World Tour: Nepal’s new beginning

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Up next, World Tour.

Last week in Nepal, a social media ban sparked violent protests. Days later, parliament lay in ashes and a new prime minister took the reins following an online poll. What’s behind the whiplash?

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Washington Producer Harrison Watters wrote this story, and WORLD’s Global Desk Chief Jenny Lind Schmitt brings it to us.

JENNY LIND SCHMITT: Young people in Nepal have been unhappy for a while. High inflation, low education, and few job opportunities have left many Nepalis looking for the exit.

MOHAN BHATT: We have around seven, 8 million young people in Nepal, and mostly, you know, they want to they are going abroad to work, to educate themselves for anything.

Mohan Bhatt is a pastor in Nepalgunj, near the country’s border with India. He says Nepal’s political leaders have long been more concerned about their own power than the needs of its citizens.

Over the past few years, young people across southeast Asia have protested their governments, and some have ended up with new ones.

BHATT: Same thing happened in Bangledesh. Same thing happened like this in Sri Lanka and in Indonesia, you know.

The spark came last week, when Communist Prime Minister K. P. Oli and his government began enforcing a social media registration rule. The goal was to force social media platforms to give the Nepali government more power to moderate content. South Asia analyst Michael Kugelman says the law would have done more than that.

KUGELMAN: Most protesters and many observers believe that the government was essentially using this idea of more effective regulation of social media as a pretext to essentially crack down on online speech.

A handful of companies, including TikTok, agreed to the new rule. Most did not. And on September 7th, the government blocked access to twenty-six social media platforms, including YouTube, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp.

KUGELMAN: Facebook, for example, is by far the most social media, the most popular social media platform in Nepal. It was taken down.

The next day, the streets of Nepal’s capital Kathmandu were filled with smoke and thousands of angry protestors.

SOUND: [Violent protests]

Police turned water cannons and tear gas on the waves of protestors, and later fired live ammunition, killing 19 and injuring hundreds more.

By midnight, the government reversed course—unblocking social media. But protests continued. The next day, rioters set fire to the homes of government officials, and burned the Parliament building. While the military struggled to contain the situation, Prime Minister Oli assessed his options, and resigned.

With many fires still burning, protest groups met online in the messaging app Discord to discuss next steps.

SOUND: [DISCORD LIVESTREAM]

More than 100,000 people joined the livestream over several days. Organizers took a poll and agreed to endorse former Supreme Court Chief Justice Sushila Karki to lead the interim government. Here’s Kugelman again.

KUGELMAN: As a justice, she was really big on curbing corruption, and that suggests that some of these vested interests in the political class and Nepal could find themselves vulnerable to steps that she might want to take.

But by Friday evening, the political parties and Nepal’s president agreed to install Karki as the new Prime Minister.

SOUND: [Ceremony]

Shortly after taking office, Prime Minister Karki promised to schedule new elections in six months. A stark contrast to Bangladesh, where the interim government only recently scheduled elections for February, after more than a year in power.

KUGELMAN: But in Nepal, you've got a much clearer time frame and a much clearer path to a formal transition, so hopefully that will portend stability.

Even so, stability will require more than new leaders. Pastor Bhatt says government offices across Nepal lay in ruins following the protests.

BHATT: All the local mayor office, local government, registration office, passport office. And we have lost very much valuable documents.

Pastor Bhatt runs two orphanages in his city, and he says a child welfare officer told him that many important government records were destroyed.

BHATT: We cannot save even one document is fully burned out every offices.

One document not destroyed was Nepal’s constitution, and it prevents Nepal’s nearly 30 million citizens from directly electing their leaders. Bhatt says that’s an obstacle to many of the youth protestors’ goals.

BHATT: That means we have to change the constitution. Otherwise, it's not possible. The same people will come again, same political party.

As Prime Minister Karki appoints members of her cabinet to lead Nepal, Pastor Bhatt says the Christians that make up only a tiny minority in Nepal are putting their trust in a higher authority.

BHATT: Pray for the stability of our this new system, and also God may give the right heart to the people, those who will be in this interim government… and Nepal needs God more over anything.

That’s this week’s World Tour, I’m Jenny Lind Schmitt.

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