Two years after the conflict ended, the country prepared for the first election to the Constituent Assembly which under the peace agreement was to draft the new Constitution. Campaigning was fierce, with sporadic residual violence from the war. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Everyone was predicting a win for the NC and UML, the two established parties at the time, but when the results came out it was a near landslide for the Maoists.
Even Pushpa Kamal Dahal could not believe it. Analysts scrambled to explain the surprise win, and the conclusion was that it was a protest vote against the NC and UML that had taken turns to rule since 1990, their constant infighting and corruption and lack of accountability to the people.&nbsp;
Even those who had suffered from Maoist violence voted for the party. Many of the votes were therefore not for the Maoists, but for peace – make them win so they do not go back to the mountains and become guerrillas.
Chairman Prachanda went on to become Prime Minister Dahal, and the first act of the Constituent Assembly was to abolish the monarchy and declare Nepal a republic.&nbsp;
That very evening in June, king Gyanendra held a chaotic Narayanhiti Palace news conference, and said “Bye bye I’m off”, and drove away in his Jaguar to Nagarjun.
Nepal was in a no war no peace situation. There was prolonged wrangling about who would be president to replace the king, and the Maoist vanguard YCL was back to its old ways of extorting businesses. In government, the Maoists developed a thin skin against criticism, and started attacking the media.
Dahal told a Maoist mass meeting in Tundikhel in September: “I have told the editor of Kantipur that if he keeps on criticising us he will have to face the consequences because the people have now made us victorious.”&nbsp;
The very next week, the YCL attacked the van carrying copies of that week’s edition of Himal Khabarpatrika that was critical of such activities and made a bonfire out of the magazines.&nbsp;
And on 28 December, the former guerrillas vandalised the offices of Himal and Nepali Times and assaulted the CEO, editor and other staff. &nbsp;
C K Lal wrote in his weekly Nepali Times column State of the State:
‘Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal lacks the moral authority to rein in groups that challenge the authority of the state. After all, he owes his political ascendancy to those who defied prevailing laws by force of arms under his direction. Welcome to the world of the post insurgency, moral-legal vacuum, where brute force is the only law.
The Maoist-led government’s inability to prevent the attack at Himal Khabarpatrika sends out a message that the media is not able to exercise their freedom. Unless the Maoists plan to go back to war, they need to understand that maintaining a peaceful society is their primary responsibility.’ &nbsp;

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Rewind

2008

After a jam packed 2006, Nepal’s nascent democracy cautiously inched forward under an interim constitution and eight parties going into government. However, there were concerns that the alliance were making no effort to listen to the needs of the Madhesi, Dalit, and indigenuos communities.&nbsp; The Madhesi were in particular incensed, because they felt that the new political system was not being fair to them.&nbsp; “Discriminated against by governments in the past, they saw that they would be denied political representation in proportion to their numbers by the interim constitution too,” wrote Kunda Dixit on the front page of issue #333.&nbsp;  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20250918120928_3e8c06c7e15fe26dbe19e4631275e32504c572d44a93e57dbc7addf8b6379de0.png" data-media-id="editor_0" data-image-id="20250918120928_3e8c06c7e15fe26dbe19e4631275e32504c572d44a93e57dbc7addf8b6379de0" data-rendition-name="original" width="1954" height="1578" loading="lazy" alt="Nepal in 2007"> </figure>  Five people had been killed in unrest in Lahan, and there had been violence and looting in Birganj, Biratnagar, and Janakpur.&nbsp; The Maoists found they could not control the genie they let out of the bottle with their ethnic-based politics. The radical Janatantrik Tarai Mukti Morcha (JTMM) had splintered from the Maoists and was demanding n independent Madhes, and there were other groups that were willing to hold talks with the alliance in Kathmandu.&nbsp; Generally, the three main Madhesi demands were a federal state, proportional representation, and re-demarcation of electoral constituencies to take into account population density in the Tarai.&nbsp; “It’s time for the parties to start looking at the tarai as more than just a vote bank, and to seriously begin to redress historical wrongs,” read the editorial in #334. Yet there was speculation that dismissed the violence, as a plot by royalists to subvert CA elections, or Maoists inciting hatred between hill annd plains and pahadis to keep themselves in power.&nbsp;  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20250918120928_67e0ae8b9267a6021fdcb91782e9dd12064a2a0de2d0812759bfb313ca8a587d.png" data-media-id="editor_1" data-image-id="20250918120928_67e0ae8b9267a6021fdcb91782e9dd12064a2a0de2d0812759bfb313ca8a587d" data-rendition-name="original" width="1130" height="1806" loading="lazy" alt="Nepal in 2007"> </figure>  Beyond the political demands, there also was a deeper feeling of alienation from the Nepali identity that was driving the protests in the plains. “Most importantly what Madhesi people need is acceptance and confidence in them as people of Nepal,” wrote a blogger in the active blog-space of the time. The protests ended in late August, with the government striking a deal with the Mashes Janadhikar Forum leader Upendra Yadav promising to change the country into a federal state with autonomy, and ensured proportional representation of Madhesis in all state organs. Talking to Plain Speaking columnist Prashant Jha, Yadav saw these terms as the “maximum achievement possible under the present situation,” a compromise so that polls could take place.&nbsp; However, Kishore Biswas, public face of the MJF in Kathmandu, saw Yadav as a traitor and his acceptance of the deal as a betrayal.&nbsp;  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20250918120928_bf8673ebaa7e1c3553e65f8fa419c7a806df9836f1d64305cd0df0b3e8f78272.png" data-media-id="editor_2" data-image-id="20250918120928_bf8673ebaa7e1c3553e65f8fa419c7a806df9836f1d64305cd0df0b3e8f78272" data-rendition-name="original" width="908" height="1122" loading="lazy" alt="Nepal in 2007"> </figure>  The week of the deal, bombs went off in Kathmandu, the first violence since the conflict ended. The attacks were claimed by an unknown group called Tarai Army. Madhesi groups, including the JTMM, denied any connection.&nbsp; In #380, Prashant Jha called 2007 The Year of the Madhes: “From the perspective of the madhes, 2007 has been transformative. Nepal is not the same country anymore. Nepal can never be described as just a country of mountains, even in a tourist brochure. Any party that ignores Madhesi sentiments cannot remain a national entity for long,”

