Janardan Subedi
According to the Gregorian calendar, 2025 is coming to an end and 2026 is only days away. As reliably as ritual itself, celebration has arrived ahead of reckoning. Christmas lights blink across urban Nepal, New Year’s parties are staged with careful enthusiasm, and restaurants, hotels, rooftop bars, clubhouses, and private homes rehearse the choreography of joy. Bottles are uncorked, music is amplified, décor multiplies. The country appears animated, festive, alive.
Appearances, however, have become Nepal’s most reliable currency.
What unfolds each December is not merely celebration but performance—repeated, rehearsed, and largely detached from social reality. Joy is no longer an outcome of collective well-being; it is a substitute for it. Where governance fails, spectacle compensates. Where institutions erode, lights are switched on. Where accountability disappears, sound is turned up. Celebration becomes an infrastructure of denial.
This is not accidental. It is structural.
Political theorists have long warned of societies drifting from substantive democracy toward symbolic governance—systems in which form survives while function decays. Guy Debord described this as the “society of the spectacle,” where lived reality is displaced by its representation. Nepal’s condition fits this diagnosis with uncomfortable precision. The state continues to perform democracy—elections, debates, court procedures—while the substance of democratic accountability steadily hollows out. Celebration, in such a context, is not cultural excess; it is political anesthesia.
The rapid normalization of imported festivals illustrates this condition with particular clarity. Christmas and New Year’s celebrations in Nepal are not primarily theological, cultural, or ethical events. They are consumptive rituals synchronized with global capitalism. Their appeal lies not in belief but in visibility. Participation signals modernity, global belonging, and urban sophistication. Meaning is optional; aesthetics are mandatory.
Consider Christmas specifically. The overwhelming majority of those celebrating it in Nepal have never read the Bible. Many do not know who Jesus is beyond a generic symbol—an infant in a plastic manger, a bearded figure printed on packaging, an icon emptied of historical, theological, or ethical content. Biblical literacy is not simply low; it is structurally irrelevant to the ritual. Faith is unnecessary. Knowledge is optional. Consumption is sufficient.
This raises an obvious question: even if one wished to engage the text seriously, in what language would this engagement occur? Is the Bible widely available in Nepali in a translation that is philosophically careful, historically grounded, and linguistically rigorous? Religious translation is not a neutral act. It is an interpretive intervention shaped by power, ideology, and competence. Nepal has no shortage of self-proclaimed experts producing translations with questionable accuracy, flattening complex theological concepts into crude moral slogans. Authenticity is uncertain. Authority is assumed.
Yet none of this interrupts the celebration. The ritual proceeds undisturbed by ignorance, linguistic limitation, or theological incoherence. Because the ritual is not about belief. It is about participation in a global spectacle.
This is not hypocrisy. It is symptomatic. Celebration has been severed from comprehension.
The irony is quietly revealing. Western food is consumed with reverence. Wine is drunk as a performance of sophistication. Cakes are cut. Photos are uploaded. And before the night ends—before borrowed joy gives way to physical fatigue—many celebrants return home to what is familiar: mashubhat, often with a little sails. The body ultimately rejects symbolic consumption and demands local sustenance. The spectacle dissolves; survival resumes.
This oscillation between imported performance and local necessity captures Nepal’s broader political condition. Institutions perform global forms while relying on informal, familiar mechanisms to function—if they function at all. The state wears borrowed costumes while operating through patronage, nepotism, and selective enforcement. What appears modern is often pre-modern in practice.
Political parties exemplify this contradiction. They perform ideology without conviction, opposition without consequence, and coalition without accountability. Over successive elections, Nepal’s largest parties have rotated power through shifting alliances, ensuring that governance becomes a shared enterprise of access rather than a contested arena of responsibility. Katz and Mair’s “cartel party” thesis is instructive here: dominant parties collude to control state resources while insulating themselves from meaningful competition. Opposition becomes temporary, performative, and ultimately meaningless.
In such a system, celebration plays a critical role. It sustains the illusion of normalcy. It reassures citizens that life continues, that the state is intact, that collapse is not imminent. Celebration becomes the emotional maintenance of a failing system.
Citizens adapt accordingly. This adaptation should not be mistaken for ignorance or moral failure. It is a rational response to prolonged institutional betrayal. When accountability mechanisms collapse, individuals retreat into private joy. When justice becomes selective, celebration becomes coping. When politics ceases to offer meaning, spectacle fills the vacuum.
