Gagan Thapa’s ascent to the Congress presidency was dramatic enough to promise something new. In January 2026, riding a wave of fury from the Gen Z protests that had shaken Nepal’s political establishment to its foundations and forced the dissolution of parliament, he engineered a special general convention that swept aside the old guard under former president Sher Bahadur Deuba. The Election Commission legitimised the gathering. The Supreme Court confirmed it. For a party that had lurched from coalition to coalition, sold its democratic soul for a share of cabinet posts, Thapa looked like the shock of renewal the Congress desperately needed.

Within weeks of assuming the party’s highest office, Thapa led the Congress into the March 5 general election. His campaign was a referendum on his own image rather than a programme of government. He spoke of reform, of inclusiveness, of a united push into the polls – phrases that, in Nepali politics, carry roughly the same weight as a campaign balloon the morning after polling day. When pressed on specifics – on economic policy, on Nepal’s chronically stalled federalism, on the question of how a country haemorrhaging young people to the Gulf and Malaysia might be made worth staying in – the answers were warm and vague. He would listen, consult and make “good decisions”.

Result? He lost his own seat in Sarlahi-4 to a candidate from the Rastriya Swatantra Party, the upstart anti-establishment movement that ate the Congress’s lunch precisely because it offered voters something Thapa never quite managed: a clear account of how it seek to “ruthlessly” govern. 

The tragedy of Thapa is that his résumé suggests a man capable of exactly the kind of political courage his leadership has lacked. He began in the Nepal Student Union in the late 1990s, rising through campus politics with a reputation for confrontation and conviction. When King Gyanendra seized direct rule in the early 2000s, Thapa was imprisoned repeatedly on charges related to treason. He emerged from that period with a credibility few of his generation could match, and played a prominent role in the second People’s Movement of 2006 that restored democracy. 

Yet somewhere between the streets and the committee rooms, that clarity curdled into calculation. His style of leadership is, at its core, reactive. He surveys the media landscape, identifies the prevailing current of opinion, and positions himself fractionally ahead of it – close enough to seem prescient, far enough to avoid committing to anything that might later prove unpopular. In Nepal’s febrile press culture, where the Kathmandu commentariat sets the terms of political legitimacy from one news cycle to the next, this can look like responsiveness. It is, in practice, the absence of guts.

The clearest illustration of this tendency came during the ill-fated coalition of 2024, when KP Sharma Oli of the CPN-UML and the then-Congress president Deuba struck a power-sharing arrangement that hollowed out parliamentary opposition. Thapa accepted to lead the high-level mechanism tasked with drafting a common minimum programme. But while leading the mechanism team, he would come out in media and talk like an opposition. Even his dissent was delivered in the language of procedural objection rather than ideological clarity. He questioned the government’s “speed, focus, skill, and intention,” as he told parliament in August 2025. What he did not do was articulate an alternative vision of what Nepali governance could look like. 

Those who know Thapa well speak of a man constitutionally averse to making enemies. This is, in personal life, an admirable quality. In democratic politics, it is a serious handicap. Running a major political party means choosing between constituencies, not satisfying all of them. It means telling powerful interests within your own organisation that their preferences will be subordinated to a broader project. It means, in short, making people unhappy in the service of a principle. Thapa, by most accounts, finds this deeply uncomfortable. He prefers to keep everyone in the conversation, to postpone the hard call in favour of another round of consultation, to emit the warm but uncommitted energy of someone who wants to lead but does not want to govern.

The Nepali Congress president is also one of the most media-literate politician of his generation. He understands the rhythms of the news cycle, the vocabulary of the opinion column, the visual grammar of the social media clip. He courts journalists, accommodates their framing, and in turn receives coverage that has consistently overstated the coherence of his political project. But governing a complex country of thirty million people across mountains and plains and castes and languages requires a leader who is occasionally willing to say things the press does not want to hear. Fiscal discipline is unpopular. Agricultural reform is complicated. Tackling the structural incentives that make foreign labour more attractive than domestic investment requires policies that will hurt someone. Thapa has shown no appetite for any of it. He governs – or rather, he opposes – by the standard of the morning headline.

The Congress, under his stewardship, produced an election campaign that even sympathetic observers described as thin on substance. The party that in better days could claim intellectual ownership of Nepali democracy – that produced B.P. Koirala, whose vision of social democracy still haunts the party’s rhetoric if not its practice – went to the voters with its president’s face and not much else. RSP, led by a former rapper turned Kathmandu mayor Balen Shah with gift for speaking in plain language about plain problems, ran rings around the Congress on policy coherence. 

None of this is to say that Thapa is finished, or that the Congress is beyond repair. But saving it will require a transformation that looks less like reinvention and more like excavation. The Congress, which faces a rebuilt 15th general convention in the coming months, needs a leader who can tell the party’s fractious factions, its donor networks, its media allies, and its voters something they may not want to hear: that the party must choose what it stands for, and that standing for everything is the same as standing for nothing.