2007

After 10 years of agonising war, and <a href="https://d1i1jdw69xsqx0.cloudfront.net/digitalhimalaya/collections/journals/nepalitimes/pdf/Nepali_Times_294.pdf">three weeks of spreading street protests</a>, by the stroke of the midnight hour on 24 April 2006, king Gyanendra finally restored Parliament. Girija Prasad Koirala was reappointed prime minister and mobile phone service was restored, FM radio stations could broadcast news again. It would take three more days for the Maoists to declare a ceasefire with a mammoth victory rally at Tundikhel. The <a href="https://d1i1jdw69xsqx0.cloudfront.net/digitalhimalaya/collections/journals/nepalitimes/pdf/Nepali_Times_295.pdf">page 1 foldout of a Nepali Times Special Edition</a> that week carried an iconic photo by Ajay Joshi of a student protester wearing a paper crown and ridiculing Gyanendra with an impersonation. Such an act would have surely meant imprisonment a day previously, but the laughing faces in the crowd were proof that the fear was gone. Gyanendra’s time was up. But politicians being politicians, the formation of the interim cabinet was delayed because of competing demands for powerful portfolios among the SPAM (Seven Party Alliance + Maoists). The following months of 2006 shows that the People’s Movement had changed the regime without changing the mindset of the leadership to show vision and action. By the end of 2006, there were ominous signs of things to come. As Nepali Times wrote in an <a href="https://d1i1jdw69xsqx0.cloudfront.net/digitalhimalaya/collections/journals/nepalitimes/pdf/Nepali_Times_328.pdf">editorial printed on 22-28 December</a>: ‘The euphoria over the ceasefire of the past nine months is now being replaced by a worrying sense of foreboding about ethnic, separatist, and religious fissures that are opening up. Part of this is caused by reaction and resentment that was welling up after the restoration of democracy. Partly it is also identity politics where the radical fringes of the Maoist and other parties have taken to extreme and militant rhetoric to leapfrog into the political arena.’ The Maoists needed to be demobilised, disarmed and reintegrated, and the United Nations was called upon to (with New Delhi’s blessing) which led to the formation of UNMIN to supervise the process. Ian Martin, who was with the OHCHR office in Kathmandu was deputed to head the team that grew to manage the mammoth task of arms management in camps for the former guerrillas across the country. This cartoon (pictured, above) about the peace process by Rabin Sayami from <a href="https://d1i1jdw69xsqx0.cloudfront.net/digitalhimalaya/collections/journals/nepalitimes/pdf/Nepali_Times_325.pdf">page 1 of the 8-14 December 2006</a> edition showed Girija Prasad Koirala scrubbing the dirt of corruption, and Prachanda washing the blood from his hands.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20250913100912_b910baf1a4595d908d98de103f27edc1d5259aa837de61ef0f95e26900201ccf.png" data-media-id="editor_4" data-image-id="20250913100912_b910baf1a4595d908d98de103f27edc1d5259aa837de61ef0f95e26900201ccf" data-rendition-name="original" width="1452" height="1046" loading="lazy" alt="2006"> </figure>  Between 2002-2006 the paper carried the syndicated comic strip, Yak Yeti Yak by Miku (pictured, below). It starred a talkative Yak and a Yeti with an existential crisis. Often absurd and sometimes deeply philosophical, the strip had a cult following of readers who chuckled briefly every Friday morning. Go to <a href="https://www.archivenepal.org/nepalitimes">Nepali Times Archives</a> to access the toons.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20250913100912_0475a2376d4c0a718920e0c59fb6aeca21be4cdd6a135c438d1198744b7d9a97.png" data-media-id="editor_6" data-image-id="20250913100912_0475a2376d4c0a718920e0c59fb6aeca21be4cdd6a135c438d1198744b7d9a97" data-rendition-name="original" width="1656" height="632" loading="lazy" alt="2006"> </figure>  2006 also saw the monumental tragedy in which the pioneers of Nepal’s internationally-acclaimed conservation movement were all killed in a helicopter crash in Ghunsa. The chopper was carrying 24 passengers, all of them perished including Chandra Gurung, Harka Gurung, Mingma Sherpa, Dawa Tsering. Yeshi Lama. The headline of issue #317 simply said in big bold letters: VOID. The editorial ‘Still Among Us’, urged the need to carry on:&nbsp; ‘In a country where there is so little to celebrate, it is a cruel blow to take away the little that stood out. The people who boarded the helicopter in Ghunsa on Saturday morning were all enormously talented, experienced, and dedicated. We owe it to them to continue their work, to innovate and prove by doing that nature conservation and economic progress can go hand in hand.' A week before the crash, the Times ran an article on how the conflict was affecting conservation. As the Maoists had stepped up their activities, forest guard posts had been abandoned, game scouts had been killed by landmines, and abduction, ambushes and extortion had forced conservationists to stop their work. Poaching had intensified. The Comprehensive Peace Accord was signed on 21 November, 2006 codifying the ceasfire, bringing an end to the decade long conflict that cost 17,000 Nepali lives. &nbsp; While it is easy to be frustrated with Nepali politics, looking back with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight leads to the realisation that progress, while slow, is taking place. Peace has reigned for the most part, and the vision of multiparty democracy and federalism has been realised even if they need some tweaks. It also warns against hastily bringing the king back, it must not be forgotten what it took to get him out in the first place.

2006

1 February, 2005. 10AM. King Gyanendra went on Nepal Television with a Royal Proclamation saying he was taking over. He criticised the political parties, condemned the Maoists, and sacked Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba. Telephone, mobile, and internet lines went dead and the airport was closed. Civil society activists, politicians and others were arrested from their homes. A State of Emergency was declared and the king took up emergency powers, declaring that he would chair a handpicked council of ministers for up to 3 years (pictured).&nbsp; The declaration included the suspension of the freedom of speech, assembly, the right to property, information and against preventive detention.&nbsp; ‘His Majesty’s Government has banned for six months any interview, article, news, notice, view or personal opinion that goes against the letter and spirit of the Royal Proclamation on 1 February 2005 and that directly or indirectly supports destruction and terrorism,’ read a notice in Gorkhapatra on 3 February. &nbsp; FM radio stations were only allowed to broadcast music, not news. So some news readers started singing the news in duets from the studio. Army censors were sent to newsrooms to vet copy. Nepali Times went to press with white holes where the soldiers had instructed us to delete paragraphs, cartoons or entire columns.&nbsp; The editorial on issue #233, 4-10 February was about trees giving oxygen -- as a metaphor for democracy and free press. Excerpt:&nbsp; ‘The sudden epidemic of tree-felling along Kathmandu’s streets is drastic, misguided and not consonant with the needs of the population...The role of trees is to introduce oxygen into the atmosphere and to ingest the carbon dioxide that human and mechanical activity spews into our enclosed airspace.&nbsp; They provide shade to the pedestrian, a demographic category which today is highly neglected by our increasingly motorised urban populace. Tree-lined boulevards and parks are the mark of any civilised society and the colour of leaves and bark have associations in the human mind with the very evolution of the species. Take away the trees from our sight and senses and our very existence suffers.’  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20250904090932_203055aef2d41d993c45627f6d6f4009f888a0a0a495e726f6efc2892577a4bd.png" data-media-id="editor_0" data-image-id="20250904090932_203055aef2d41d993c45627f6d6f4009f888a0a0a495e726f6efc2892577a4bd" data-rendition-name="original" width="1772" height="1016" loading="lazy" alt="Rewind 2005 NT"> </figure>  The Nepali Times masthead started to carry a fuel guage to indicate to readers the degree of censorship of that edition. An ‘Empty’ gauge signified that the issue was relatively free of censorship.&nbsp; The royal-military coup was not altogether a surprise, and there was some support for it because people were fed up with the shenanigans of the political parties, and the violence unleashed by the Maoists.&nbsp; Reader Ranjit Rauniyar wrote:&nbsp; ‘It is easy to decry the overthrow of an elected government and express concern about the suspension of civil liberties. I, like all Nepalis, will be watching closely to see how King Gyanendra wields the sweeping powers he has assumed.&nbsp; But I hope the rest of the world, before rushing to instant judgement, will pause to consider how far Nepal had gone down the path towards becoming a failed state, before the king resorted to such desperate measures.’&nbsp;

