00:00Late last year, we brought you to Nepal, where an idea about fairness spread across
00:05the nation and helped bring down the regime.
00:07This past week, the sweeping changes continued as the mayor of Kathmandu headed to a landslide
00:13victory to be the country's next prime minister.
00:16To understand what's happened, we have to go back to the beginning.
00:19Our colleague Michael McKee takes us to the high Himalayas for the anatomy of a revolution.
00:27We plan to have a very small, peaceful protest.
00:33Did you stay off of social media or did you go back to posting?
00:36No, I went back to posting.
00:38I will never stop posting.
00:40It's fine, even if I die.
00:43Now more than ever, people have a window into the lives of others.
00:47Social media connects youth across countries and continents, but it also shows them riches
00:52beyond their reach.
00:53And as inequality and unfairness become more conspicuous, some Gen Zers have taken to the
01:00streets.
01:01In Nepal, a small democratic country wedged between Tibet and India, what started as a
01:07few angry posts became a movement that overthrew the government.
01:22Prashamsa Subedi is a 22-year-old law student who lives with her parents in the outskirts of
01:28Nepal's capital, Kathmandu.
01:29Not long ago, her life took a surprising turn.
01:34It was 2024 when I started uploading the videos about my political opinion, what I felt the
01:42government was doing wrong.
01:43And that's when it took off.
01:45In late June, after a Nepali politician downplayed the country's poverty, Subedi posted an angry
01:52response on TikTok.
01:53A day later, her clip had over a million views.
01:57How can a leader, mantra, mantra say that?
02:03Before, when we think of it, these politicians would not have their life public.
02:08So we would not know what their lifestyle was, how everything was going.
02:12But then, there is a very famous politician.
02:16One of his family members was a vlogger.
02:18And he used to document their lives, and every clip used to go viral.
02:23And people used to see what lavish lifestyle they were having, which we could not even imagine.
02:28So that is how it all sparked, that is how it all triggered.
02:32There's sudden visibility to how much richer the rich are than the poor, right?
02:38That ability to kind of see over the palace walls.
02:42Clay Shirky studies the effect of social media on politics at New York University.
02:47In revolution after revolution, there has been some sudden change in perception of how the wealthy are living.
02:54In Nepal, it was around this idea of Nepo babies, right?
02:56It was the idea that the children of the rich were not suffering the way the rest of Gen Z
03:02was.
03:04Something had changed about the way Nepal's youth saw their country,
03:07history, and the lives of its wealthiest citizens.
03:10It was not just the inequality that felt wrong, but the inequality of opportunity.
03:15The idea that those at the bottom would never have the chance to rise up.
03:19And those at the top might not deserve to be there at all.
03:23As the online furor grew, the government made a dramatic decision.
03:27And Nepal has cracked down on a number of social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, X.
03:34I was, first of all, utterly hopeless and helpless.
03:3918-year-old Shaswat Lamechan was one of the many Gen Zers who was angry about the social media ban.
03:47Talked with some activist friends, figured out what we could do, and we concluded that doing a protest would be
03:53the best way to do it.
03:5518-year-old Shaswat Lamechan says he expected 200 protesters to show up.
03:59But across the country, others like him were putting out the same call to friends and influencers.
04:05The collective action problem is if one person goes to the government and is protesting out front, they are completely
04:11helpless.
04:12But if 1,000 people do, they have to pay attention. And if 10,000 people do, they're overwhelmed.
04:17Tell us what happened on September 8th when you woke up in the morning.
04:22I didn't sleep that day.
04:25We all planned to wear school dresses so that police could not even beat us because it's illegal to beat
04:34up school children.
04:35And we were 100 meters away from parliament where we were sitting and we got the sense of tear gas.
04:43In an instant, everything changed.
04:46That is when I got the news of a person being killed.
04:50We didn't think it would go that far. But there was a news of a person being targeted.
04:56I was just scrolling through the news. I could not work. I could not do anything. I was just scrolling
04:59through the news.
05:00One scroll, one death. One scroll, one death.
05:03After the news that one person is shot and he is dead, I felt so guilty because he might have
05:09come watching my videos.
05:11So maybe I am responsible for his death.
05:16The news of the violence traveled quickly and then escalation.
05:26The very clip that I would say that ignited the fire in the people was a 17-year-old getting
05:33shot on his head.
05:35Our palaces were burned. Our banks were looted.
05:39By the end of the violence, over 70 people had died, 2,000 injured. On September 9th, one day after
05:47the protests began, many of Nepal's top leaders resigned, including the prime minister himself.
05:53We never imagined the situation. It was like nobody told us we would be a country without a government.
06:01But then, an unexpected phone call in the middle of the night.
06:05The army invited us to sit down with them at the army headquarters to talk on what to do next,
06:13what the future of the country should look like.
06:16Subeidi also got the army's call, along with a handful of others.
06:19They asked, you helped start this. Now, come fix it.
06:24Lama-chan, who had started a chat room to organize the protests, helped create another, this time to pick a
06:31new leader.
06:31The name they chose, Sushila Karki, a retired Supreme Court justice known for fighting corruption and supporting women's rights.
06:40Subeidi, the law student, got her phone number.
06:43She was asking if we were okay and everything, and we asked her to step up.
06:47And then she said, if you guys are trusting on me, then I will have to step up, because it's
06:53not about me anymore, it's about the country.
06:55For Subeidi and others, a look over the palace wall made them angry.
07:01But then, also, hopeful for a better future.
07:05Hopeful enough to take action.
07:07And now, hopeful that their action will be worth the sacrifice.
07:14On March 5th, Nepal's citizens took the next step toward delivering on the changes they sought last September, going to
07:21the polls to elect a new prime minister.
07:23We spoke with Thomas Carruthers, chair for democracy studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
07:28and a leading scholar on democracy and governance globally.
07:32He finds the results dramatic.
07:35The March 5th election in Nepal looks like a pivotal moment in Nepalese political history.
07:41After the huge demonstrations of last September, which pushed for really dramatic political change, voters have delivered that change.
07:49Coming to power as prime minister, bringing with them the RSP party, is Belendra Shah.
07:55In his mid-30s, he's the former mayor of Kathmandu.
07:59The news makes a lot of him as an ex-rapper, but let's not forget the fact that he's been
08:03mayor of the capital city for almost four years.
08:05He comes in, interestingly, as a centrist.
08:09RSP is a centrist party, but comes in with a mandate for sweeping reforms.
08:14Nepalese voters are highly dissatisfied, angry.
08:18They want change.
08:20So what do we know about his policies from his time as mayor or what he has campaigned on in
08:25this election?
08:26I think we could call him, at least he tries to be a sort of technocratic activist, if you will,
08:31an activist who tries to focus on good governance, transparency, kind of basic governance reforms.
08:37He's not coming for change from the left or from the right, but really from the middle out,
08:43which is, I think, appealing to the many youth who protested last fall who represent a kind of
08:48non-ideological movement, a sort of post-ideological movement, which is characteristic of so many of
08:54the Gen Z protests that we've seen in the last year.
08:56The story in Nepal has caught a lot of attention around the world with the social media phenomenon
09:02and then the uprising that came after that.
09:04From what you understand of Nepal, might that have similar effects in other countries?
09:10Over the last 12 months, we've seen a wave of what quickly got to be named Gen Z protests.
09:15We've seen them in Africa, in Kenya and Madagascar.
09:19We've seen them in other parts of Asia, like Indonesia or the Philippines.
09:22We've seen them in the Middle East with Morocco, seen them in South America with Peru.
09:27All these protests have a couple of things in common, dominated by young people,
09:32often kind of leaderless in their form, rather spontaneous, somewhat non-ideological,
09:38very delivery-oriented, here's what we want, and non-violent for the most part.
09:43So these protests have certain common characteristics, and they're the same kind of drivers.
09:48Corruption is just a big issue among young people in all of these regions, all of these countries.
09:55Corruption is a big thing.
09:57Economic grievances are important.
09:59And again, that general sense of underrepresentation.
10:02This is, of course, the issue with so many struggling democracies around the world,
10:06citizens losing their patience, wanting to see that having political and civil rights
10:11also brings them some benefit to their everyday life.
10:14It's not just in the developing world.
10:16I think people feel it in many, quote, wealthy, established democracies as well.
10:20All of this happening is a backdrop of the war in Iran right now, a very, very different country,
10:26where Nepal is very, very small.
10:28Iran is very, very large.
10:29It's something like 90 million people, the size of much of Western Europe.
10:33We had seen some uprisings, civil uprisings in Iran before this war happened.
10:38What do you think the effects may be on the young people of Iran and what we're seeing right now?
10:42Well, the young people of Iran stood up incredibly bravely in December and January
10:48and were massacred by the thousands, by just really an amount of violence
10:53we have not seen against protesters anywhere in the world in the last 10 or 20 years.
10:58Inevitably, Iran is driven by its own political dynamics.
11:01But I think many young people in Iran were inspired somewhat by this wave of what I described
11:06as Gen Z protests around the world.
11:08So maybe not Nepal specifically, but it was one part of a larger wave,
11:13which I think many young people in Iran feel they would like to be part of
11:17and would like to see the ability to have a voice, to bring to power someone who listens to them
11:23and tries to respond to their needs and interests.
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