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.
 

The Nepali Congress was never meant to be the kind of party it has become. Founded in 1947 in the twilight of Rana autocracy, it drew intellectual and moral inspiration from the Indian National Congress but was shaped by Nepal’s own peculiar conditions of a feudal monarchy, a fragmented society and a nascent middle class. Its leading lights, most notably B. P. Koirala, articulated a vision that combined political freedom with social justice, but not at the expense of individual liberty.

Mr. Koirala’s thought is often misread through a modern ideological lens. He spoke of “democratic socialism,” but in practice this meant something closer to European social liberalism than to redistribution. He believed in parliamentary democracy, civil liberties, and a mixed economy in which the private sector would play a leading role. The state, in his view, was a body to correct wrongdoings rather than a dominator of economic life.

In short, the Nepali Congress was born as a liberal party with conservative instincts. Cautious about upheaval, respectful of institutions, and attentive to the realities of a poor, agrarian society. It was a party of reform, not revolution. So how did such a party come to be perceived as indistinguishable from the socialist and even communist forces?

The answer lies partly in Nepal’s turbulent political history. Its early years in power were cut short by King Mahendra’s royal coup in 1960. When democracy returned in 1990, the ideological terrain had shifted. The global Cold War was ending, but Nepal’s domestic politics were increasingly shaped by leftist insurgency, culminating in the Maoist civil war.

Faced with the rise of the Maoists and the Communist Party of Nepal Unified Marxist–Leninist (CPN UML), the Nepali Congress made a fateful choice of convergence rather than differentiation. It embraced populist rhetoric, expanded state commitments, and blurred its economic philosophy. Over time, “democratic socialism” hardened into something more programmatically statist. It gained pace more so in the era of Sher Bahadur Deuba, party’s former leader and five time prime minister. 

This was not merely an ideological shift, it was an organisational one. The party became less a vehicle for ideas and more a coalition of factions competing for state resources. Its leaders spoke the language of redistribution while presiding over a system that delivered neither efficiency nor equity. The result was a slow erosion of credibility. To the poor, the party seemed ineffective; to the middle class, it seemed unprincipled; to the young, it became irrelevant.

After it ousted Mr. Deuba and elevated Gagan Thapa as its chairman from the special convention in January this year, the party attempted to position itself as a centrist force. A moderate alternative to both leftist radicalism and conservative reaction. But centrism, when untethered from a clear philosophy, becomes mere opportunism. Mr. Thapa did not realise that. Maybe he did not have enough time? 

On economic policy, the party oscillates between promises of welfare expansion and vague commitments to private-sector growth. On governance, it speaks of reform while perpetuating the same networks of patronage. On ideology, it invokes Koirala while ignoring his emphasis on individual freedom and institutional integrity.

This ambiguity might once have been electorally viable. It is no longer.

The general election held on March 5 has upended Nepal’s political order. The Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), a party barely a few years old and led by the former journalist Rabi Lamichhane, swept to power in a landslide that few predicted. It secured a commanding majority of 182 seats in the 275-member parliament, while the Nepali Congress was reduced to a distant second with a fraction of that tally.

The scale of the victory is unprecedented. Final counts in most constituencies showed RSP’s candidates far outpaced both the contenders of Congress and the UML. This was not a routine anti-incumbency swing. It was, in the words of observers, a “tsunami”.

The rise of the RSP cannot be understood without reference to the youth-led September protests of 2025, which toppled the UML’s KP Sharla Oli-led coalition government. The demonstration, driven by frustration with corruption, unemployment and political stagnation, created the conditions for a new kind of politics.

RSP positioned itself as the vehicle of that anti-establishment discontent. Most of its members: young, technocratic, and digitally savvy. Its PM-candidate, Balendra Shah, former mayor of capital Kathmandu, cultivated a direct connection with young voters, bypassing traditional party structures and media channels. The result is a generational realignment. 

Nepal is a young country—more than 40% of its population is under 35—and this cohort has had enough. And they displayed the youth power in the ballot box quite loudly. 

For the Nepali Congress, this is an existential threat. It is no longer competing with the ideological rival, because there are hardly any differences in Congress and RSP’s beliefs. Faced with such a challenge, the temptation for Congress is obvious: to imitate the RSP. To adopt its rhetoric, its style. But that would be a mistake. 

The RSP’s appeal lies precisely in its novelty. It is unburdened by history, untainted by governance, and unencumbered by internal factions. Five years in the government is unlikely to turn this upside down. Even if RSP fails to deliver on its promise, the party will have the excuse to sell that it took them five years just to clean the mess left behind by Congress and the Communists. 