2005

The Maoist war was at its peak, the rebels were attacking one district headquarters after another, people were being disappeared, Nepalis were killing fellow Nepalis. <a href="https://nepalitimes.com/here-now/long-leave-the-king">King Gyanendra </a>had dismissed Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba for failing to hold elections and negotiate with the insurgents. By this point, the Maoists were also organised into the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), a centralised military force with battalion-level formations. The eastern division was led by Nanda Kishor Pun (later vice president), and the western division by Barshaman Pun (later finance minister).&nbsp; The night of terror which has since been dubbed<a href="https://archive.nepalitimes.com/article/nation/remembering-battle-of-Beni,3213"> the Battle of Beni </a>started at 10:30PM on Saturday, 20 March, and the fighting continued until 6AM the next day.&nbsp; Soldiers and police guarding the police station<a href="https://nepalitimes.com/20-years-ago-this-week/battle-of-beni"> fought until ammunition ran out</a>, the CDO building next door was reduced to rubble, and the army camp was the only government building standing, albeit barely. Thomas Bell, a Kathmandu-based correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, was one of the first foreign journalists on the scene, and had a dramatic eyewitness account in Nepali Times issue #189: ‘Lt Col Ragu Nepali’s office with its sandbagged windows is a wreck. He estimates there were at least 5,000 Maoists involved in the attack: frontline fighters, militia and porters.&nbsp; “They came in waves, like the sea, one after another, one after another,” said Lt Col Nepali, looking exhausted after two nights without sleep. “There were more women than men. And many, many child soldiers, below 14. I saw them while I was shooting back.” There were six Maoist bodies inside the army base and Nepali points them out: “They are all young children, this one is a girl.”…  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20250828100812_7f9ca76a1a5d6e9b2fbe65557636afa206d996ecd34625877e5484f08feb5be7.jpg" data-media-id="editor_3" data-image-id="20250828100812_7f9ca76a1a5d6e9b2fbe65557636afa206d996ecd34625877e5484f08feb5be7" data-rendition-name="original" width="1500" height="1000" loading="lazy" alt="Rewind 2004 NT"> </figure>  After the sun came up, they were walking here like they were coming home from a movie. Singing, joking, showing no fear.”’ Accompanying the piece was a photograph by Bell of Jamila Khatun washing blood from her shopfront in Beni while her three-year-old daughter Sajita watched. The picture would go on to become an iconic image of the war and was included in Nepali Times’ publisher Kunda Dixit’s The People’s War trilogy, a pictorial documentation of the armed conflict in Nepal. In total, 19 civilians, 17 police and 14 soldiers were killed in the Beni attack, while at least 90 Maoists were slain. There were prisoners on both sides including Matrika Yadav from the Maoists.&nbsp; The Battle of Beni was one of the biggest attacks on a district headquarters, and a turning point in the conflict. Following Beni, the Army bolstered the defence of its garrisons, and the Maoists shifted to ambushing security convoys along the highways. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan who had been to Nepal in 2001 expressed serious concern and offered to help find a solution. In our editorial that week, we said: ‘Kofi Annan has echoed the sentiments of nearly all Nepalis: that there is no military solution to the conflict.’ The United Nations went on to set up the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) in 2007 to support the peace process following the end of the war. But the body was largely criticised for overstepping its mandate, disagreements over exit strategy, and perceived bias towards the Maoists, among others.&nbsp; Maoist supremo Pushpa Kamal Dahal in a leaked 2009 video even boasted of deceiving the UNMIN about the actual number of their fighters to 35,000 when the real figure was closer to 7,000-8,000. &nbsp;

2004

The beginning of 2003 was marked by a ceasefire agreement between the government and the Maoists on 29 January. But it was short-lived and collapsed on 27 August following three rounds of failed peace talks. The country went back to violence, and journalist Gyanendra Khadka was beheaded in Sindhupalchok. Young children were used as pawns with private school shutdowns as well as kidnapping and murders. Subsequently, more and more people were fleeing for the comparative safety of Kathmandu, adding to the capital’s unsustainable urban sprawl. While the war waged in the countryside, Kathmandu was becoming unlivable in other ways. The quality of air was worsening by the day. The Supreme Court banned vehicles older than 20 years from plying, but that was not the answer. A <a href="https://archive.nepalitimes.com/news.php?id=3730">page 1 headline ‘Gasp’</a> on issue #137 drew attention to the unbreathable air. Twenty-two years later, things have changed -- but for the worse.&nbsp; We doubled down on the crisis with another spread ‘<a href="https://archive.nepalitimes.com/news.php?id=3325">Breathing is Harmful to Health</a>’ on issue #155 where environmentalist Bhushan Tuladhar looked into how the concentration of particulate matter from newly set up monitoring stations showed that people were breathing air with pollutants several times higher than the WHO standard. The main culprit: vehicular emission made worse by adulterated fuel, and soot particles from the brick kilns. That year we also exposed<a href="https://archive.nepalitimes.com/news.php?id=3403"> toxic effluent &nbsp;being discharged into the Narayani River</a> by a paper mill, threatening the ecology of Chitwan National Park downstream. The investigation showed toxicity analyses of Narayani water:&nbsp;  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20250821060832_bb08ed9c7947b7703571485f6c6667637777546bec702a12b6bb0b0e8d7e1249.png" data-media-id="editor_3" data-image-id="20250821060832_bb08ed9c7947b7703571485f6c6667637777546bec702a12b6bb0b0e8d7e1249" data-rendition-name="original" width="1596" height="828" loading="lazy" alt="Rewind 2003"> </figure>  ‘One indicator of pollution is Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), and according to Nepali law, COD content in industrial discharge cannot exceed 250 mg/l. A sample of Bhrikuti’s effluent showed a whopping 979.6 mg/l…’ Measuring the pH value of discharge is an indicator of alkaline content, and the paper mill’s effluent was 11.5 on the pH scale, whereas this value is not supposed to exceed pH 9 in industrial discharges. Since the pH scale is logarithmic, this means that the alkalinity of Bhrikuti’s effluent was almost 1,000 times more than permissible standards. The researchers also detected high concentrations of ammonium nitrate and nitrite.’ Back in 2003 we were already reporting on a ban on Nepali women going to work in the Gulf following the death by suicide of<a href="https://archive.nepalitimes.com/news.php?id=4816"> Kani Sherpa </a>who was sexually abused by her employer in Qatar. We said the restriction was a serious violation of freedom of mobility, livelihood and self-determination rights, especially as the ban was arbitrary and implemented haphazardly at Kathmandu airport. Interestingly, in issue #156, Shiva Gaule exposed<a href="https://archive.nepalitimes.com/news.php?id=3476"> Kathmandu airport for being a global centre for human trafficking</a>:&nbsp; ‘Kathmandu airport is not just where Nepalis use fake documents to get out of their country, it is also getting the reputation among the international human smuggling networks as an easy airport to transit. Our lax controls, immigration desks with inadequate counte rfeit detection equipment, rampant corruption, and a huge domestic demand for fake travel documents from Nepalis desperate to migrate for a better life make it an ideal jump-off point.’ &nbsp;

2003

On midnight 16 February 2002, on the sixth anniversary of the beginning of the insurgency, the Maoists launched the biggest attack till then against the state. Some 2,500 Maoist guerrillas stormed the town of Mangalsen in Achham in far west Nepal and went about strategically bombing government buildings and executing officials and security personnel.&nbsp; All 57 soldiers in the Mangalsen garrison, along with 77 policemen and five civilians were killed while many government buildings and Sanfebagar airport were destroyed. Up until that point, the Mangelsen raid was the single most damaging strike by the Maoists.&nbsp; Many heavy weapons were looted. Thirty-six civilian workers building an airfield were killed in Kalikot when the Army in hot pursuit mistook them for guerrillas. &nbsp; The Royal Nepal Army was now in the war, and more people were killed in the next 12 months than in the previous six years of conflict. The page 1 story Nation in Grief was by Umid Bagchand. Narendra Shrestha's photograph showed an army honour guard saluting fallen comrades at Pashupati cremation site as a grandmother looked on, capturing the sombre mood of the nation in mourning.&nbsp; The story read:&nbsp; ‘Twenty of the dead soldiers had execution-style bullet wounds in the head. Other bodies were severely charred. One injured soldier had his hand blown off when he picked up a Maoist grenade and tried to throw it back to them.&nbsp; He survived because the Maoists gave him up for dead. We were not allowed to speak to the other survivor, who was in a state of shock. In a simultaneous attack, the Maoists also destroyed the airfield at Sanfebagar 20 km to the north, killing another 27 policemen.&nbsp; With the barracks razed and nearly everyone killed, the Maoists had a run of the district headquarters. The policemen put up a brave defence, fighting almost to the last man, but they were overwhelmed by numbers and the Maoists’ better weapons.&nbsp; The attackers used automatic rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades captured during the Ghorahi raid on 23 November. The Maoists looted another 55 automatic weapons and five machine guns from the Mangalsen barracks..’  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20250814080840_654fbd570c9fcea124158cecc57af61bddfbc24bd3747be1b14592f754f86ffc.jpg" data-media-id="editor_0" data-image-id="20250814080840_654fbd570c9fcea124158cecc57af61bddfbc24bd3747be1b14592f754f86ffc" data-rendition-name="original" width="605" height="879" loading="lazy" alt="Rewind 2002"> </figure>  The country was shaken to its core by the devastating scale of the attack, but it was also a tragic tale of warnings not heeded.&nbsp; As Bagchand reported for Nepali Times the week following the attack, the Maoists had distributed pamphlets, pasted posters, organised rallies warning of an impending attack on the district headquarters, and sent threatening letters to the district administration which was passed on to Kathmandu.&nbsp; The Chief District Officer Mohan Singh Khatri, who was killed in the attack, had said at an all-party meeting a few weeks prior that Kathmandu would likely send reinforcements only for their funerals, and as it turned out, the first army helicopters from the capital landed at 10AM on 12 February, just to pick up the corpses.&nbsp; In an editorial that week titled Coming out of Slaughter, we said that this cannot continue any longer and a real solution was in non-violent struggle, democracy, and social progress. ‘We have a situation here: democracy is threatened by an ultra-violent group that does not believe in it. Their reach has widened dramatically in the past six years, and they have used brutal violence to cleverly fill the vacuum left by the state.&nbsp; And as the threat to our democracy and freedoms get more and more serious, our parliamentary parties and factions within them continue to use that threat to bring each other down. Successive rulers since 1996 have squandered the political option: the civil police couldn’t fight the war so an armed police force was set up, the laws of the land were not enough and the anti-terrorism act was needed, constitutional provisions did not suffice and so an emergency was declared and the army unleashed. And the problem is still there. If anything, it is getting bigger.’ And bigger it did get. The Maoist war had already cost 3,200 lives until then, but would go on to claim more than five times that number by the time the peace accord was signed in 2006, and the former rebels were brought to mainstream politics.&nbsp; But the absence of war didn’t mean peace, as we found out in the years since. &nbsp;

2002

As the Maoist conflict intensified, a demoralised Nepal Police fought with .303 rifles. It launched ‘Romeo’ and ‘Kilo Sierra 2’ Operations to hunt Maoists, but killed and tortured a whole lot of civilians whose families then joined the guerrillas. (‘Kilo Sierra’ seemed to be accurately named because it was all about ‘killing’.) Girija Prasad Koirala of the Nepali Congress (NC) was prime minister, trying to keep both his party and the country from splintering. The opposition UML was shutting down Kathmandu every other week, forcing people off the streets by terrorising them with arson on vehicles that defied strikes. &nbsp; Koirala himself was under pressure to resign after the CIAA implicated his party’s top figures of taking kickbacks in the lease of a Boeing 767 from Austria’s Lauda Air. He also wanted to form a separate Armed Police Force (APF) to fight the Maoists with heavier weapons.&nbsp; A worried King Birendra watched warily as feckless, corrupt politicians squabbled and the Maoist violence spread. As constitutional monarch, he was under pressure from hardliners in his family to be more decisive, and take control of the country. On the morning of Friday 1 June 2001, the Editorial in Nepali Times was titled ‘Long Live the King’. On page 14 was a translation of a piece from Naya Sadak newspaper by Kishore Nepal titled ‘A Suitable Prince’ about Crown Prince Dipendra’s marriage prospects. It read: ‘Crown Prince Dipendra turns 31 on 27 June. It is high time he got married.’  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/2025080709088_c07eea44494e476c23670b7ee74529e15fbe143fcdd0a42e430cc47a0fd2d8de.png" data-media-id="editor_0" data-image-id="2025080709088_c07eea44494e476c23670b7ee74529e15fbe143fcdd0a42e430cc47a0fd2d8de" data-rendition-name="original" width="550" height="779" loading="lazy" alt="Rewind 2001"> </figure>  Both articles turned out to be bizarrely prescient because that evening at 8:45PM Dipendra opened fire at a royal family dinner with several automatic weapons, killing his father the king, his mother the queen, his brother and sister, two aunts and an uncle before turning the gun on himself.&nbsp; The dead and wounded were rushed to the Military Hospital in Chhauni, from where Nepali Times carried an eye-witness account by the surgeon, Upendra Devkota, who tried to save their lives.&nbsp; Dipendra was in a coma for four days despite a bullet through his head. Nepal erupted in grief, shock and anger. Conspiracy theories flew faster than the truth. Nepali Times reported this like it would any crime story: speaking to eye witnesses, corroborating their testimonies, triple checking the facts.&nbsp; The 6 June issue headlined ‘The Kings Are Dead, Long Live the King’, on 15 June was a banner headline that many did not want to believe: ‘It Was Dipendra.’ (with a fullstop) and on 22 June the paper pieced together all the evidence with a 3D diagram of the scene of the massacre in Narayanhiti with the headline ‘Three Kings in Four Days’.&nbsp; By November, the Maoists pounced on the palace massacre to take the insurgency to the next level by attacking Royal Nepal Army bases and capturing heavy weapons, dragging the military into the war.&nbsp; While the war intensified in Nepal, the United States suffered the 9/11 attacks which was featured on page 1 with the headline ‘Kamikaze’.&nbsp;

2001

Nepali Times was born at the dawn of the new millennium. It started publishing online in May 2000 before the #1 print edition in the week of 19-25 July 2000. But a month before that, there was a <a href="https://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/nepalitimes/pdf/Nepali_Times_000.pdf">practice #0</a> which had a Publisher’s Note titled ‘The Freedom To Be Fair’ on page 1. Here is an excerpt:&nbsp; ‘It was a journalist who once said that journalists are people without any ideas, but with an ability to express them. These are cynical times, and it is people in media who are most cynical about the media. For too long journalists have taken objectivity as our main mantra, forgetting fairness.&nbsp; Objectivity is not having to make up your mind about anything, fairness is hearing all sides. Globally, and within countries society’s balance of justice is heavily skewed by the weight of the powerful. Objectivity perpetuates this status quo, fairness tries to set things right. We at Nepali Times and other publications of the Himalmedia group are committed to professionalism and high-quality journalism … upholding the freedom to be fair.’ These were heady times for Nepal’s mainstream press during the constitutional monarchy days. One had to use dialup through a modem and phone line to access the Internet. Nepal Telecom had just started its GSM mobile service, and we all proudly carried around Nokia 3310s with tiny LCD displays.&nbsp; It would be six years before Twitter started. YouTube was launched in 2005 after its former PayPal founders were caught up in the Asian Tsunami in Thailand, and found there was no platform for sharing videos. It would be another eight years before algorithms began pushing cat videos to users.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20250801110848_996e922379073386e7b137498f8f5b6979fe839d808669bc732d33b60827ba4e.jpg" data-media-id="editor_1" data-image-id="20250801110848_996e922379073386e7b137498f8f5b6979fe839d808669bc732d33b60827ba4e" data-rendition-name="original" width="1500" height="1000" loading="lazy" alt="Nepali Times 2000"> <figcaption>Nepali Times #1 19-25 July 2000</figcaption> </figure>  The masthead of the <a href="https://d1i1jdw69xsqx0.cloudfront.net/digitalhimalaya/collections/journals/nepalitimes/pdf/Nepali_Times_001.pdf">#1 print edition of Nepali Times of 19-25 July 2000</a> carried the ambitious ‘Nepal’s Top Newspaper’. The Editorial titled ‘A Sign of the Times’ said in part: ‘Newspapers do more than hold the mirror to society. They are the mirror. Journalism is called history in a hurry. It is also culture, sociology, anthropology, philology, and philosophy in a hurry. Nepali Times will aspire to be a true reflection of our times…’ Indian graphic designer Rustam Vania was invited to Kathmandu in April 2000 and designed a newspaper with a fresh, modern look. His rendition of the masthead and the page template has not changed in 25 years, though much has changed in Nepal, even while a lot has remained the same. Reports and op-eds about air pollution, hydropower exports, investment, political back-stabbing from two decades ago are as relevant today as they were then. Most of the protagonists are the same people, just a little greyer and chubbier. In the first of his many thoughtful columns ‘State of the State’, C K Lal lamented the cynicism in Nepali society: ‘Nepal’s nabobs of negativism hold forth in their nay-saying nooks. Cynicism is at least a reflection of exaggerated self-worth. Despair is much worse, it is a state of having lost all hope.’ Sounds familiar?  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20250731110744_c270d9b78096edfeec71984033aae895e376a347b5cd1ba77362c8a8038b9856.jpg" data-media-id="editor_3" data-image-id="20250731110744_c270d9b78096edfeec71984033aae895e376a347b5cd1ba77362c8a8038b9856" data-rendition-name="original" width="1500" height="1000" loading="lazy" alt="Rewind: 2000"> <figcaption>Nepali Times #7 30 August - 5 September 2000</figcaption> </figure>  Water resources expert Dipak Gyawali argued in a commentary that it made more sense for private power producers to build reservoir projects not for export, but to make up for the dry season power shortfall. A debate even more prescient today. Manjushree Thapa's &nbsp;Nepaliterature column profiled Nepali writers with translated excerpts. The paper serialised chapters from Desmond Doig’s book In the Kingdom of the Gods. The Backside satire column featured ‘Under My Hat’ and ‘The Ass’. Nepali Times even carried a weekly horoscope, cigarette and alcohol advertisements.&nbsp; Journalism is indeed history in a hurry. Those who do not learn from it are doomed to repeat it. Browse the past 25 years of Nepali Times through the online archive on HTML and the ePaper through<a href="https://www.archivenepal.org/nepalitimes"> Archive Nepal</a>.