But adaptation has consequences. Over time, societies lose the capacity to distinguish between substance and simulation. Ritual replaces responsibility. Visibility replaces value. Imported calendars replace historical urgency. Celebration crowds out memory.
Hannah Arendt warned that the greatest danger to political life is not tyranny alone, but thoughtlessness—the normalization of practices without reflection. Nepal’s borrowed celebrations exemplify this danger. They are not inherently harmful. They become harmful when they displace the capacity to ask why institutions fail, why justice is delayed, why public trust erodes.
Nepal’s tragedy is not cultural openness. It is cultural displacement without understanding. Indigenous festivals are not rejected; they are diluted, reduced to routine obligations rather than ethical anchors. Imported festivals arrive stripped of philosophical depth, retained only for their consumable aesthetics. Culture becomes decoration.
This is how states decay quietly—not through invasion, but through distraction.
One might argue that celebration is necessary. That joy sustains life under pressure. This is true. But joy untethered from responsibility becomes pathology. Celebration detached from accountability becomes narcotic. Ritual without reflection becomes noise.
Nepal today does not suffer from a lack of festivities. It suffers from an absence of reckoning. Protesters die. Public funds disappear. Institutions fail. Yet memory is short, and spectacle is immediate. Each new celebration resets the emotional ledger without settling moral debts.
The result is a peculiar form of continuity: not progress, not collapse, but suspended decay. The state continues to exist, but increasingly as form without force. Governance becomes theatrical. Law becomes selective. Justice becomes procedural rather than ethical.
The lights grow brighter each year. The music grows louder. The borrowed rituals grow more elaborate. Meanwhile, corruption persists, accountability remains absent, and public trust erodes further. The nation moves forward only in calendar time.
There is a grim efficiency to this arrangement. Spectacle distracts. Consumption pacifies. Performance reassures. The system does not require belief—only participation. It does not demand understanding—only compliance.
And so, as 2025 ends and 2026 approaches, greetings feel inappropriate. Celebration feels premature. What is required is not another ritual, but a pause. Therefore, condolences are more honest.
Condolences to a society that celebrates borrowed meanings while its own foundations erode.
Condolences to institutions that survive as symbols rather than servants.
Condolences to a culture fluent in performance but illiterate in accountability.
Condolences to a political order that consumes global aesthetics while relying on local survival mechanisms.
Celebration without substance is not harmless. It is denial with decoration.
Truth, accountability, memory, and justice are the real rituals of a functioning polity. In Nepal, they remain postponed—unperformed, uncelebrated, unresolved. Meanwhile, the borrowed cheers grow louder, as if volume could substitute for virtue.
These are not condemnations. They are diagnoses.
All of these observations, taken together, compel a final judgment.
Nepal was once the world’s only officially Hindu state. Today it is constitutionally secular, even as more than eighty percent of the population remains Hindu in belief and practice. This transformation required moral clarity, institutional responsibility, and historical accountability. None were supplied. Secularism was adopted procedurally, not ethically; belief was retained culturally, not responsibly. What followed was not pluralism, but substitution—symbols replacing substance, performance replacing obligation.
In urban centers, citizens dance under the influence of fine spirits, shouting greetings in borrowed tongues, singing Western and Bollywood songs, mistaking noise for freedom and consumption for progress. At the same time, far from the glow of rooftop bars and electric décor, mothers of those killed or permanently wounded by the state continue to scrub dried blood from floors, walls, and memory. Their grief is not seasonal. Their loss does not reset with the calendar.
No authority assumes custody of these families. No institution completes the chain of justice. No court delivers closure. No government acknowledges liability. The record shows only deferral, repetition, and silence. The absence of accountability is not temporary; it is normalized.
The conclusion is therefore unambiguous. Celebration has been institutionalized as a method of avoidance. Justice has been postponed without timetable. Memory has been relegated to private grief. The state functions, when it functions at all, only to maintain continuity of appearance. In this arrangement, mourning is individual, denial is collective, and celebration is compulsory.
Stopping would necessitate reckoning. Reckoning would expose failure. Thus, the system prefers noise to truth, light to clarity, ritual to responsibility. This is not collapse. It is stabilization at a lower moral threshold.
The record is closed.
(Dr. Janardan Subedi is Professor of Sociology at Miami University, Ohio. He writes on political ethics, democratic transitions, and institutional accountability in South Asia.)