The name Sapana means dream in Nepali. Sapana Pradhan Malla’s, the senior-most justice on Nepal’s Supreme Court, parents gave this name to her not as a wish but as a lament. They had wanted a son. She trained at Harvard and Delhi, spent three decades fighting for women’s rights in law, and served nine and a half years on the bench. She was Acting Chief Justice when her government looked at her record and chose someone else.

On May 7th, the Constitutional Council chaired by Prime Minister Balendra Shah, the former Kathmandu mayor who rode a Gen Z wave to a landslide election victory in March, recommended Justice Manoj Kumar Sharma as Nepal’s 33rd Chief Justice. Sharma was fourth in the seniority order. Two other justices ranked above Sharma were also passed over. The decision was not unanimous though as the National Assembly chair and the leader of the opposition registered formal written dissent, saying they could not accept a recommendation that “violated established procedures and tradition.”

The Prime Minister’s response was blunt. Tradition alone, he said, cannot justify appointments. Merit, expertise, and judicial capability must also matter. He is not wrong about that and that is where the conversation must begin, and where Nepal’s commentariat has mostly refused to go.

Nepal’s constitution does not require the most senior justice to become Chief Justice. Article 129 sets a floor at least three years of Supreme Court service but leaves the selection to the Constitutional Council. The convention of appointing by seniority dates, as defenders of the practice note, to the post-Rana era, making it roughly seven decades old.

What made this particular departure explosive was not merely the breach of protocol. It was the identity of the person bypassed. Nepal had its first female Chief Justice only in 2016, when Sushila Karki, a septuagenarian former advocate known for her zero-tolerance approach to corruption became the 26th to hold the post. Her tenure lasted less than a year before an impeachment motion, widely regarded as politically motivated, suspended her. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights at the time said the attempt to remove her gave rise to “serious concerns about the Government’s commitment to the rule of law.” She went on to write a memoir, Nyaya (Justice), and a novel, Kara (Prison), and then, in a twist that only Nepal could produce, became interim Prime Minister following the Gen Z protests of September 2025 that toppled KP Sharma Oli.

Karki handed over power to Shah’s government only six weeks before his Constitutional Council sidelined Nepal’s second woman in line for the same court’s top post. She is among those who have publicly raised concerns about the recommendation process.

Two days after being bypassed, acting Chief Justice Malla addressed the 74th Law Day ceremony in Kathmandu. “Justice cannot prevail under fear or influence,” she told the assembled legal fraternity. “Whether it is the fear of a powerful government or the threat of impeachment, judges must rise above such narrow constraints.” She called on the Nepal Bar Association, civil society, and the media to protect judicial independence from what she described as “structural conspiracies.” She also said, for those paying attention, “I myself fought discrimination and injustice throughout my life. Our fight is still not over.”

These are stirring words. They are also, it must be said, the words of a litigant in her own cause, delivered from a judicial platform, directed explicitly at the government that had just declined to elevate her.

The response to this speech in Kathmandu was largely celebratory. Legal activists filed a writ to annul the Constitutional Council’s recommendation. Former prime minister Baburam Bhattarai added his voice to the chorus of criticism. The framing was consistent and simple. A qualified woman had been denied what was rightfully hers, and the motive must be understood as political suppression of women.

Shah’s government chose Justice Sharma because, by their account, he is the better-qualified candidate for the specific institutional challenges facing Nepal’s Supreme Court. More than 22,000 cases sit pending. Public trust in the judiciary has been eroded by years of allegations about corruption and political interference. Whether Sharma is genuinely better equipped to address these than Malla is a question that deserves examination but in the resulting storm, almost no one examined it. The story was, from the moment the decision was announced, entirely about gender.

Malla’s own career offers a clue to the complication. She left a lucrative corporate law practice in the 1990s because, as she has said, she was troubled by how the law discriminated against women. She founded the Forum for Women, Law and Development. She contributed to the drafting of the Human Trafficking Bill, the National Women Commission Bill, gender equality legislation, and succession rights reform. They are also the achievements of an advocate, a campaigner, a person who came to the bench with a defined mission.

But Nepal’s judiciary does not need more advocacy. It needs the kind of judge who looks at a case and follows the law wherever it leads including, sometimes, to conclusions that cause discomfort to the causes one holds dear.

There is a serious and largely taboo argument worth making here. Because activist lawyers produce a particular kind of judge. One who is sensitive to outcomes, oriented toward correcting past wrongs, and inclined to weigh human stakes alongside legal merits. These are not neutral qualities. In a house or office, they may even be virtues. At the highest bench in a country, they become a problem. Claire Lehmann, the founder and editor of Quillette, has written and published extensively on the distinction between what she calls the “care” orientation more commonly found in the moral psychology of women and the “justice” orientation that formal legal reasoning demands. Her argument is not that women make bad judges. It is that when institutions responsible for dispassionate adjudication are staffed or led by people whose identity and professional history are inseparable from advocacy for a particular group, the result is not neutrality but a different kind of bias, one that wears the costume of principle.

This is an argument that polite opinion in Nepal and in most of the Western-influenced discourse that shapes elite conversation there refuses to have. It is easier to say that any bypassing of a senior female judge is automatically discriminatory than to ask whether the career that brought her to seniority is the right preparation for the role.

There is a version of this story in which Shah, having promised to run Nepal differently from the corrupt machine politicians who preceded him, decided that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court should be the most capable jurist available rather than simply the next in line and that this decision happened, in this instance, to disadvantage a woman. That version deserves at least as much attention as the version in which a misogynistic government kicked women out of their rightful place.

It is worth noting that Shah’s government includes women in senior positions. His Constitutional Council meeting was attended by the Deputy Speaker, a woman. His Law Minister is a woman. The framing of this decision as an act of gendered malice requires one to ignore quite a lot of contradicting evidence.

It is also worth asking what the seniority convention was actually doing. Seniority systems exist, in part, to depoliticise appointments to remove discretion from powerful actors and replace it with a neutral rule. But Nepal’s recent history suggests the convention was already failing at that purpose. Shah’s decision to select on grounds other than seniority is, in this light, less a revolutionary break than an honest acknowledgment that the convention had become a fiction.

And yet the breach matters. Not because Malla was entitled to the post as a woman, but because predictable rules protect the independence of any judiciary. If a chief justice can be chosen on the basis of executive preference even well-intentioned, merit-based preference then future executives will do the same, and not all of them will have Shah’s stated reasons.

Nepal has made genuine, hard-won progress on women in public life. Sushila Karki became chief justice, then prime minister. The constitution mandates representation. Women now make up 13.8% of judges, still low, but higher than a generation ago. Sapana Pradhan Malla’s career, whatever one thinks of the outcome here, represents a real advance in the range of people who can reach the top of the country’s legal establishment.

But progress is not served by the refusal to ask hard questions. It is not served by the assumption that any outcome disadvantageous to a woman is ipso facto unjust. And it is certainly not served by a sitting acting chief justice who uses a ceremonial platform to deliver what amounts to a political speech directed at the government and receives nothing but applause for it.

Malla said, “Our fight is still not over.” But if the Chief Justice of Nepal’s Supreme Court understands her role as a fight, one must ask what it is being fought for, and against whom, and what happens to the litigants who find themselves on the wrong side of it?That is the conversation Nepal is not having. It is the one it needs.

There is a particular kind of modern activism that mistakes the performance of outrage for the substance of it, that confuses the emotional intensity of a gesture with the moral seriousness of a cause. We see it in the world’s most photographed protest movements. 

The point of such activism is never really the cause itself. The cause is the currency with which the activist purchases their identity, where outrage becomes a credential and grief an aesthetic content. The slogan exists not to demand change but to announce the speaker’s virtue to whoever is watching, and in the age of Instagram, someone is always watching.

Nepal’s so-called GenZ leadership has given us a domestic version of this pathology, and it is time we said so plainly.

On the morning of September 8, 2025, thousands of school students and young professionals gathered at Maitighar Mandala in Kathmandu, many of them in uniform, carrying banners that read “Youth Against Corruption.” The movement had no manifesto, no party colours. Its organisers insisted, repeatedly and explicitly, that it had no leaders, and this was not a weakness of design but its central moral claim. 

By early afternoon, police opened live fire on the crowd outside parliament. By September’s end, at least 75 people were dead, the overwhelming majority shot above the waist, in the head, neck, and chest, in what Amnesty International would later call “a shocking and callous disregard for human life.” A 12-year-old child was among those confirmed dead. Over two thousand were injured. 

Those deaths were not background noise to a political event. They were the event. They were the price Nepal’s youngest generation paid for the right to demand that the people who governed them be held to account. It is worth sitting with that before examining what followed.

Consider Tanuja Pandey, who turned 25 four days after September 8, and who by that time had already become the “poster girl” of Nepal’s GenZ protests. A lawyer and climate justice activist from Jhapa who had built the @gen.znepal Instagram presence and coined the rallying cry “Enough is Enough”. Pandey had genuine activist credentials going back years. She founded Harin Nepal, an environmental organisation, at nineteen, and had been writing about climate justice long before the September uprising gave her a national platform. One would be churlish to deny any of that.