2000

Nepal won the first two matches, clinching the T20 series in the UAE, making history: this is the country’s first ever win, and series win, against a Test-playing country.&nbsp; On Tuesday night, Nepal lost the last game by 10 wickets. The West Indies easily met Nepal’s 122 runs in 19.5 overs. Despite that, Nepal had beaten the two-time T20 World Champions which is currently number 6 in T20 rankings. It is important to note that the West Indies are fielding a significantly weaker and younger team than they could. Caribbean heavy hitters Nicholas Pooran, Andre Russell and Shimron Hetmyer are currently resting or playing in domestic leagues. But that does not take away from the fact that, after two narrow misses against South Africa and Bangladesh at the 2024 T20 World Cup, Nepal has now beaten a Test-Playing nation, and done so convincingly.&nbsp; Nepal won the first match of the series on 27 September by 19 runs. Batting first after winning the toss, Nepal put up 148 for 8 after losing openers Kushal Bhurtel and Aasif Sheikh early.&nbsp; Rohit Paudel’s 38 and Kushal Malla’s 30 steadied the innings, and 148 was a reasonable target to defend on the tricky Sharjah pitch. The young Windies dropped a series of catches.&nbsp;  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20251001031052_5f24273f6da2f52f6414b7ecc485938a4c726431bfa7c2ba435bded3debe9f5a.jpg" data-media-id="editor_0" data-image-id="20251001031052_5f24273f6da2f52f6414b7ecc485938a4c726431bfa7c2ba435bded3debe9f5a" data-rendition-name="original" width="1440" height="960" loading="lazy" alt="Nepal defeats West Indies NT 1"> </figure>  Nepal’s fielding, in contrast, was excellent as it held the West Indies to 129 for 8. Dipendra Singh Airee and Kushal Bhurtel both had run outs, and the team held on to tricky catches throughout.&nbsp; The last ball of the match, with it already won, saw Bhurtel catch Fabian Allen off of Airee’s bowling, throw the ball in the air before stepping outside the boundary, before jumping back in to complete the catch legally.&nbsp; Head coach Stuart Law, former Australian Cricketer, was pleased with the performance. “We deserved it, we played a really good game of cricket. I thought our fielding in the first 15-17 overs was outstanding,” he said, predicting, “the West Indies will be hurt, they’re a proud nation. They’ll come out red-hot on Monday, so we got to be better than tonight.”&nbsp; Bhurtel was ecstatic at having beaten the two-time T20 World Champions. He pointed to the team’s versatility as a big strength. “We have a lot of players who can both bat and bowl. Gulsan (Jha) and Kushal Malla did not bowl at all, and Lalit (Rajbhansi) did not bowl out all of his overs.” And the team still used seven bowlers.&nbsp; If the first match was a surprise, then the second match was a shock. Nepal put up 173 for 6, with Aasif Sheikh hitting 68 not out and Sundeep Jora 63, the two putting up a hundred run fourth wicket partnership.&nbsp; They then bowled out the West Indies for a humiliating 83, with Mohammad Aadil Alam taking 4 for 24 and Kushal Bhurtel 3 for 16.&nbsp; There was more excellence in the field, with the Nepali team taking seven catches, many of them very tricky ones right on the edge of the ropes. This second win sealed the series victory, also a first for Nepali cricket. The margin of victory and the team’s overall dominance were both very obvious.&nbsp; Nepalis in the UAE showed up at the Sharjah Stadium in full support for the Rhinos, wearing jerseys, flags, and dhaka topis, raucously cheering on the team’s performance.&nbsp;  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20251001031052_217ceb7078e9c253f8db6fec57911eb8e56822e3fc20d520d39e06f475fd6d65.jpg" data-media-id="editor_1" data-image-id="20251001031052_217ceb7078e9c253f8db6fec57911eb8e56822e3fc20d520d39e06f475fd6d65" data-rendition-name="original" width="1440" height="960" loading="lazy" alt="Nepal defeats West Indies NT 1"> </figure>  Fresh on their minds must have been recent protests back home. The Cricket Association of Nepal dedicated the series to those who lost their lives. Captain Rohit Paudel also dedicated his man of the match award from the first T20 to the 74 people killed last month in Nepal.&nbsp; “Since last one month has not been that great for us, so slowly we are getting better. It is great to give a little happiness to the people of Nepal,” said Paudel.&nbsp; Leg-spinner Sandeep Lamichhane was notably absent from both matches, having excused himself from the squad for personal reasons.&nbsp; “It is what it is,” said coach Law. “we are a very competitive team and someone has to stand up in his place.”&nbsp; The wins also open the possibilities for further series, with countries such as Bangladesh, Pakistan or Zimbabwe.&nbsp; CHASING TESTS  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20251001031048_70fed823c34d91dfefc078cb5786c2ea04ad70387fbf09424a5304b926cc3e3c.jpg" data-media-id="editor_2" data-image-id="20251001031048_70fed823c34d91dfefc078cb5786c2ea04ad70387fbf09424a5304b926cc3e3c" data-rendition-name="original" width="1600" height="995" loading="lazy" alt="Nepal defeats West Indies"> </figure>  In international cricket, a ‘Test-playing nation’ is a country that is authorised to play Test Matches by the central governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC). Test Matches are the longest format of the sport, lasting up to five days, and are the most prestigious.&nbsp; Currently, this exclusive group is made up of Australia, Bangladesh, England, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies, Zimbabwe, and Afghanistan.&nbsp; Nepal has a ways to go. To become a Test-playing nation, it must first become a full member of the ICC. To do this, they must consistently qualify for ODI and T20 world cups over eight years, and have at least two ICC-accredited venues for hosting matches — currently only the Tribhuvan University Cricket Ground qualifies.&nbsp; Nepal must also have significant youth development infrastructure, a good domestic setup, and a recognised governing body that is financially stable and not corrupt.&nbsp; With the current development of stadiums across Nepal and innovations such as the Nepal Premier League, and performances such as these, Nepal seems firmly on the way.&nbsp;

2-1 for Nepal against The Windies

Nepal is still reeling from the short but violent GenZ moment, and the reverberations are being felt around the world.&nbsp;
As news from the killings and rampage from Nepal on 8-9 September spread through the wire services and social media, in the Philippines, East Timor and even faraway Peru, banners on the streets last week referred to ‘learning lessons from Nepal’. In Ladakh last week, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/25/bloodiest-day-how-gen-z-protest-wave-hit-indias-ladakh-killing-four">protesters set fire to the ruling BJP party office</a> and four people were killed in police firing.&nbsp;
Nepal’s GenZ was praised by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/opinion/asia-protest-youth-nepal-bangladesh.html">international commentators</a> for rising up against chronic corruption and impunity, and for achieving the fastest regime change in history. But the youth were also blamed for the arson and vandalism even though the groups said they had no part in it — most &nbsp;foreign media also did not highlight enough the infiltration by radical groups.
“We were not expecting the protests to turn so violent and deadly. On the second day, things escalated so quickly it became difficult to keep track. We were rushing on the groud and making calls to confirm what was happening,” recalls Paavan Mathema of Agence France-Presse (AFP) in Nepal.
The GenZ protest this month was a lesson on the mechanics of social media. Hashtags like #youthagainstcorruption and #nepobaby from Indonesia inspired Nepal’s youth to take to the streets, but events here in turn triggered protests elsewhere. The international news agencies and mainstream global tv channels were not as important in this information cross-pollination.
The movement was organised online and spread quickly in no time, but it was disinformation and fake news that spread faster than facts. The over-simplification by international media was because it had to explain 30 years of political evolution in a country that they mostly ignored in the past, this sometimes tended to be misleading.&nbsp;
While the Oli government’s social media ban of 26 platforms starting 5 September poured oil on the fire that had already been lit by a disparate group of desperate youth, their outrage over decades of corruption and impunity was reaching a breaking point. There was extreme disenchantment with serial politicians recycling themselves in power.&nbsp;
“The ban on social media definitely triggered the protest, but we put a high priority on accuracy and speed during reporting in such times,” explains the Nepal correspondent for Associated Press (AP) news agency in Nepal Binaj Gurubacharya. “Our own safety also becomes a prime concern in times like these, but should not be at an expense of accuracy.”
CRISIS REPORTING
But headlines everywhere including in The New York Times, The Guardian and others that used wire service content initially highlighted the social media ban as the main reason for the protest. They were soon called out by protesters, while <a href="https://institute.aljazeera.net/en/ajr/article/3358" target="_blank">Al Jazeera</a> and its <a href="https://institute.aljazeera.net/en" target="_blank">Media Institute </a>were applauded for more nuanced coverage.
Another positive example of international media supplementing the stories by local journalists was <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/" target="_blank">France 24’</a>s detailed <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20250915-nepal-police-protests-violence-kathmandu" target="_blank">forensic analysis</a> of the security forces firing live ammunition at protesters at Parliament on 8 September.&nbsp;
What really went far and wide around the world were dramatic YouTube videos about the violence, and memes on social media. <a href="https://nepalitimes.com/here-now/the-accidental-journalist" target="_blank">A British tourist</a> who filmed street protests did the work of an on-the-ground journalist and got millions of views globally for some of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slq6zWu9o9w" target="_blank">his YouTube videos</a>.&nbsp;
But some of the misinformation or fake news on social media was also picked up by the mainstream press, like the <a href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/south-asia/nepal-violence-ex-pm-khanals-wife-dies-after-house-torched-president-urges-calm-dialogue/articleshow/123791004.cms">wrongly reported death of former Prime Minister Jhalanath Khanal’s wife</a> in an arson attack on their home. A video of the Finance Minister Bishnu Poudel being <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/video-nepal-finance-minister-chased-through-street-kicked-attacked-9243749">chased and beaten</a> by protesters also turned out to be someone else.&nbsp;
Some international outlets, mainly in India, also fell prey to a fake video that K P Oli had fled to Dubai. Even this newspaper’s online edition had to correct it after wrongly reporting it without verification.&nbsp;
Indian tv channels which did &nbsp;extensive coverage of events in Nepal, with many Nepalis relying on them and believing their content — especially during the protests when Nepal’s main channels went off air as they were being attacked.
All this got out of hand, and protesters in the week after the violence started ridiculing and harassing Indian tv correspondents as they tried to interview talking heads outside the charred Parliament building, or on the streets.
<a href="https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/09/09/foreign-hand-gen-z-data-addiction-5-ways-indian-media-missed-the-nepal-story">Indian media</a> were also the first to accuse US involvement in sparking a ‘colour revolution’ in Nepal. They later claimed that former Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) chief and now Energy Minister Kulman Ghising and even Kathmandu Mayor Balen Shah have been appointed interim prime minister in Nepal. These were rumours in Nepal, but were reported as news.&nbsp;
“Fact checking is crucial while covering such movements, and since we are telling an important story about Nepal to the world, double checking becomes important as it sets the international narrative,” says Mathema.
“We were constantly double checking numbers and information with concerned authorities and parties to make sure we were accurate, especially as misinformation was rampant,” she adds.
Apart from Indian media, international news agencies got reinforcements of reporters, photojournalists and editors from the region, and other foreign correspondents also flew in when Kathmandu airport was opened after 48 hours.
Adds Mathema: “Sometimes foreign reporters can give a fresh perspective or an angle which we could not see or cover. So their inputs are always helpful.”
In the aftermath of the violence, there were plenty of jokes and memes, clips of protesters dancing, in weird poses and performing martial arts, showcasing the light hearted side of the protests while also <a href="https://nepalitimes.com/here-now/nepal-s-meme-revolution">reaffirming the resilience</a> of people able to bounce back from something so traumatic.
The GenZ clean-up campaigns, neighbourhoods helping restore burnt out police stations and local people’s emotional reaction to the burnt out hulks of government buildings at the city centre also <a href="https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/people/article/3325635/nepals-gen-z-protesters-lead-clean-campaign-after-violent-clashes">made news</a>.
“After the protests, people were quick to gather and clean up public spaces and paint police stations. This is a scene which may not be so common in other countries with similar violence,” adds Gurubacharya. “So it became an important story to also tell the world.”&nbsp;
In less than two days, the world saw a dramatic toppling of a democratic government. With the interim government led by former chief justice Sushila Karki, there is much hope. She has expanded her ministerial cabinet, and the election has been announced for 5 March 2026 but between then and now, a lot remains uncertain.&nbsp;
And Nepal will continue to be watched by national and international media alike until then and after. AP’s Gurubacharya sums it up: “For now, we are taking it one day at a time.”

International spotlight on Nepal

From the echo chambers of social media to neighborhood tea shops, the hot topic two weeks after the GenZ revolt toppled Nepal’s government is whether the country should now have a directly elected prime minister. Although this has been proposed before as a way to end the instability in heads of government chosen by the biggest party or coalition in Parliament, it has found supporters and critics in the aftermath of the protests. As democratic as it sounds, a directly elected executive is not that simple.&nbsp; Nepal’s 2015 Constitution does not allow it, but for a young generation impatient for change, this demand raises critical social, political and constitutional questions. Nepal has seen a multiplicity of systems in the past 45 years: from a partyless absolute monarchy to a constitutional one, a parliamentary democracy and then a federal republic. But they have repeatedly failed to bring stability, good governance or an end to corruption in Nepal. But even though lately they have ensured civil liberties, the public was losing hope for the future, especially the young who could air and amplify their outrage on social media. Unbridled corruption and ideologically mismatched fragile coalitions acting with impunity, led many to conclude that a directly elected prime minister would ensure stability and accountability. ‘We have repeatedly trusted the same political parties, but they have repeatedly broken that trust, so it is no longer possible to trust that system anymore,’ says Miraj Dhungana, popular for the TikTok videos asking young people to go out into the streets to rally against corruption, and seen by many as the ‘original’ representative of Gen Z.&nbsp; In interviews he has stated that it has become necessary for Nepal to have a directly elected executive head through constitutional amendment. Dhungana himself did not participate in the protests after his meeting with pro-monarchist businessman Durga Prasai on 7 September sparked controversy that he as a lackey. Binod Deuba Thakuri of the Nepal Student Union who also participated in the GenZ protests thinks Nepal is institutionally not ready for directly elected prime minister: “Our democracy is not mature yet, our institutions are not strong, and we are vulnerable to social media induced populism.”&nbsp; CONSTITUTION AMENDMENT Amending the Constitution would also open a pandora’s box, with other demands, and should be left to the next legislative body, he adds. In her address to the nation on Friday, Prime Minister Sushila Karki who is a former chief justice also clarified that her interim government does not have the mandate to amend the Constitution to make way for a directly elected head of government, and it should be up to the new legislature and government after the 5 March election.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20250919130956_799b2d43dccca73b3bff96e435efc0752203117b2cb219d0073994c0e6f2ee25.jpg" data-media-id="editor_0" data-image-id="20250919130956_799b2d43dccca73b3bff96e435efc0752203117b2cb219d0073994c0e6f2ee25" data-rendition-name="original" width="4160" height="2774" loading="lazy" alt="Constitution Day NT"> <figcaption>Constitution Day address by Prime Minister Sushila Karki on 19th September earlier this month.</figcaption> </figure>  The demand for a directly elected executive head was first raised by Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal after the 2006 ceasefire. He proposed himself as Nepal’s first executive president ahead of the 2008 Constituent Assembly elections. While the UML did not strongly oppose the idea, the Nepali Congress (NC) stuck to a parliamentary framework. The 2015 Constitution ultimately clinched it for the current parliamentary system. The Constitution stipulates that the process of selecting a prime minister is based on parliamentary strength: the President appoints the leader of the party with a majority in the House of Representatives, or, in the absence of such a majority, a member who can demonstrate majority support. If these efforts fail, provisions exist for coalition or minority governments, and ultimately for the dissolution of the House and fresh elections. The Constitution currently makes no provision for a directly elected prime minister, which means that any attempt to introduce a directly elected executive would first require the careful design of a democratic mechanism to amend the Constitution and set out the procedures for such an election.&nbsp; “There is no legal legitimacy to have the directly elected executive head of the country in the March election, except if political legitimacy surpasses legality but that would mean a new constitution,” explains senior advocate Surendra Kumar Mahato. “Many other institutional arrangements like the appointment of the judiciary, the role of the president, and other check and balance mechanisms would need to be restructured.” Mahato says: “Nepal’s Constitution itself is not at fault — it is the political actors, who have failed to uphold good governance within its framework. Changing systems does not ensure better governance.”&nbsp; Changing the Constitution also needs a broad political consensus, the institutional capacity of the state must be carefully considered to ensure such a new system can function effectively in practice and not simply in theory. Empowering an executive head through direct elections should not come at the expense of accountability or parliamentary oversight, and there should be checks and balances in place. LESSONS FROM ABROAD Sri Lanka’s 2022 Agralaya was fuelled by the anger that the directly executive head turned out to be an authoritarian who backslides on democracy. Under Sri Lanka’s 1978 Constitution, the country adopted a directly elected executive presidency with sweeping powers over the cabinet, appointments, dismissal of parliament, and control over key institutions.&nbsp; Over the years, President Mahinda Rajapaksa removed term limits via the 18th Amendment in 2010, centralised appointment powers, including judges and heads of independent commissions, and used constitutional changes such as the 20th Amendment (2020) to reverse safeguards that limited presidential authority, thereby subordinating the legislature, weakening oversight, and enabling authoritarian control.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/20250914060932_a96e1046d0b148982b33f2dcbe56f349dc0c20a087e358360eb2dddcfe0b5072.jpg" data-media-id="editor_1" data-image-id="20250914060932_a96e1046d0b148982b33f2dcbe56f349dc0c20a087e358360eb2dddcfe0b5072" data-rendition-name="original" width="4640" height="2610" loading="lazy" alt="GenZ and Aragalaya"> <figcaption>Anti-government protest in Sri Lanka on 13 April 2022 in front of the Presidential Secretariat. Photo: WIKIPEDIA</figcaption> </figure>  Nepal’s multiparty framework upholds an institutional balance where both the governing party and the opposition have defined roles. This parliamentary setup prevents power from being overly concentrated in one individual and ensures accountability through parliament and competing parties. Beyond the neighbourhood, the United States has a directly elected executive system. Donald Trump exemplifies how direct electoral mandate can fracture institutional check mechanisms. He has leveraged his power to attack judges, frame political opponents, turn legal defeats into rallying points for his supporters, often using pliant media platforms to reinforce the idea that institutional checks impeded the popular will. In Nepal, there is a risk that a directly elected prime minister could bring up a populist media savvy messiah who could use public grievances to get to power and consolidate it. Social media can be mobilised and easily saturated with posts to fuel a political narrative of choice.&nbsp; In the past, former prime minister K P Oli’s ‘digital army’ has been lobbied on his behalf on social media. Even without an ‘IT sena’, it is not unusual for governments to collaborate with social media platforms as seen in the US and India.&nbsp; In Nepal, a directly elected prime minister would raise the stakes, turning the battle for votes into a battle for attention online, where a leader who wins the algorithm also wins the elections, just as Kathmandu Mayor Balen Shah demonstrated in 2022 with support from groups like MRR and RONB. The Balen Phenomenon started in social media trickled to the ballot box.&nbsp; The digital space mas ensure that it is not trendy to dislike Balen. Comments that are critical of the Kathmandu Metropolitan City’s treatment of street vendors or of the mayor himself are met with backlash from supporters. Or, if the comments did not get any likes, the algorithms filtered them out as ‘not relevant’.&nbsp; The conversation of Shah often centred on his emotive responses and sentiments, generating strong engagement online. Meanwhile, policy debates received comparatively less attention.&nbsp; “Choosing a leader directly through an election means that we are vulnerable to populism and undermining of the democratic process, accountable institutions,” says Thaukri. Political activist Pradip Gyawali admits that the GenZ revolt was an example of how social media is a powerful tool to organise and disseminate information. But there are risks posed by disinformation and fake news online.&nbsp; “More media and political literacy among the people before the election in March is crucial to control the damage social media could do to influence voter behaviour,” he says.&nbsp; Beyond social media, online news increasingly relies on sensational, click-driven headlines to attract readers in a competitive digital market. A recent survey showed that 82.6% of GenZ (16- 24) rely on Facebook for news and 51.4% on YouTube.&nbsp; Nepali people with higher education seemed to engage with news more (99.1%) than illiterate individuals at 52.1%. Byte-sized headline-only journalism is leaving readers to their own devices, and vulnerable to media infiltration by IT cells.&nbsp; With social media actively shaping the course of elections, and news consumption, debates about changing the Constitution or the system of governance yet again may not ensure the demands for corruption free governance is met. Instead, strengthening media and political literacy among voters is key to prepare for the elections in March. Ayusha Chalise is a communication and development scholar specialising in how politics is experienced in the digital space.

Nepal's democracy keeps doubting itself

The word for ‘development’ in Nepali is bikas. The world for destruction is binas. &nbsp; The two words not only rhyme, but replacing just one consonant gives it an opposite meaning. It also demonstrates how easily what we think is <a href="https://nepalitimes.com/editorial/development-destruction-yt3t1yhu">‘Development’ can be destructive</a>.&nbsp; University libraries in Nepal and around the world are stacked with hundreds of books dissecting ‘development’. They can be divided broadly into at least two types: some authors define development as a moral imperative to improve living standards of people in the underserved parts of the world, mostly in the Global South.&nbsp; Others critique development either as being an ‘industry’, or as a continuation of the western colonial project that imposes dependency and corruption, perpetuates the donor-recipient hierarchy, and ends up disempowering intended beneficiaries. Somewhere in between are books by experts who have tried to find a middle path with concepts like ‘sustainable human development’, ‘people’s participation’ or ‘public-private partnership’. But even the staunchest proponents of traditional development models will admit that all is not well, somewhere along the line we lost our way. Peter Sutoris and Uma Pradhan have dared to take the bull by the horns to find a new path to ‘reimagine’ development, and explore new templates to confront a world wracked by interconnected crises of conflict, inequality, environmental decay and climate breakdown. Their book Reimagining Development: Bold Directions Towards a Thriving World lays out a roadmap for countries like Nepal as they try to fix what went wrong. Billions of dollars were poured into Nepal’s ‘development’ over the past seven decades, but the country is littered with the carcasses of failures like the rusted abandoned tractors from the Rapti Valley Development Project 65 years ago. To be sure, there have been catalytic success stories along the way. It is not a coincidence that whatever has worked well in Nepal since 1990 has the word ‘community’ in it — things fall into place when local groups are given ownership to decide what they need, and allowed to decide what they need to do.&nbsp; Some examples in the book include <a href="https://nepalitimes.com/banner/reviving-nepals-community-forestry-success-story">Nepal’s community forestry project</a>, which Sutoris and Pradhan cite as an example of the kind of possibilities needed to reimagine development for a ‘thriving world’. Local communities were handed control to manage their natural resources, revive traditional conservation practices, and assert command over their own destiny. Nepal’s community forestry program together with the Local Self Governance Act that decentralised power to elected local bodies in the 1990s was the best example of how development can be a political act to ensure an equitable future, while conserving nature. Sutoris and Pradhan write: ‘Substantial evidence from Nepal indicates that community forestry enhances forest protection and regeneration … Village Development Committees that had adopted community forestry recorded a 77% increase in forested area, compared to a 13% increase in the villages without community forest.’&nbsp; Peter Sutoris was born in the former Czechoslovakia that saw the 1968 Prague Spring uprising and the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Uma Pradhan is from Nepal, which has witnessed successive People’s Movements in 1980, 1990, 2006 and earlier this month in 2025. &nbsp; ‘It was perhaps because of these experiences of witnessing the remaking of the world in the wake of the end of the Cold War that we come to this book with a strong belief that even the most rigid collective trajectories can and do change,’ the authors write in their introduction. Their book has three parts. The first one dissects the Development Industry and the model of perpetual ‘growth’. (Interestingly, the word ‘growth’ is used in medicine to signify malignancy.) The authors propose re-centering the stories of beneficiaries and their lived experiences which have been pushed to the margins in ‘project’ design of mainstream Development with a capital ‘D’. &nbsp; The book defines development with a lowercase ‘d’ as a more democratic bottom-up approach. Capital ‘D’ Development on the other hand involves ‘developers’ wanting to ‘develop’ societies, replicating the wasteful, unsustainable growth path of the industrialised countries. &nbsp; The book’s second section examines the tension between sweeping international concepts of development, and how it is not quite relevant to the reality of rural areas of countries like Nepal. The prevailing notion that development ‘aid’ flows mostly from cash rich countries to cash poor ones ignores the fact that it mostly takes from the poor in rich countries to give to the rich in poor countries. After all, the Global South also includes the underserved parts of the Global North.&nbsp; RETHINKING PROGRESS The Development Industry does ‘develop’ certain segments of the economy, just not so much the sections it is supposed to uplift. The <a href="https://nepalitimes.com/here-now/usnoaid">cancellation of USAID</a> this year vacated hundreds of rented offices and houses in Kathmandu, consultants and contractors became jobless, and even Nepal’s domestic airlines lost business.&nbsp; The third part of this book imagines what ‘A Thriving World’ can look like if we listened more to indigenous communities and their knowledge of the stewardship of nature, adopted best practices about inclusive and decentralised decision-making, and explores examples of ‘degrowth’ and ‘postgrowth’ to address unsustainable consumerist, extractivist economics, and the climate crisis. Sutoris and Pradhan admit that these concepts are not new. Practitioners have questioned the top-down model for decades, but their book Reimagining Development takes a fresh, non-conventional approach to bridging the best of the ‘old’ development discourse with a ‘new’ imagining that transcends entrenched positions. The authors cite Buddhist mindfulness techniques, the concept of ‘radical humility’ and the idea of deep time to zoom out for a fresh perspective on a novel development paradigm to ‘think about humanity’s position in the world’. ‘Ultimately, this book is likely to disappoint both the proponents and critics of development,’ the authors admit. ‘The proponents might view the arguments we put forward as too esoteric and not attuned to what can realistically be achieved. The critics might be dismayed by our &nbsp;unwillingness to dispose of the concept of development altogether and by our attempts to give credit to the Development establishment where credit is due. Our aim, however, is not to please either camp.’ The authors do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. However, the obsolete way of forcing soft states to adopt the path of linear modernisation and infinite growth so they can ‘graduate’ to a higher per capita income bracket must be rethought. Alternative models are available to confront the momentous crises facing people and the planet.&nbsp; Nepal’s <a href="https://nepalitimes.com/here-now/nepal-s-historic-youth-dissensus">GenZ protesters this month rose up</a> against corruption and bad governance. But underlying it was a failure of the development path that the country has chosen, which contributed to wanton destruction of ecosystems, the unequal allocation of &nbsp;benefits, and corruption that ensured both over- and under-development.&nbsp; Nepal’s young idealists may not have been able to articulate it in the language of academic discourse, but on social media platforms they have discussed a post-development era to reexamine and reimagine development, accountability, embedded ethnocentric hegemony, and an in-built structural inequality in the system.&nbsp; These lines from Sutoris and Pradhan’s book could almost be word-for-word from the GenZ manifesto: ‘Development encompasses not only financial prosperity but social justice, environmental sustainability, and the more plural development pathways that respect the world’s diverse cultural, historical, political, and social contexts.’&nbsp; Indeed, instant global connectivity through social media platforms has meant that socio-political movements elsewhere in the world impacted on young Nepalis, just as the events in Nepal this month are now influencing youth globally.&nbsp; These lines from Reimagining Development were written before the September Uprising in Nepal, but were a warning of things to come: ‘The current moment feels different. Perhaps due to the global nature of many of the contemporary movements facilitated by social networks, perhaps due to the movements’ sheer scale, or perhaps as a result of the multitude of challenges faced by the world, the feeling in the air seems to be that accumulated critiques of Development are more pressing than ever. If development is to remain a historical moment, it must reinvent itself and finally listen to the voices from below.’ &nbsp; Kunda Dixit is the author of Dateline Earth: Journalism As If the Planet Mattered, and publisher of Nepali Times.  <figure> <img src="https://publisher-publish.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pb-nepalitimes/swp/asv65r/media/2025092704094_b795907f8fa9a5ec67508e683e7a65737c6c237ca5482425bcbe5ee6254bb3f0.jpg" data-media-id="editor_4" data-image-id="2025092704094_b795907f8fa9a5ec67508e683e7a65737c6c237ca5482425bcbe5ee6254bb3f0" data-rendition-name="original" width="1136" height="702" loading="lazy" alt="Development book details"> </figure>