“Nepal’s Regime Change: Are Gen Z Youth Getting Played?”, My Ind Makers, October 03, 2025
“The political landscape of Nepal, long characterised by long cycles of instability and elite power struggles, recently witnessed an explosion of youth outrage that was as swift as it was consequential. In September 2025, a seemingly innocuous government ban on the social media platforms for failure to register by foreign social media behemoths became the spark that ignited the so-called “Gen Z Uprising,” forcing the resignation of the then Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli and dissolving the Parliament in a matter of days. This wasn’t just a street protest; it was a more widespread generational roar against endemic corruption, economic hopelessness, nepotism and the vulgar display of wealth by a geriatric political class that had monopolised power for decades and promoted and indulged their own “nepo-kids”.
This dramatic regime change, catalysed and coordinated by a digitally native generation on platforms like Discord and Instagram, presents a critical question: Did Nepal’s youth merely provide the revolutionary fuel, only to have the political elites seize the steering wheel once the old guard was ousted? Are the so-called Gen Z youth, the true architects of this upheaval, now at risk of being sidelined, co-opted, or worse, played by the very system they risked their lives to dismantle?
Western media’s irrational fascination with the label Gen Z protest has been remarkable in this whole saga of the protest of the Nepalese youth movement. First, the age groups involved in this Nepalese protest movement included school children in their teens to adults in their fifties, involving almost all sections of society, including students, unemployed youth, middle-aged citizens and ordinary citizens of that country. It is highly debatable whether the American sociological classification of generational cohorts is similarly applicable to Nepal as to the US. To romanticise a specific age group also reflects the true intent of the ideological backers of this protest movement, who are using lofty notions to justify the regime change agenda……”
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