But here is what else is true, and what Pandey would rather you not examine too closely. Multiple reports indicate she was associated with the youth wing of the Nepali Congress, the very party whose coalition with KP Sharma Oli’s government had made it an accomplice in the conditions that produced the uprising, and whose headquarters were burned by protesters in September for precisely that reason. 

The Nepali Congress was not a bystander to the rot GenZ rose against, it was one of its institutional authors. When Pandey’s critics raised this, she was, by her own account, “crestfallen”, she denied links to the party with some vigour. Her grandfather, Ramesh Nath Pandey, served as Nepal’s Foreign Minister during the royal regime, a connection the family has deep roots in, and reports of her earlier Congress youth-wing association have never been cleanly refuted.

None of this would be disqualifying in itself. What makes it significant is the gap between Pandey’s self-presentation‚ the scrappy, organic, grassroots challenger to the old order‚ and the actual contours of her biography, which places her closer to the political establishment than her brand identity suggests. Pandey has built her public persona entirely on the premise that she represents a clean break from the old way of doing things. The premise is, at best, complicated. At worst, it is another form of the nepo-kid culture, only wrapped in denim and a climate-justice hashtag.

Rakshya Bam is a more interesting case, and in some ways a more troubling one, because the gap between her stated principles and her conduct has been so consistently and specifically documented. Bam, who grew up in Kailali in the far-west and moved to Kathmandu to study, has spoken movingly and often about the systemic neglect of provinces like Sudurpaschim. “Kailali is not poor, it is made poor,” she has said, with a bluntness that commands respect. 

She walked out of Army Headquarters in the days after September 9 when the army chief tried to seat GenZ representatives alongside Durga Prasai and the pro-monarchist Rastriya Prajatantra Party, saying the grouping would undermine the movement’s credibility. In the aftermath of protests, she told the press without ambiguity that her GenZ friends risked their lives and were shot in the chest and head while shouting slogans for good governance and against nepotism and cronyism, nothing else.

These are the words of someone who appears to understand exactly what is at stake. They are also, it turns out, words that do not constrain her own behaviour. By December 2025, Bam had accepted an invitation to private political negotiations at the Kupandol home of then-Kathmandu’s mayor Balen Shah’s close aide, negotiations in which she was specifically tasked, according to Setopati’s reporting, with coordinating which GenZ figures would join Shah-affiliated Desh Bikash Party, and with holding discussions with martyrs’ families on behalf of Shah’s electoral project. 

To be precise about what this means: the families of people who were shot dead by the state were being approached, through Bam’s coordination, as potential assets in an electoral strategy. The Nepali Congress, the party that co-authored the coalition government whose police opened fire on those families’ children, was by January 2026 proposing that Bam herself contest from Kathmandu-1 on their ticket, a proposal whose significance should not be lost on anyone. 

The party whose headquarters was burned by GenZ protesters in September was, months later, hoping to recruit GenZ’s most prominent coordinator as its candidate. Bam declined. But the fact that the conversation happened at all, that she was a participant in it rather than someone who refused the meeting outright and said so publicly‚ tells you something about the distance she had already travelled from the movement’s founding logic.

Bam has also said, with an apparent sincerity that “some of us should stay outside so we can keep reminding and challenging the people who come to power.” She said this while, by all available evidence, manoeuvring inside the political architecture. Reports suggest she was a trusted aide to Home Minister Om Prakash Aryal of the interim government. The problem is not the access. The problem is that she apparently saw no contradiction between holding it and continuing to perform opposition for an audience that did not know she had it. Bam, so far, has not denied the reports.

Majid Ansari presents a third variation of the same disease. A law student from Morang, the son of a woman who once watched a court officer extort a Musahar villager and who resolved from that moment to use the law as an instrument of justice, Ansari has been more consistent than either Pandey or Bam in his actual advocacy, calling out the Attorney General over the Hope Fertility case, raising questions about the rights of Madhesi and Muslim students, warning against electoral delay with genuine constitutional seriousness. These things matter. 

But Ansari arrived at September 8 as an ordinary law student who joined the protest on that day, watched the crowd grow, escaped through Thapagaun when the gunshots began, and went to Civil Hospital to donate blood. This is not the biography of a movement leader. This is the biography of a citizen who showed up for his country at a critical moment, as hundreds of thousands of others did.

The difference is that Ansari, unlike most of those hundreds of thousands, understood very quickly how to monetise‚ in terms of visibility and platform, the GenZ identity that the movement had made valuable. He was soon being quoted on constitutional matters, and he started issuing public statements demanding the dismissal of the Attorney General, and began advising the nation on how to conduct its democracy. 

This would be admirable if Ansari had some formal institutional relationship to the movement he was representing. He does not. The movement said it had no leaders. Ansari simply became one by insisting, repeatedly and publicly, that he was one, and by understanding that in the media ecosystem that surrounds a successful uprising, a confident voice with the right vocabulary and the right background story is indistinguishable from an actual representative.

This is not a personal failing peculiar to Ansari. It is a structural feature of how leaderless movements get captured. The movement’s great strength, the absence of a named leadership, becomes its greatest vulnerability once the streets go quiet, because the name-shaped void gets filled by whoever shows up consistently in front of cameras.

What connects all three of them, and what connects Nepal’s GenZ leadership more broadly, is the philosophy of activism as performance. The slogan “Don’t Forget the Blood of Martyrs” was chanted in the streets of Kathmandu by such activists as early as September 9, and it has since appeared on banners, been invoked in press releases, and referenced in speeches with a frequency that should make anyone who actually cares about those martyrs feel something close to revulsion. Not because the sentiment is insincere, but because sincerity, by itself, is not accountability. 

As of the time of writing, the commission set up to investigate protest deaths has not released its findings. The people who ordered those 2,642 live bullets, the police logs confirmed that number, have not faced court. The families of the martyrs received 10 lakh rupees each in compensation and a declaration from the interim government that their children were martyrs, which is the kind of gesture that soothes a news cycle without disturbing a power structure. Our self-declared GenZ voices issued suitably outraged statements at appropriate intervals. None of them has made this their consuming, daily, non-negotiable campaign in the way that justice for the dead actually requires.

Meanwhile, at least 49 GenZ-affiliated groups had registered at the Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers by December 2025, according to reports. Most were led by prominent faces of the protest movement itself. The political economy of the martyrs had, within three months, been converted into a registration drive.

This is a specific kind of dishonesty that is more dangerous than ordinary hypocrisy, because it is indistinguishable from genuine conviction on the surface. Tanuja Pandey wrote, in reference to someone else, that “history never forgives traitors who turn the people’s hope, pain and sacrifice into a game of self-interest.” Rakshya Bam, in the same breath as accepting a political brokerage role, said the new forces must not forget “the essence of the GenZ revolution.” Majid Ansari tells young Nepalis to question leaders rather than idolise them, while allowing himself to be idolised as a leader. None of these people, I suspect, believe they are being hypocritical. 

This is the endpoint of activism-as-performance, the final stage in which the performer can no longer tell the difference between what they are saying and what they are doing, because the saying has become, for them, a form of doing. This happens everywhere. Greta Thunberg, a popular young Swedish climate activist, once refused to fly to climate conferences, and crossed the Atlantic by sail to honour her stated convictions. But recently, she crossed the Mediterranean twice on diesel vessels to participate in political theatre. The distance between who she was and who she became was not measured in kilometres but in the slow erosion of the distinction between gesture and action. Nepal’s GenZ leaders have travelled a similar distance in considerably less time.

The movement of September 2025 was, in the strictest sense of the word, heroic. It was heroic because it was leaderless, because it was waged by people in school uniforms who had nothing to gain and everything to lose, because it refused the logic that change requires a saviour, and because it paid a price, in blood, in real blood, on real streets, that no amount of subsequent Instagram content can retrospectively justify or redeem. 

The 75 people who died did not die so that Tanuja Pandey could become a commentator, or so that Rakshya Bam could be courted by the Nepali Congress as a candidate, or so that Majid Ansari could be quoted as a constitutional authority. They died because they believed, with the desperate and unstrategic conviction of people who have run out of patience, that this country could be better than it has been.

Honouring that belief requires requires the willingness to remain angry past the point where anger is fashionable, past the point where the cameras have moved to the next story, past the point where the political opportunities have been distributed and the movement’s leaders have found their way into the rooms they always, on some level, wanted to be in.

The way of common decency is to pay the price for what you stand for. The martyrs of September 8 paid it fully. The least their self-appointed inheritors can do is stop making speeches about their sacrifice and start earning the right to invoke it. If that is too much to ask, then consider a much smaller request: say nothing. We do not need moral instruction from people who have learned to speak the language of sacrifice while quietly collecting its dividends. The families of the dead do not need elegies. They need justice, and justice, unlike outrage, does not trend.