The Nepali Congress carries the weight of decades in power. It cannot credibly present itself as an outsider. Nor can it outbid the RSP on populism without further eroding its own identity. More importantly, the RSP already occupies the space of reformist activism. If imitation is not the answer, then what is?

The Nepali Congress should return to its roots. It should embrace a coherent ideology that speaks to contemporary realities. That ideology is best described as conservative liberalism. This does not mean a retreat into reactionary politics. It means a commitment to institutional stability, market-led growth, fiscal responsibility, and social pluralism. These principles are not alien to the party’s history. They are, in fact, implicit in the vision of its founders.

Across the world, centrist parties that have survived the populist wave have done so by clarifying — not diluting — their ideological positions. In Europe, for instance, social-democratic parties have embraced market reforms while maintaining a commitment to social protection. In Asia, successful democratic parties have combined economic pragmatism with institutional conservatism.

Nepal’s context is different, but the lesson is similar. Voters reward clarity. It would be a mistake to assume RSP’s success as just a rejection of the old parties. It is a reward for a party that, however loosely defined, offered a distinct narrative. The Nepali Congress, like the CPN UML, currently holds no story to narrate.

For Congress, ideological repositioning is necessary but not sufficient. The party must also address its organisational weaknesses. First, it must renew its leadership. The dominance of ageing elites has long alienated younger voters. Second, it must reform its internal structures. Patronage and factionalism have undermined its effectiveness. Transparent processes for candidate selection and decision-making are essential. Third, it must reconnect with voters. This requires not just better communication, but a willingness to listen, to understand the frustrations that drove millions to support the RSP.

The enormous power has given RSP an opportunity to reshape the country’s political and economic landscape. If it succeeds, even partially, it will likely entrench as the dominant force for decades to come. In such a scenario, the Nepali Congress risks becoming a relic of a bygone era. So, the stakes could not be higher.

Even if the RSP falters, the space it occupies will not automatically revert to Congress. Other challengers will emerge, perhaps more radical, perhaps more disciplined. We saw the rise of the Shram Sanskriti Party, led by former mayor of Dharan, Harka Sampang, in this election. The Nepali Congress still has assets such as nationwide organisation, legacy of democratic struggle, and a reservoir of goodwill among older voters. But these assets are depreciating rapidly.

To arrest the decline, the party must make a choice. It can continue on its current path which is hedging its bets, diluting the message, and hoping for the best. Or it can undertake a more difficult but ultimately more rewarding course of redefining itself as a party of conservative liberalism. Mr. Thapa, or whoever leads the party next, should remember that brands decay long before they die. It is pretty clear that walking in the current path, there is only one destiny for the party. 

When ten Nepali students were murdered in the Hamas onslaught of 7 October 2023, Kathmandu mourned as any small nation would: funerals, vigils and urgent appeals from a government scrambling to help its nationals caught in a foreign horror. The slaughter at Kibbutz Alumim was not an abstract quarrel between distant states; it was a sequence of scenes that cost Nepali families their sons. Israel’s account and the grim reality on the ground left little doubt about who staged the initial atrocity. Yet in the two years since, public discourse in Nepal among some editors, social-media activists and self-styled intellectuals has at times blurred this sequence, turning moral outrage into a blunt instrument aimed at the wrong target. The result has been a spectacle of solidarity that sometimes looks less like grief and more like ritualised moral performance.

The death, and recent repatriation of Bipin Joshi, one of the Nepalis abducted that day and only now returned after being declared dead, makes this misdirection painfully personal. His family’s vigils and the images of candlelight processions in Kathmandu remind Nepalis of the human costs of geopolitical theatre; they also demand a sober answer to a simple question: whom did this violence begin with, and who has been principally responsible for prolonging it?

Across Western capitals and on social platforms, a new species of activism has gained purchase. Boatyards stage gestures: media-friendly flotillas, short on cargo and long on cameras, which aim less to deliver aid than to create optics of defiance. Celebrity figures who once trafficked in climate righteousness have migrated to the front row of Gaza politics, turning complex, lethal conflicts into tidy moral dramas in which emotion substitutes for judgment. The criticism is not of compassion; it is of a politics that treats feeling as evidence and performance as policy. Such acts may garner applause and headlines, but they do little to help civilians trapped in violent theatres, and worse, they distort causality. 

There are two grave errors in the prevailing performative script. The first is historical amnesia: many of the most arresting and misrepresentative slogans recast the Gaza war as a simple tale of occupation and oppression while eliding Hamas’s operational choices, the mass killings and kidnappings that lit the fuse on 7 October and the embedding of arms and fighters amid civilians thereafter. That is not to excuse indiscriminate or excessive military action; civilians have died, and accountable democracies should be held to account when they overstep. But moral clarity requires that criticism begin with facts, not with hashtags. 

The second error is moral vanity. