By Janardan Subedi
Recently, I came across a piece of news that revealed more about Nepal than any manifesto or political speech could. Prime Minister Sushila Karki had summoned all four chiefs of the nation’s security apparatus to her office. The agenda was brief, the implications enormous. She asked for their opinion on whether the government should arrest KP Sharma Oli and Ramesh Lekhak — the two leaders widely blamed for the massacre of seventy-five young protesters from the Gen-Z movement.
The room fell silent.
The army chief, witnesses say, leaned back in his chair, expressionless. The police chief and his counterparts in intelligence and armed police were firm in their refusal. The arrests, they argued, would destabilize the country, weaken morale, and risk a wider rebellion. None mentioned what everyone knew — that all four were in office when the killings took place. Each owed his position to the very government now accused of orchestrating the tragedy.
Such am I surprised? No, I am not.
This is Nepal’s story in miniature — a nation where every crisis exposes not a single failure, but the entire structure of rot beneath it. What unfolded in that quiet office meeting was not a difference of opinion; it was the naked truth of a state that no longer believes in its own sovereignty.
The interim government that rose from the ashes of the protests promised stability, accountability, and an election to reset the national order. But hope without authority evaporates fast. Prime Minister Karki, though well-intentioned, sits atop a machinery that obeys no moral compass. The army acts above politics yet within power. The police bow to legality only when it aligns with survival. Bureaucrats wait, as they always do, for the next regime.
This is not governance — it is inertia dressed in protocol.
In Nepal today, power circulates without direction. Every order is interpreted, negotiated, diluted. Every decision is weighed against who might be offended rather than what might be right. It is a politics of fear — fear of losing office, fear of exposure, fear of truth. And fear, in the end, is the most effective tool of control.
The massacre of the seventy-five young Nepalis was not just a crime against citizens; it was a crime against the idea of a republic. These were young people — digitally connected, politically homeless, and spiritually exhausted — who dared to believe their voices still mattered. They were children of democracy, gunned down by the very democracy that claimed to represent them.
Their deaths split the country open.
On one side, a restless generation that speaks in the language of justice and dignity. On the other, an aging elite that clings to stability as if it were virtue. One side wants change; the other wants control. That chasm — moral, generational, psychological — is what I call the Great Divide. It is not a division of geography but of spirit.
Nepal now lives in two realities. In one, the youth still imagine a nation governed by law and merit. In the other, power flows through old channels of party loyalty, ethnicity, and personal favor. One side calls for accountability; the other calls for calm. One demands truth; the other offers delay. Both inhabit the same land, but not the same time.
When sovereignty dies, it rarely announces its death. It fades quietly, through moments like these — when the Prime Minister’s command is politely defied; when generals look away; when the law bends for convenience; when the people stop expecting justice because they know it will not come.
Sovereignty, after all, is not just control over territory. It is control over meaning. And meaning, in Nepal, has been outsourced.
Foreign interests speak louder than national convictions. Donors fund what politicians cannot justify. Embassies mediate what our own institutions refuse to address. Decisions that once belonged to the Nepali state now unfold in boardrooms and back channels far from Kathmandu. We remain a republic in form, but a dependency in function.
This, too, is a kind of colonization — not by armies, but by influence; not through conquest, but through consent.
The security chiefs’ refusal to act revealed what every Nepali already suspects: there is no singular chain of command. Each institution serves its own survival. The bureaucracy aligns with whoever can guarantee its continuity. The judiciary interprets justice as discretion. The army guards its pride but not its people.
The Prime Minister, in this tableau, becomes a spectator to her own government.
We are witnessing not rebellion but paralysis — a slow-motion breakdown where no one dares to move first. And yet, beneath this paralysis lies a deeper pattern: a state that has mistaken silence for stability.
Every crime, every scandal, every massacre is followed by a commission, a postponement, a negotiated forgetting. But memory does not die on schedule. It lingers, corrodes, and eventually consumes. The ghosts of those seventy-five young souls still walk among us, not as martyrs but as witnesses. They remind us that impunity is not peace — it is the quiet before disintegration.
I have long maintained that Nepal cannot be repaired by patchwork reforms. The present constitution — hurried, imbalanced, and poorly conceived — has failed to embody the nation’s complexity. It centralized what should have been shared, divided what should have been united, and rewarded loyalty over legitimacy.
It must be scrapped.
Nepal needs not revision but re-foundation. A new social mandate rooted in accountability, inclusiveness, and national dignity. One that recognizes that sovereignty begins not in the palace or the barracks, but in the trust between citizen and state. Without that trust, no flag can save a country from collapse.
The constitution was supposed to bind us; it has instead exposed the fractures we refused to see. It promised equality but institutionalized exclusion. It promised stability but delivered stagnation. It promised sovereignty but created dependence.
The Gen-Z uprising was, in its essence, not an act of rebellion but of remembrance — a desperate plea to remind the nation of its own unfinished promise.
If Nepal continues along this path — where commands are ignored, truth is bartered, and sovereignty is sold in small, polite transactions — it will not take a foreign invasion to end the republic. It will die from within, slowly, silently, like a candle burning in an empty temple.
The tragedy is not that Nepal is divided; it is that its leaders still believe the divide can be managed rather than healed.
And yet, every crisis contains its own chance for renewal. The Karki government, if it dares, can still act. It can open the files, prosecute the guilty, and restore faith in the simplest of republican principles — that no one stands above the law. It can break the cycle of fear by standing with the truth.
If it does not, then history will finish the work politics refused to begin. The youth will not forgive another betrayal. They have seen through the rituals of rhetoric. They know that progress without justice is just another form of decay.
Nepal stands today at the edge of its own making — a republic that cannot govern, an army that will not obey, a constitution that cannot protect, and a people who will not forget.
The Great Divide is not between parties or provinces. It is between a state that survives by habit and a generation that demands meaning.
If we continue to postpone reckoning, sovereignty will not fall in one dramatic collapse. It will slip away, one institution at a time, until nothing remains but the memory of what we once dared to call a nation.
And when that day arrives, the question will not be who lost power — but who lost courage.
(Dr. Janardan Subedi is Professor of Sociology at Miami University, Ohio. He writes on political ethics, democratic transitions, and institutional accountability in South Asia.)