also used excessive force. Two people were killed—one by a police bullet and the other after protesters set fire to a house.

     The Cabinet that met afterwards strongly condemned the demonstration. At the same time, however, it paid tribute to those who had died, wished the injured a speedy recovery, assigned the Ministry of Health responsibility for their free treatment, and instructed the Home Ministry to “investigate the facts and take action against those responsible.”

     The government had at least performed those formalities for people killed in a movement that it itself characterised as violent. Yet six months later, on the evening when 21 young people were killed by police bullets, it neither remembered the dead nor the injured, nor ordered any investigation.

     No questions were raised about the excessive use of force by police during the pro-monarchy demonstration of March. According to some, it was precisely that impunity that opened the way for the level of force used on September 8.

     “The police were emboldened from March 28 (pro-monarchy protest) onwards. At the Central Security Committee meeting on March 27, the Home Minister had apparently said, ‘Use the power you have. From the very beginning, use force against these reactionary, regressive, anti-system forces,’” a senior military officer said.

     “He [then home minister Lekhak] apparently said the same thing on the night of September 7: ‘Do what you did on March 28. No one has the freedom to become anarchic.’ That led to September 8.”

     At around 8 pm on September 8, a meeting of the National Security Council was held at Baluwatar. But that meeting too did not make any concrete decision about the extraordinary circumstances prevailing at the time.

     Under the Constitution, the National Security Council exists specifically for the purpose of recommending to the Council of Ministers that the Army be mobilised. The constitutional provision is that the President declares Army mobilisation on the basis of a Cabinet decision following a recommendation from the National Security Council.

     The Council meeting that evening did decide to “mobilise all security agencies effectively and in a coordinated manner.” However, although the decision referred to “all security agencies,” that did not necessarily mean the Army was being mobilised, because the procedures prescribed by the Constitution had not been completed.

     Army Chief Sigdel told the Karki Commission that the Nepal Army is not an institution that automatically comes out onto the streets.

     However, Sigdel said that by the time the National Security Council met on the evening of September 8, Home Minister Lekhak had already resigned, the restriction on social media had been lifted, and the expectation was that the protesters’ demands would be addressed. “Because the possibility of what might happen the following day was not anticipated, there was neither a decision nor a discussion regarding Army mobilisation,” he said.

     Oli told the Karki Commission that the government had no intention of mobilising the Army, and that the Army’s advice had also been in line with that position. Therefore, no decision to mobilise it was made.

     UML leader Gyawali, however, says that when reviewing the situation one year later, he thinks “perhaps it would have been better if the Security Council had recommended Army mobilisation.”

     “But the Army cannot make this argument,” he said. “Because the prime minister was clearly in favour of bringing the situation under control by imposing a curfew. The Army should have been mobilised under the curfew, but that was not effectively done.”

     “If the argument is that mobilisation was impossible without a recommendation from the Council, then after 10 pm on September 9, on whose recommendation and by whose decision was the Army mobilised?” he questioned.

     The National Human Rights Commission also raised a question similar to the one posed by Gyawali. When the Commission summoned the Army Chief to give a statement, he did not appear. Instead, he sent a letter presenting his position.

     The Commission, however, pointed out the apparent contradiction.

     “It was stated that the Army could not be mobilised because the government had made no decision throughout the day on September 8 and 9, but it appears that the Army was mobilised from 10 pm on the 9th. As it appears that the Army was mobilised without a government decision, there was no consistency in the Army’s position,” the Commission wrote in its report. “It further stated that the Army had already been stationed at Singha Durbar and the President’s residence for the purpose of protecting those buildings, yet it appeared that it had not even made a basic effort to protect them.

     At 10 pm on September 8, Oli again held discussions at Baluwatar with the heads of the security agencies, the Chief Secretary, Home Secretary and other officials.

     The discussion continued until past midnight — 1 am. But rather than developing a concrete strategy for September 9, Oli spent a considerable amount of time giving the security chiefs a lengthy explanation of how the merger of Sikkim with India had taken place.

     According to then-chief secretary Ek Narayan Aryal’s testimony to the Karki Commission, the heads of the security agencies gave oral presentations during the meeting.

     Aryal stated: “At that meeting, no concrete intelligence information was presented indicating that there would be widespread violence, arson or large-scale vandalism through social-media platforms such as Discord and Reddit.”

     According to Sigdel’s testimony to the Karki Commission, on the morning of September 9, Oli asked him for his advice there as well.

     Sigdel told the Commission that he suggested two options: “Resignation [by the prime minister] would be appropriate to prevent further loss of human life, or, if constitutionally recommended, the Nepal Army was fully prepared to control the situation.”

     But the conversation was not as cordial as Sigdel formally described it to the Commission.

     According to a Baluwatar source, Oli was not happy with the Army Chief’s suggestion that he “provide a way out.”

     “You don’t fulfil your defined responsibilities, and then you come to me talking about a way out? Are you going to preach politics to me?” Oli snapped.

     Directing his response to the Army Chief, Oli added: “I am not sitting here to occupy this chair. I am here to meet the nation’s challenges. You should fulfil those challenges too.”

     Army sources said the relationship between Oli and Sigdel had ceased to be cordial some time before that meeting. They said whenever Sigdel told Oli that he was receiving information about the situation beginning to deteriorate, the latter refused to take it seriously.

     After one meeting with Oli, Sigdel returned to Army Headquarters and, while speaking with senior officers, recounted an incident in which he said: “the prime minister had been ‘looking down on’ him.”

     According to a senior military officer, following the Tinkune incident of March 28, 2025, the Army Chief himself had repeatedly warned Oli that “there is anger among the people, and it could erupt further.”

     At a meeting attended by other security chiefs as well, Oli said: “He is a soldier. He has no contact with the people. So his assessment is of its own kind. We, on the other hand, are politicians.”

     Oli continued: “We are representatives of the people. Sitting here, I know what is happening in every household in all 77 districts. I am that updated. According to the information I have received, the people are happy with this government. The dissatisfaction with us may be from one or two people, or from reactionary forces.”

     On the night of September 8, a meeting was held at Army Headquarters, with officials from other security agencies also present, to discuss how to deal with the security challenges expected the following day.

       According to a brigadier general, those present included Major General Anup Jung Thapa, head of the Army’s Directorate of Military Operations; Brigadier General Manoj Thapa of the same directorate; Nepal Police and Armed Police Force AIGs Siddhi Bikram Shah and Narayan Dutta Paudel, respectively — Paudel is now the inspector general of the Armed Police Force — and Tekendra Karki, additional chief research director of the National Investigation Department, who is now its chief research director.

     Kathmandu Chief District Officer Chhabilal Rijal had also been invited, but he did not attend.

     Three curfew orders were issued in different parts of Kathmandu on September 8. The final order was to remain in effect from midnight until 5 am. At the Army Headquarters meeting, the security officials agreed that the District Security Committee should be advised to continue the curfew from 5 am on September 9.

     However, a curfew order effective from 5 am was not issued. Chief District Officer Rijal issued it only at 8:30 am.

     “Curfew can be effectively enforced only when the streets are empty. Once protesters have already taken to the streets, enforcing a curfew reaches a situation where troops may have to fire,” said Silwal. “Therefore, failing to continue the previous day’s curfew into the next day [September 9] was a serious error.”

     After that, everything happened: arson, vandalism, looting, beatings and attacks.

     Chief District Officer Rijal — the official who had issued the curfew order — himself felt unsafe even inside the Home Ministry at Singha Durbar. Before 2 pm, he went to the Army’s Narsingh Dal Battalion.

     By then, news had reached Baluwatar that protesters had attacked the Deuba couple at their residence in Budhanilkantha. Protesters had also already entered the Baluwatar compound through its eastern gate.

     Oli’s resignation came at around 2:30 pm. A military officer carried Oli’s resignation letter from Baluwatar to Sheetal Niwas.

     In a conversation with Kantipur, then-Chief Secretary Ek Narayan Aryal said that “if the prime minister’s resignation had come earlier, the arson, vandalism and physical damage might have been reduced.”

     According to then-Secretary of the President’s Office Dipak Kafle’s testimony to the Karki Commission, the resignation letter was received at 2:45 p.m. and was accepted just five minutes later. Another 25 minutes later, President Paudel himself had to be moved from Sheetal Niwas to Bhairavnath Battalion.

    According to Assistant Brigadier General Manoj Baidwar, the security commander at the President’s Office, they had already received information around 11 a.m. that protesters were gathering in different places. At 12:30 p.m., President Paudel discussed the matter with all his advisers, including Baidwar.

     At 2 pm, the President again asked him for an update on the situation. Baidwar told him that Sheetal Niwas remained secure and that preparations had been made to move the President to an alternative location if the situation reached a critical stage. Once protesters began entering Sheetal Niwas, the Army moved Paudel to Bhairavnath Battalion at around 3:15 pm.

     At 3:20 pm, protesters entered Sheetal Niwas by climbing over the low walls on either side of the main gate.

     A small unit of nine Nepal Police personnel was stationed inside Sheetal Niwas. The Armed Police Force was not deployed in the inner compound. There were 224 Nepal Army personnel deployed there.

     Because residential and commercial buildings surrounded the area, there was a risk of serious loss of human life, said Baidwar, adding that for that reason, the security forces did not use gunfire, warning shots or tear gas.

     However, another senior Army officer acknowledged Army’s weaknesses in its security strategy for the building housing the residence and office of the President. “Sheetal Niwas could have been protected. It could have been protected without killing people,” he said.

     He argued that attempts had been made to protect the Supreme Court and Parliament building, but they were unsuccessful. “The Supreme Court was not under Army security, and the Parliament building was the same, but we made a very strong effort for Singha Durbar,” he said. “We had given orders not to allow human casualties. Remember what it was like at that time — the number of protesters kept increasing. They would beat their chests and come forward saying, ‘Shoot me!’ What were we supposed to do?”

     The Army deployed at the prime minister’s official residence in Baluwatar received information at around 2 pm that protesters were approaching the residence. By 2:30 pm, Nepal Police and Armed Police Force personnel deployed around the outer perimeter of the prime minister’s residence had been unable to withstand the crowd and withdrew. Only after that did Oli resign.

     According to Lieutenant Colonel Diwakar Khadka, the security commander at the prime minister’s residence in Baluwatar, the Army evacuated Oli by helicopter to the Chanwan barracks at 2:55 pm.

     When this is compared with the time President Paudel accepted Oli’s resignation, the Army had flown him out of Baluwatar to Chanwan within 5 minutes.

     The Army, however, has constantly pointed to the constitutional limits on its mobilisation. Multiple Army field commanders say the instruction from above was to “exercise restraint and prevent human casualties.”

        Similarly, regarding criticism that the Army failed to protect buildings such as Singha Durbar, Sheetal Niwas and the Supreme Court, Sigdel told the Commission: “I gave priority to human safety over the protection of physical structures.”

     The soldiers deployed in the field also say they received the same instructions.

     “Our first concern was precisely that people should not die,” a soldier who was deployed on the streets at the time said.

     Critics give an exactly opposite response.

     UML’s Gyawali says: “Nobody has said that the Army should have used indiscriminate force. The Army’s symbolic presence alone is sufficient to control disorder.” He believes that had the Army been mobilised immediately after the prime minister’s resignation, rather than at 10 pm on September 9, the destruction might not have been so catastrophic.

     “That is why I believe that somewhere along the line, the Army failed,” he said.

     Asked why the Army might have failed, he said, “I don’t have the answer to that question right now. I also don’t want to connect it to too many conspiracy theories.”

     Another Army officer responded to the criticism in somewhat stronger terms.

     “They seem to think that the Army did not save their government,” he said. “The Army’s job is not to save any government. That is the responsibility of Parliament and the people. The Army’s job is to protect the sovereignty of the country according to the Constitution.”

     From the time the Army came out onto the streets on the night of September 9, rumours swirled that it was taking over. The following day, Army Headquarters called in the defense attachés of various embassies and briefed them about the developing situation.

     Army Chief Sigdel explained the intention behind his televised address the previous night. He said that the Army had been trying to manage the situation but did not want to become involved in politics.

     “There were widespread rumours and suspicions that the Army was trying to stage a coup,” a source at Army Headquarters said. “We explained to them that, because the country’s politics had suddenly changed, we were only trying to manage the situation until a civilian government could be formed.”

     On the unrelenting criticism the Army has faced ever since last year’s Gen Z protests, a senior military officer put it this way, citing General Sigdel: “The Chief told a few senior officers, including me: ‘If the government did the right thing on September 8 [by opening fire on protesters], then we did the wrong thing on September 9 [by not opening fire to protect structures]. But if what happened on September 8 was wrong, then we took the right step on September 9.”

     The marathon meetings of September 11–12 finally led to the appointment of Sushila Karki, paving the way for the political power that had shifted from Singha Durbar to Jangi Adda to return to Singha Durbar. Even now, a year later, many of the questions surrounding that transition remain unanswered.”

       Want does it mean?

      As written by Aaditya Karna in The Kathmandu Post, in an article entitled Ideology is not dead in Nepal. It only changed its address: For fifteen years, Nepal’s political class taught us to distrust every grand vision. Now, we’re paying the price for the vacuum; “There is a strange kind of failure that happens not because a thing has been proven wrong, but because those who claimed to represent it never quite lived up to it. A doctrine does not need to be refuted to become useless in the eyes of the people; it only needs to be betrayed often enough, and for long enough, by those who invoked it. This is roughly what has happened to ideology in Nepal over the last decade and a half.

     Every major party that emerged from the 1990 movement, the People’s War and the republican transition of 2006, carried a label. Some called themselves communists of one shade or another, some socialists, some democrats of a liberal bent. But in government, in opposition and in the long, undignified business of forming and breaking coalitions, the labels stopped meaning anything. A party of the left governed much like a party of the right. Corruption was ubiquitous, regardless of ideological boundaries. So was opportunism, and the habit of switching alliances overnight for the sake of a ministry. People who watched this for years drew the only reasonable conclusion available to them: ideology, in Nepal at least, was a costume rather than a conviction.

     It was exhaustion, more than any coherent alternative vision, that gave rise to the appeal of centrism and of parties that claimed to stand above ideology altogether, offering competence and newness instead of doctrine. Their rise was evidence that the existing ideological actors had discredited themselves so thoroughly that even the absence of ideology began to look like a virtue.

     But this is where the argument usually offered—that ideology is finished—misses something important. Ideology was never only the property of parties or of the slogans they shout during elections. It is, more fundamentally, something a nation carries, often independent of whichever party happens to be governing at a given moment.

     Consider Europe. Regardless whether a Christian democrat or a social democrat holds office in Germany or in the Nordic countries, the underlying architecture does not change dramatically: a market economy paired with a substantial welfare state, a broadly shared commitment to public health care, public education, and a redistributive tax system. Governments in these countries compete over the margins, not over the foundation. That foundation is itself an ideology, sedimented so deeply into institutions and expectations that it no longer needs to be argued for every election cycle.

     Nepal is no different in principle, even if the substance is still contested. Article 4 of our constitution describes the state as a “socialism oriented, federal democratic republic”. That single phrase is a declaration that whichever party forms the government, certain ideological commitments are meant to persist—a directive, however imperfectly honoured, toward equity, toward federalism, toward republican accountability. The fact that governments have failed to live up to this framing is a separate question from whether the framing exists. It does. The ideology has not disappeared; it has migrated from the manifestos of parties into the architecture of the state itself, waiting to be either fulfilled or abandoned by whoever next takes power.

     A further dimension is easy to overlook. Politics is not something that begins when a citizen turns 18 and casts a vote. It begins at birth, and arguably before it. Where a child is born, the quality of maternal care available during pregnancy, whether the family has access to a functioning hospital or a rural outpost with no doctor, the kind of education the child will receive, the opportunities or the absence of them that will follow through adulthood, and even the dignity or indignity of how a person’s remains are handled after death—all of this is shaped by political choices. And the character of those choices, whether the state leans toward collective provision or individual responsibility, whether it privileges the market or the community, is itself an ideological question, however much we have grown tired of naming it as such.

     What has genuinely changed is the vocabulary and the terrain on which ideological argument now takes place. The classical debates—Marx against Smith, Weber against Hayek—have not vanished, but have been absorbed into something more reflexive. Social media has turned ideology into an instinct rather than a treatise. Someone criticises the excesses of capitalism on a smartphone manufactured by a multinational corporation, and within minutes a chorus arrives to point out the apparent contradiction of using the tools of the very system one criticises. Someone defends a welfare programme and is immediately sorted into a camp, labelled left or right, without much interest in the argument itself. Every opinion, however small, now gets filed instantly into a pre-existing ideological bin. In that sense, ideology has become more pervasive than ever, despite the thinning of its formal, party-based expression.

     This is precisely why the search for ideology is likely to intensify rather than fade. A government can build roads, distribute subsidies and manage the ordinary business of administration without ever explaining why it is doing so in one way and not another. But legitimacy that outlasts a single budget cycle or a single election requires more than competent delivery. People need to understand what larger project their sacrifices and their patience are in service of. A government that solves problems without offering a coherent account of the world it is trying to build will eventually be asked, and rightly so, what all of it is ultimately for.

     Nepal’s political class spent a decade and a half teaching its citizens to distrust ideology because those who claimed it did not practice it. But the vacuum that distrust created cannot remain empty indefinitely. Somewhere between the fatigue with old slogans and the hunger for meaning that no purely technocratic government can satisfy, the search for ideology will return, not as nostalgia for Marx or Hayek, but as a renewed demand that power explain itself. That demand, once it gathers force again, may prove harder to dismiss than the ideologies it succeeded.”

        One year ago today I wrote; A mass revolt and revolution by young people enraged at the state’s total blackout of all social media has toppled the government in days and seized power, the fourth victorious democracy revolution in Nepal since 1954, and though each and every time the monarchy has recaptured the state, each and every revolution has advanced the cause of democracy in sudden cataclysms of change met with glacial ossification and realignment of hierarchical power, in an inevitable movement toward liberation.

       It was my great privilege to be a witness and a fulcrum of change in the democracy revolution of 1990 which overthrew the monarchy and created the first Constitution of Nepal. As we sat in the hall of ministry we had seized, debated fine points of ideology with sly and fiery rhetoric and issued grand proclamations of social engineering few in the masses outside could read, as the famine, plagues of typhus and cholera, skirmishes between Indian refugees and Nepalese landowners and between Hindu and Buddhist mobs and militias raged unchecked in the streets, no one among us imagined the future which awaited; the persistence of bureaucracy and the caste system reinforced by feudal land ownership and social hierarchies that would six years later ignite a Maoist insurgency in a Chinese Great Game for the next ten years, ending with the restoration of monarchy and a year later with another democracy revolution in 2006 that again made things just a bit better, but not enough to make us all equals.

     And now, this.

      With the collapse of the government over the total social media blackout, everyone can talk to everyone else again, and freedom of information, of speech, and of the press, is crucial to democracy. If the Revolution of September 2025 has won nothing else, it can be celebrated as a victory.

      But can the Revolution become permanent? And what else can be changed, not merely on paper or as institutions of the state but as ideas about how to be human together which live in the hearts of the people?

      Caste, social position, the institution of arranged marriage and the equality of men and women, literacy and meaningful citizenship, deference to authority and the interdependence of theocracy and aristocratic feudalism, land reform and the function of property as enforcement of inherited privilege; all of this remains to be imagined and transformed, and none if it is unique to Nepal.

       The history of Nepal’s previous democracy revolutions in 1954,1990, and 2006 can illuminate the situation as it now stands; each has moved the nation nearer to true democracy, including the long period of Maoist insurgency which had broad social motives and goals including annihilation of the caste system as well as capitalism.

     As written by Binod Ghimire in The Kathmandu Post in 2022, in an article entitled Nepal’s democracy revolutions, and achievements and failures; “The country has witnessed three revolutions for democracy in the past seven decades. The first was in 1950 when the people revolted to end the century-long autocratic Rana regime. The long protest of the people paid off when the country ushered in democracy in 1951.

     It, however, was short-lived as King Mahendra hijacked it through a royal-military coup in 1960. He took direct control of the executive authority from the leaders who were elected for the first time by the people. It took 30 years to end the rule of the Palace until the Nepali people in 1990 launched a decisive protest to restore democracy in the country.

     The country adopted a multiparty democracy with constitutional monarchy. Freedom of speech, right to equality and other civil and political rights were enshrined in the 1990 constitution. That, however, didn’t get translated into actions, fully. The parties elected to power failed to live up to the expectations of the people. They were more focused on petty partisan interests and leaders paid little attention to people and their concerns who yearned for development and prosperity.

     Six years into democracy, the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist waged an armed struggle against the state which it said was to establish the “rule of the people.” The non-performance of the mainstream political parties fueled the Maoist movement. As the country fell into deep uncertainties, King Gyanendra, following the path of his father, usurped power in 2005. He sabotaged the democratic institutions which prompted political parties, including the Maoists, and the people from different walks of life to unite together against Gyanedra’s absolute rule.

     That movement against Gyanedra in 2006 lasted 19 days. Gyanedra finally capitulated. People’s power prevailed. Multiparty democracy was restored. The ground for turning Nepal into a federal republic was also created. The 2006 revolution also gave rise to the identity movement. The Madhes uprising in 2007, which took place on the foundation laid by the 2006 movement, prompted the country to become federal.

     The country became a republic, the Hindu kingdom turned into a secular nation and transitioned into a federal set-up abandoning the decades long centralised system of governance. It is the contribution of the 2006 revolution that the country adopted the principles of inclusion in the state machinery though much needs to be done for them to be institutionalised.

     Political analysts say the major achievement of the different revolutions is the shift in the political system.

     “There have been paradigm changes in the political system. However, it hasn’t yielded expected results,” Rajendra Maharjan, a political analyst, told the Post. “It is because the same old faces continued to be in power despite changes in the political system.”

     In his view, the same “dirty politics” that was dominant after the 1990 people’s revolution continues even to this day as the political behaviour and political culture of the parties remain the same. Democratisation of the existing parties and their leadership is a major challenge at present.

     Analysts say despite contributions of the people from different communities in democratic movements in the country, there couldn’t be economic and cultural transformations. The marginalised communities continue to suffer economically and culturally. A large number of the people from the Dalit community, for instance, still don’t possess land, say analysts.

     “Inequality is rife. Only a certain section is enjoying state benefits,” Daman Nath Dhungana, a former Speaker and a civil society member, told the Post.      “Our leaders do not have any agenda for development. Nor are they committed to addressing the concerns of the people, especially those from the marginalised communities that have suffered oppression for long.”

     Dhungana says the political transformation alone makes no sense unless every section of society feels that there is the state for the people to look after them.

     The Constitution of Nepal promulgated in 2015 envisions an inclusive state. Article 42 states that representation in the state machinery should be based on the principles of inclusion. However, other than specified in the constitution and laws, the government and parties have always been hesitant in ensuring representation of women and other communities. Neither the Cabinet nor the constitutional and ambassadorial nominations, for instance, are inclusive.

     According to experts, democracy can be strengthened only when the people are empowered.

     “However, least has been done to empower the people as the parties have been constantly bickering for power,” Meena Vaidya Malla, a former professor of political science at the Tribhuvan University, told the Post. “History has provided several opportunities for the parties to perform but they have failed miserably.”

     She says had the parties been committed to the country and the people, a lot could have been achieved after 1990 and 2006.

     Observers say even though the country has gone through different revolutions and embraced different political systems, political parties are still unclear on what kind of security policy and foreign policy the country should adopt. “This is necessary because oftentimes external politics gets intertwined with domestic policies,” said Dhungana.

      Some political experts believe there is a need for yet another revolution in the country as dissatisfaction among the people is rising.

     Maharjan says discontent is brewing in society, but how and when it will erupt is difficult to predict.

     “All the revolutions so far have been political. I believe the country is waiting for an economic or cultural revolution,” he said. “A new revolt is inevitable as only a certain section has benefitted from the changes so far.”

     Dhunanga also says a new revolution may happen but he says that is not possible in the near future. According to him, no alternative force has emerged to pose a challenge to the existing parties.

     “The existing parties aren’t changing because there is no powerful force to challenge them,” he said. “I think the country will continue to move ahead in the same fashion as it has been, at least for a while.”

      As written by Sajad Hameed and Rehan Qayoom Mir in Jacobin, in an article entitled Nepal’s Youth Rise Against a Digital Gag Order: A sudden social media blackout lit the fuse. But the youth revolt shaking Kathmandu runs far deeper, fueled by years of corruption, joblessness, and a democracy hijacked by its former revolutionaries.; “On September 4, Nepal’s government abruptly banned all major social media platforms, claiming they were spreading “anti-national disinformation.” Within hours, Kathmandu’s streets began to swell with anger. Young Nepalis took to the roads, protesting not just the blackout, but decades of broken promises from the political parties that once led the country’s revolution.

     Once hailed as liberators, today’s leaders preside over corruption, cronyism, and a republic that fails its youth.

     Police in riot gear confronted protesters almost immediately. Helmets wet from water cannons clattered to the ground as officers charged into the crowds, scattering students, gig workers, coders, and unemployed graduates. Hundreds of young protesters, their T-shirts drenched and their faces hidden by scarves, crouched behind overturned trash cans.

     For a generation that lives, organizes, and dreams online, the blackout felt like a direct attack. Instagram vanished, TikTok sputtered, X refused to load. Even messaging apps lagged. “They pulled the plug on our voices,” said twenty-one-year-old protester Aayusha, standing barefoot on the slick road as she rinsed her eyes from tear gas. “We already feel invisible. Now they want us to be silent too.”

     By September 8, Nepal’s youth-led protests had spiraled into deadly unrest. Clashes left streets littered with stones and tear gas shells as at least nineteen people were reported killed and dozens more wounded. Hospitals struggled to treat the injured while the government tightened curfews, signaling a deepening crisis.

     In the midst of it all, someone in the crowd waved a cardboard sign reading, “We were promised a future” before being swallowed in a cloud of gas. By the time dusk fell, the capital resembled a city in revolt. Makeshift barricades burned. Police vans cruised the streets blaring curfew warnings. And still, the young kept coming — a flash flood of discontent that stunned Nepal’s complacent political class.

     The Spark and the Drought

     On paper, the protests erupted over internet access. In reality, they were years in the making.

     Nepal boasts one of South Asia’s youngest populations, with over 60 percent under thirty-five. But the so-called demographic dividend has curdled into despair. The economy limps along on remittances from Gulf migrant workers, while graduate unemployment nears 26 percent and underemployment runs even deeper.

     “The only growth industry here is leaving,” said twenty-four-year-old Dipesh, who graduated in economics last year and now drives a ride-share scooter twelve hours a day. “I studied how whole economies work while applying for Canadian visas.”

     Corruption fuels the disillusionment. Nepal ranks among South Asia’s most corrupt countries, according to Transparency International. Its politics are routinely marred by procurement scandals, cash-for-citizenship rackets and entrenched nepotism.

     Government contracts often go to relatives and jobs go to party loyalists. For the youth who grew up in the shadow of Nepal’s 2006 democratic revolution, this feels like betrayal.

     “We are not apathetic,” said student Priya Gurung. “We are exhausted from watching these people switch chairs while nothing changes.”

     So when the government abruptly ordered telecom companies to block social platforms on September 4 — citing “national security threats” after rumors of planned anti-government rallies — it wasn’t just about access to Instagram or TikTok.

     The Left’s Dilemma of Becoming the Ruling Class

     To understand this revolt, one has to confront the paradox at the heart of Nepal’s politics: the same left forces that once fought to remake the country are now the establishment its youth are rebelling against.

     The Maoists who waged war in the hills promised to uproot caste hierarchies, redistribute land, and make workers and peasants central to governing. Their allies in the mainstream communist parties vowed to build a “people’s democracy” that would break Nepal free from feudalism and foreign domination. And to their credit, they did achieve historic transformations: the monarchy was abolished, Nepal became a secular federal republic, and once-excluded communities gained new constitutional rights.

     But once in power, these movements collided with the hard limits of governing a poor, aid-dependent country tethered to the Indian and Chinese economies. Millions of young Nepalis left to work in Gulf construction camps, hollowing out the labor base the Left had once claimed to represent.

     Instead of resisting these pressures, Nepal’s left parties adapted. They embraced the patronage politics they had once condemned — handing out contracts, licenses, and state jobs to maintain fragile coalitions. The state became less a tool for change and more a prize divided among factional barons.

     As one of the protesters we spoke to put it, they fought to abolish the monarchy — “and then built a new monarchy of parties.” Nepal’s current crisis stems from a republic born of revolution, now governed by former revolutionaries who speak the language of the poor while presiding over elite capture.

     This contradiction fuels the youth revolt. These aren’t liberal youth seeking Western freedoms; they are the children of a leftist dream gone sour, demanding that the republic fulfill its radical promises.

     From Revolution to Stagnation

     The Maoist insurgency (1996–2006) killed over 17,000 people and reshaped Nepal’s political landscape. After a bloody stalemate, the rebels signed a peace accord. In 2008, Nepal abolished its centuries-old monarchy and declared itself a federal democratic republic.

     In the early years following the 2008 peace accord, expectations soared. The new constitution promised federalism, secularism, and affirmative action, sparking hope among Dalits, Janajatis, Madhesis, women, and youth who had rallied to end royal rule.

     By the mid-2010s, the revolution had calcified into an oligarchy. Former Maoist commanders traded their fatigues for tailored suits, joining the mainstream parties they had once denounced. Parliamentary politics became a carousel of cynical coalitions.

     This transformation sparked disillusionment among the youth who had once rallied for change. The promises of a new republic seemed increasingly hollow as the political elite consolidated power, leaving many to question the revolution’s true legacy.

     Corruption probes are weaponized to settle factional scores and then quietly buried. Funds for rebuilding after the 2015 earthquake were looted. The COVID response descended into procurement scams.

     “Our fathers fought for a republic. We inherited only ruins,” said Bishal, a nineteen-year-old protester from Pokhara, one of Nepal’s major cities.

“They got the throne. We got the ashes.”

     “We Are Not Afraid!”

     The ban that sparked the uprising was both sudden and surreal. The September 4 order was sweeping and abrupt. Overnight, Nepal’s most popular platforms were shut down, cutting off millions from their daily routines.

     By the next morning, cafés sat eerily silent, their usual glow of phone screens gone dark. Influencers and freelancers lost their income overnight. Students could not submit university assignments.

     “It was like waking up in the 1980s,” said Anuj Shrestha, a freelance graphic designer who relies on Instagram for clients. “And the government thought we’d just shrug and go back to sleep.” Instead, word spread through VPNs and encrypted chats: gather at Ratna Park, Kathmandu, at noon. Bring masks. Bring courage.

     On September 5 and 6, protests spread well beyond the capital. Crowds gathered in Pokhara, Lalitpur, Biratnagar, Butwal, and other towns. None were led by parties or unions. Instead, they were self-organized through offline word of mouth and QR-coded flyers posted on street poles.

     Slogans fused personal anguish with political fury: “We want jobs, not jails! Stop killing our future.” Police cracked down fast. Water cannons swept the streets. Dozens were beaten with batons. More than three hundred were arrested.

     Yet the crowds only swelled, driven by a rare unity across class lines — unemployed degree-holders marched beside delivery riders and garment workers. The government tried to paint them as “digital hooligans” manipulated by “foreign interests.” But this only deepened the anger.

     Protest leaders framed the ban as the latest sign of an authoritarian drift under Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, known as “Prachanda,” and the ruling coalition, which includes the Nepali Congress and former monarchist parties. “They shut our mouths because they fear what we might say,” shouted one masked speaker through a megaphone as tear gas hissed nearby. The crowd roared back: “We are not afraid!”

     The Crackdown and the Climbdown

     Facing mounting pressure, the government backed down. On September 9, the ministry quietly announced it would “temporarily lift the social media restrictions pending further study.” When apps flickered back online that night, protesters marked with defiance posted photos of their bruises and court summons under the hashtag #NeverAgain, which trended across Nepal within hours.

     “We forced them to blink,” said Aayusha, who had spent three nights sleeping on cardboard. “But this fight isn’t over.”

     That same day, September 12, Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli resigned and former chief justice Sushila Karki was sworn in as Nepal’s first female prime minister, leading an interim government tasked with restoring order and preparing for elections in March 2026.

     Nepal’s blackout shocked many because the country had long been viewed as a democratic outlier wedged between two authoritarian giants. But the move was in line with a regional playbook. India has repeatedly shut down internet access in Kashmir, most infamously during the 2019 abrogation of Article 370. Bangladesh has similarly weaponized its Digital Security Act to jail critics and throttled social media during the 2018 student protests. Pakistan, too, has blocked platforms during anti-government marches and imposed sweeping bans amid the 2023 political unrest.

     The logic is the same: control the internet to control dissent. But Nepal’s youth revolt showed the limit of this strategy. The blackout backfired, magnifying discontent and uniting a generation across class and region.

    The Aftermath — and What Comes Next

     Since the ban’s reversal, authorities have shifted from censorship to criminalization. Protesters now face charges under Nepal’s vague cybercrime and public order laws. Dozens remain in pretrial detention.

     Yet the momentum has not ebbed. New youth-led groups have sprouted almost overnight, demanding legal protections for internet access, transparency in digital regulation, and a youth quota in civil service hiring.

     For now, the streets are quieter. But something fundamental has shifted.

     The youth have seen their own power — and seen the state blink. They are starting to imagine how that power might be used for more than just restoring internet access.

    Since September 12, candlelight vigils have flickered across Nepal, phones raised like lanterns. A cardboard sign leaned against a wall reads: “We are the children of a broken revolution.”

     Nepal’s youth grew up on promises of a new republic, only to inherit disillusionment. Facing a stagnant elite that has forgotten its radical past, they are forcing the country to remember.

     The ban is gone. The anger remains. And if Nepal’s rulers are not careful, this spark may yet light a second revolution — one born not in jungles or palaces, but in the glow of cracked phone screens raised defiantly against the dark.”

        Revolution and Counter-Revolution, tyranny and liberation struggle are counter forces of each other, whichever holds power serving as the force which creates its own resistance according to Newton’s Third Law of Motion, and comparing them can have great explanatory power.

     I envision the mission of creating civilization and humankind as a game played by figures which represent conserving and revolutionary forces, as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot may serve as paragons of their sides of the board and reflect each other as partners in the great game of reimagining humankind, a result of the early influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which I read during seventh grade, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I read the following year. Each of us, as with every author, musician, artist, scientist, or public figure, plays the Great Game on one of these dyadic teams.

     The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our systemic form, the loss of our culture and traditions.

     The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential in dynamically unstable conditions, to adapt and shape ourselves to future needs and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.

     We need both conserving and revolutionary forces to envision and enact a thing of beauty, be it a person, story, song, film, theory, or any creative artifact of authentic human imagination and experience. A beautiful political structure may be judged by the same criterion as a beautiful poem; so also with humans and the values their actions embody.

     As I wrote in my post of July 14 2025, A Legacy of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity for All Humankind: Bastille Day; When I describe and think of myself as a Jacobin in terms of political identity, I am thinking of the relationship between Marat and de Sade as negative spaces of each other in Weiss’ play, of our historical civilization as a game played between conserving and revolutionary forces which may change masks at times as codified in the trilogy of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, Kawabata Yasunari’s The Master of Go, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, and of systemic unequal power as the origin of evil and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which subverts revolutionary seizures of power as tyranny.

     I bear it in mind as a cautionary tale throughout a life lived beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and the limits of our maps of becoming human, in the unknown blank spaces marked Here Be Dragons, as I have upon occasion answered the question, Who are you?, with Napoleon’s “I am the Revolution.”

     As causal sources of global revolution against the system of aristocratic monarchy and state religion, the American and French Revolutions are a tide of democracy and universal human rights which radically reimagined human social and political relations, being, meaning, and value, and continue to propagate throughout the world. It found echoes in the Russian Revolution, and as anticolonial struggle in India, South Africa, and nearly everywhere on earth as humankind awakened from its long darkness as tyrannies of masters and slaves.

      Today its values and ideals manifest in revolutions and liberation movements throughout the world, in Hong Kong, Palestine, and Ukraine, among those places to which I have traveled in solidarity with the struggles of their peoples, those whom Franz Fanon called “The Wretched of the Earth”, and whom our Statue of Liberty proclaims the “huddled masses yearning to be free”.    

      What does Liberty mean for us today?

      Memory, history, and identity; a process of becoming human and a ground of struggle between our anchorages and our aspirations, and one in constant motion and a state of change; impermanent, ephemeral, protean, shaped by the dynamism between authenticity and falsification as we wander in a wilderness of mirrors, lies and illusions of authority which seek to capture, distort, and subjugate us, to enslave us and steal our souls.

     This is the primary revolution of all humankind; the struggle to create ourselves as autonomous beings, free of authorized identities and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, against the forces of dehumanization and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, divisions of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and the inequalities and injustices of state terror, repression of dissent, institutional violence, force, and control.

     To become ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight, of which other forms of revolutionary struggle are echoes and reflections, and they are united in the struggle for ownership and control of our identity as aspects of a common emergence of humankind.

     To refuse to submit is the primary human act which confers freedom, for who cannot be controlled is free. In this moment of Resistance to authority and tyranny we become Unconquered, each of us Living Autonomous Zones and agents of Chaos, Liberty, and the reimagination and transformation of humankind.

     Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just Authority.

     Let us throw open the gates of our prisons, and be free.

     As Guillermo del Toro teaches us in Carnival Row; “Chaos is the great hope of the powerless”. Let us seize our moment and bring change to systems of oppression and unequal power.

     In this moment of decision, from the darkness of Vichy America, captured state of the Fourth Reich and the loathsome Trump regime, to the looming tide of fascist revivalism which shadows much of Europe and threatens to dismantle the Enlightenment, I say to all tyrants who meet protest not with redress of grievances but with brutal repression as a carceral state of force and control, both at home and in former colonies and emerging nations; in a free society of equals one must lead from the front of the masses as their champion, and not behind the walls of your palace as their tyrant.

    In this moment when state tyranny and terror savages us in its jaws, let us bring the Chaos. 

    Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, ou la Mort!

     As I wrote in my post of January 8 2021, Anatomy of a Failure: Trumps January Coup; One of the comments was brilliantly satirical; ”Be kind. Who hasn’t helped instigate a fascist insurrection and then regretted it the next day.”

      Actually, I once did exactly that; we seized Nepal’s Congress in a revolution against the monarchy, and while we issued proclamations and debated the nuances and praxis of theory and ideology, a scene very much like the situation faced by the victorious Arab forces after the capture of Damascus in the great film Lawrence of Arabia, the Gurkha regiment, which I had relied on as my principal allies, declared the Himalayas Gorkhaland and invaded Bhutan, where my monastic order the Kagyu Buddhists are based, having been an active political force as were the Buddhists during the Vietnam War or the Liberation Theology Catholic orders in Latin America, and then the military simultaneously declared war on India and China. Things became more confused from there.

    The purge of the Bhutanese ethnic minority from Nepal is one lasting effect; they were driven into Bhutan which did not recognize them and tortured many in concentration camps, and those who escaped to America are now under threat of being sent back to Bhutan by Trump and his white supremacist terror force ICE.

     Seizures of power are sacred acts of Chaos and Transformation, and as such are inherently beyond control. When there are multiple conflicted interests and powers involved, opening the door to change means riding the whirlwind, abandoning control and welcoming the unknown.

     Chaos is a natural limit of power, and of the use of social force and control; another such limiting factor being that force and control become meaningless when met with disobedience.

     Compulsion by force and violence also sacrifices legitimacy on the part of its perpetrator and the loyalty of those it seeks to subjugate. This is why authoritarian states couple force with control; surveillance, disinformation, and the falsification of their subjects with the lies and illusions of an alternate reality created through propaganda. The January 6 Insurrection is a splendid example of its operations, a false religion and a politics of atavistic barbarism which seized a mob of its true believers in mass hysteria at the command of a mad tyrant.

     The parallels of Trumps regime and coup attempts with Nepal are manifold; the origins of the Revolution in Nepal included ethnic Nepalese-Indian and   sectarian Hindu versus Buddhist nationalist conflicts, poverty, by which I mean the majority of people lived in the streets and scavenged garbage but for the few who survived by ruthlessness and guile in the vast criminal underworld of heroin and human trafficking, alongside aristocratic wealth and power, by which I mean that all property was ultimately owned by some two thousand members of the royal family, and a horrible famine and plagues including typhus and cholera.

     The crisis of transformation originated in natural disaster leveraged by flawed social and political decisions and historical inequalities and injustices; sixty percent of India’s rice harvest having been lost to drought and hordes of rats in a nation which has inheritable debt to the third generation and produced legions of suddenly landless farmers who crossed the border into Nepal to escape debt slavery for their families, to a feudal nation of archaic tribes with no export products beyond wool rugs and other village handcrafts and no jobs available, limited social services, and which had already deforested and burned all the firewood in the midst of a brutal winter and were cooking over dried goat dung.

     There are differences of scale; our streets are not ankle deep in blood and feces, nor littered with the dead; we have no open battle between landowners and waves of migrants, nor are we wedged between hungry empires and defended by a few thousand former British colonial soldiers whose independence from civil authority stems from their awareness of that power and hovers at becoming military rule. But the conditions are broadly similar to those which gave rise to fascism here in America.

    Here too there was poverty, plague, a kleptocracy of elites and a hegemony of power and privilege, a militarized police regime of brutal force and control, prison labor as a legal form of chattel slavery and the legacies and epigenetic harms of historical slavery, and divisions of exclusionary otherness including those of race, gender, and class created through propaganda, especially the demonization of migrants, and its expression as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

    In the figureheads of the government and the hegemonic elites which entertain us by making them dance and posture upon the public stage as the puppets of our distraction while behind the curtain they subjugate and enslave us as instruments of their power, here too we are similar; we have Trump, Giuliani, and a host of buffoons for our amusement, Nepal had a crown prince who was flamboyantly queer and a centerpiece of Kathmandu’s nightclub scene, but also a notorious heroin addict and gun nut, and who one day got hopped up and shot the rest of the royal family to avoid an arranged marriage; not a promising beginning for a reign of stability and public trust.

    And Nepal? This month it has once again overthrown monarchy in favor of democracy, for the fourth time since World War Two; I’m hoping this time it sticks.

     In this history of democracy in struggle with hierarchies of belonging and elite wealth, power, and privilege in Nepal I find analogy in Stephen Jay Gould’s evolutionary principle of punctuated equilibrium; a gradual but inevitable movement toward liberation, in fits and starts, threats and mutations, as conservative and revolutionary forces shape us over time into something better.

     When you open the door to Chaos and Transformation, be prepared to reap the whirlwind. That the forces which are our allies obey no master is the great hope of the powerless; it is also what makes them dangerous to unleash and to wield.

     Herein I wish to signpost that I bear no sentimental longings for the return either of the Hindu monarchy and the de facto theocracy of Buddhist monastic orders with which it has long been interdependent.

      As I wrote in my post of May 7 2023, The Abjection of Faith as Sadism: Case of the Dalai Lama’s Command “Suck My Tongue”; Thousands of years of history speak to us with the voice of the Dalai Lama, and what it says is; “suck my tongue.”

      I have heard the Dalai Lama speak when I was a Buddhist monk, during the revolution in Nepal when we overthrew the system of monarchy. I’m not sure what the topic was, because all I heard was this; “I am better than you, and I want to steal your power.”

      Actually, this is always the true purpose and design of those who claim to speak for the Infinite, and of any faith weaponized in service to power and authority through exploitation of trust, falsification, and the Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, and terminating in subjugation and narratives of belonging and exclusionary otherness as divisions of identitarian politics and theocratic elite hierarchies of the Elect.

     “Suck my tongue.”

      This is the sum of all wisdom which can be offered to us by such tyrants and theocracies as we go forward into the future and create new ways of being human together; authority and elite hegemonies of the elect and of wealth, power, and privilege serve themselves alone and the systems of unequal power of which they are apex predators, and all their apologetics are nothing more or less than the weaponization of faith and trust in service to power and the subjugation and falsification of those whom they seek to enslave.

     There is no meaning or value in theocratic ideologies or autocratic societies, especially those of organized religions who field armies and enforcers of virtue, beyond this, and we may say with Diderot; “Humankind will be free when the last king has been strangled by the guts of the last priest.”

     Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.

     “Suck my tongue”; possibly this shocks only Westerners who embraced  Buddhism as so many have in reaction to the vile history of imperialism, patriarchy, racism, and wars of religion of traditional European Christianity, in the naïve hope that beliefs outside its boundaries may reify humanistic values and offer real change even when they reinforce rather than challenge systems of patriarchal authority and theocratic dominion.

     Traditional authoritarianism mixes poorly with Western permissiveness. Here I speak of the precise and unique ferocity of Orientalism, so well articulated as colonial apologetics by Edward Said, of which the Western embrace of exotic cultures including religions during periods of civilizational fracture, disruption, and collapse from its internal contradictions such as those of the 1960s is a form, embedded in the history of the counterculture and its aberrant New Age faiths both empowering as liberation struggle and dangerous as colonialist assimilation of alien cultures and submission to authority.

     Something like this wave of disgust at the nihilistic moral vacuity and dehumanizing arrogance of power as sexual terror now ripples through the global Buddhist community exactly as it has the Catholic Church and the Shia dominion of Iran, whose democracy movements are in part driven by revulsion at the selling of temporary marriages which finances the theocratic regime. The Dalai Lama, the Pope, and the Ayatollah are different not in kind but merely by degree from other apex predators of unequal power as tyrannies of the Elect, figures of vast systems of harm and dehumanization and organizations of subjugation and imperial dominion as weaponized faith.

     There is always someone in a gold robe who has tricked others into doing the hard and dirty work for him and his chosen co-conspirators. In the case of the Dalai Lama as the exiled ruler of Tibet and the leader of a faith organization authorized as national identity, we have an actual theocracy like the priest-kings of Pharaonic Egypt combined horrifically with fascist identity politics and nationalism.

     The Buddhist magazine Lions Roar once had a long article about the pervasive and endemic sexual abuse of students by Buddhist teachers and priests; it began “Of course you must accept some authority”. This is where you lose me, and why I no longer live as a monk and Dream Navigator of the Kagyu Vajrayana order, for I say you must never accept a thing as true on the basis of authority, and anyone or any system of politics or faith that demands your obedience is an enemy which must be resisted to the last, a tyrant who has no legitimacy, a deceiver who must be questioned and disbelieved, and a system of lies and stolen power from which we must awake and emerge.

      As Kazantzakus teaches us; “I believe nothing, I hope for nothing, I am free.”

       The power and impunity of religious authority is a precondition of abuse and a corruptive force.

      Treat a man as the voice of revealed truth and an intermediary and substitute for the Infinite long enough, and it will destroy both of you.

    As written in Huffpost, in an article entitled Dalai Lama Apologizes After Video Shows Him Telling Boy, ‘Suck My Tongue’; “During a February event, the Dalai Lama asked a boy to kiss him on the lips and stuck out his tongue. “And suck my tongue,” he added, prompting laughter from audience; “Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama apologized Monday after a video showing him kissing a child on the lips triggered criticism.

     A statement posted on his official website said the 87-year-old leader regretted the incident and wished to “apologize to the boy and his family, as well as his many friends across the world, for the hurt his words may have caused.”

     The incident occurred at a public gathering in February at the Tsuglakhang temple in Dharamsala, where the exiled leader lives. He was taking questions from the audience when the boy asked if he could hug him.

     The Dalai Lama invited the boy up toward the platform he was seated on. In the video, he gestured to his cheek, after which the child kissed him before giving him a hug.

     The Dalai Lama then asked the boy to kiss him on the lips and stuck out his tongue. “And suck my tongue,” the Dalai Lama can be heard saying as the boy sticks out his own tongue and leans in, prompting laughter from the audience.

     The footage triggered a backlash online with social media users condemning his behavior as inappropriate and disturbing.

     “His Holiness often teases people he meets in an innocent and playful way, even in public and before cameras,” the statement from the Dalai Lama read.”

         As written by Slavoj Zizek in Project Syndicate, in an article entitled Suck My Tongue, Crush My Balls; “The controversy surrounding a recent video of the Dalai Lama greeting a seven-year-old boy was not merely a classic case of “lost in translation.” It also speaks to the deep, ineradicable abyss that can separate cultures, and invites reflection on the confusion surrounding intentions and desires that can occur within cultures.

     In a recent viral video, the Dalai Lama can be seen asking a seven-year-old boy, at a widely attended public ceremony, to give him a hug and then, “Suck my tongue.” The immediate reaction from many in the West was to condemn the Dalai Lama for behaving inappropriately, with many speculating that he is senile, a pedophile, or both. Others, more charitably, noted that sticking out one’s tongue is a traditional practice in Tibetan culture – a sign of benevolence (demonstrating that one’s tongue is not dark, which indicates evil). Still, asking someone to suck it has no place in the tradition.

     In fact, the correct Tibetan phrase is “Che le sa,” which translates roughly to “Eat my tongue.” Grandparents often use it lovingly to tease a grandchild, as if to say: “I’ve given you everything, so the only thing left is for you to eat my tongue.” Needless to say, the meaning was lost in translation. (Although English is the Dalai Lama’s second language, he does not possess native-level mastery.)

     To be sure, the fact that something is part of a tradition does not necessarily preclude it from scrutiny or criticism. Clitoridectomy is also a part of ancient Tibetan tradition, but we certainly would not defend it today. And even sticking out one’s tongue has undergone a strange evolution in the last half-century. As Wang Lixiong and Tsering Shakya write in The Struggle for Tibet:

     “During the Cultural Revolution, if an old landowner met emancipated serfs on the road he would stand to the side, at a distance, putting a sleeve over his shoulder, bowing down and sticking out his tongue – a courtesy paid by those of lower status to their superiors – and would only dare to resume his journey after the former serfs had passed by. Now [after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms] things have changed back: the former serfs stand at the side of the road, bow and stick out their tongues, making way for their old lords. This has been a subtle process, completely voluntary, neither imposed by anyone nor explained.”

     Here, sticking out one’s tongue signals self-humiliation, not loving care. Following Deng’s “reforms,” ex-serfs understood that they were again at the bottom of the social scale. Even more interesting is the fact that the same ritual survived such tremendous social transformations.

     Returning to the Dalai Lama, it is probable – and certainly plausible – that Chinese authorities orchestrated or facilitated the wide dissemination of a clip that could besmirch the figure who most embodies Tibetan resistance to Chinese domination.

     In any case, we have all now gotten a glimpse of the Dalai Lama as our “neighbor” in the Lacanian sense of the term: an Other who cannot be reduced to someone like us, whose otherness represents an impenetrable abyss. Western observers’ highly sexualized interpretation of his antics reflects an unbridgeable gap in cultural understanding.

     But similar cases of impenetrable otherness are easy to find within Western culture. Years ago, when I read about how the Nazis tortured prisoners, I was quite traumatized to learn that they even resorted to industrial testicle-crushers to cause unbearable pain.

     Yet lo and behold, I recently came across the same product in an online advertisement:

     “Pick your poison for pleasure … STAINLESS STEEL BALL CRUSHER, STAINLESS BALL CLAMP TORTURE DEVICE, BRUTAL COCK VICE TORTURE TOY, HARDCORE STAINLESS BALL TORTURE … So if you lie in bed with your partner, melancholic and tired of life, the time is right. Your slave’s nuts are ripe for crushing! It is the moment you have been waiting for – to find the right tool to brutalize his balls!”

     Now, suppose I walked by a room where two men were enjoying this device. Hearing one of them moan and cry in pain, I would probably misread what was happening. Should I knock on the door and politely ask, at the risk of being an idiot, “Is this really consensual?” After all, if I just kept walking, I would be ignoring the possibility that it really was an act of torture.

     Or, imagine a scenario where a man is doing something similar to a woman – torturing her consensually. In this age of political correctness, many people would automatically presume coercion, or they would conclude that the woman had internalized male repression and begun to identify with the enemy.

     It is impossible to render this situation without ambiguity, uncertainty, or confusion, because there really are some men and women who genuinely enjoy some degree of torture, especially if it is enacted as if it was nonconsensual. In these sadomasochistic rituals, the act of punishment signals the presence of some underlying desire that warrants it. For example, in a culture where rape is punished by flogging, a man might ask his neighbor to flog him brutally, not as some kind of atonement, but because he harbors a deep-seated desire to rape women.

     In one sense, the passage from Nazi ball crushers to the erotic kind used in sadomasochist games can be seen as a sign of historical progress. But it runs parallel to the “progress” that leads some people to purge classic works of art of any content that might hurt or offend somebody.

     We are left with a culture in which it is okay to engage in consensual discomfort at the level of bodily pleasures, but not in the realm of words and ideas. The irony, of course, is that efforts to prohibit or suppress certain words and ideas will merely make them more attractive and powerful as secret, profane desires. The fact that some superego has enjoined them furnishes them with a pleasure – and pleasure-seekers – that they otherwise would not have had.

     Why does increasing permissiveness seem to entail increasing impotence and fragility. And why, under certain conditions, can pleasure be enjoyed only through pain? Contrary to what Freud’s critics have long claimed, psychoanalysis’s moment has only just arrived, because it is the only framework that can render visible the big inconsistent mess that we call “sexuality.”

     Yes, theocracy is vile and extravagantly evil, and must be answered with ax and torch and utterly destroyed. Systems of unequal power must find balance and a Reckoning without fear, pity, or remorse, for all Resistance is War to the Knife.

     This is due to the imposed conditions of struggle, and in Nepal monarchy and theocracy, caste and capital, are systems of oppression and legacies of history from which we must emerge.

      What matters is not authorized versions of good and evil; these serve only power.

      Liberty, equality, and who holds power matter; the balance of forces between sovereign and free individuals as Living Autonomous Zones matters, citizenship and our universal human rights matter.

      In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.

Five days, five questions: How Army Headquarters became Nepal’s political centre: The Gen Z uprising brought down the government and left Nepal in a political vacuum. Here is how the five days that followed unfolded, as Army Headquarters emerged as the centre of efforts to restore order and form a new government.

https://kathmandupost.com/national/2026/09/10/five-days-five-questions-how-army-headquarters-became-nepal-s-political-centre

Ideology is not dead in Nepal. It only changed its address: For fifteen years, Nepal’s political class taught us to distrust every grand vision. Now, we’re paying the price for the vacuum.

https://kathmandupost.com/columns/2026/09/16/ideology-is-not-dead-in-nepal-it-only-changed-its-address

         News of the 2025 Revolution

Nepal’s Youth Rise Against a Digital Gag Order

https://jacobin.com/2025/09/nepal-youth-social-media-protest?fbclid=IwY2xjawM_1MNleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFtMGFhbU1wa1ZuMWZhNUFkAR5q8mR0rJVUc6BdlR3_SAY_SrEHqW_YM1-j7jgNwVjTpMQGmt4K6hUWvnO7zQ_aem_l2okRBKYKcFV5GWH8rCgaQ

Nepal’s prime minister quits after deaths at protests sparked by social media ban – video

Deadly clashes in Nepal during protests over social media ban – video

‘This is our revolution. It’s our turn now’: Nepal’s ‘gen Z protesters’ speak out against corruption

Nepal’s democracy revolutions, and achievements and failures

https://kathmandupost.com/national/2022/02/19/nepal-s-democracy-revolutions-and-achievements-and-failures

A heroine of Nepal:

Rebel fighter, Maoist MP, rape survivor: the many lives of Devi Khadka

     For those wishing to compare the 1990 Revolution and that of September 2025, here is an excellent political study of the fall of the monarchy to democracy 35 years ago.

Spring Awakening–account of the 1990 Revolution in Nepal by Raeper

https://pahar.in/pahar/Books%20and%20Articles/Nepal/1992%20Spring%20Awakening–account%20of%20the%201990%20Revolution%20in%20Nepal%20by%20Raeper%20s.pdf

Kathmandu spring: The people’s movement of 1990, Kiyoko Ogura

Punctuated Equilibrium, Stephen Jay Gould

Marat/Sade film

Wisdom of the Big Lamaperv; “Suck My Tongue” for I am a king and you are my slave, and I speak with the voice of the Infinite

 Slavoj Zizek’s essay on the abjection of faith as sadism                    

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/dalai-lama-tongue-controversy-cultural-confusions-by-slavoj-zizek-2023-04?fbclid=IwAR2S9_33u5MjMlwfVlkMZc3BOmVIZPkGwG97J-tiNH3hdU2mwbGi_ruGK_c

                 Nepal, a reading list

Kathmandu, Thomas Bell

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23152847-kathmandu?ref=rae_0

Forget Kathmandu, Manjushree Thapa

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/987418.Forget_Kathmandu?ref=rae_16

The Nepal Nexus: An Inside Account of the Maoists, the Durbar and New Delhi,

Sudheer Sharma

The lives we have lost: Essays and opinions on Nepal, Manjushree Thapa

The Bullet and the Ballot Box: The Story of Nepal’s Maoist Revolution,

Aditya Adhikari

Blood Against the Snows : The Tragic Story of Nepal’s Royal Dynasty,

Jonathan Gregson

Goddesses of Kathmandu Valley: Grace, Rage, Knowledge,  Arun Guptohttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26408370-goddesses-of-kathmandu-valley?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Wzfy4nEAo5&rank=108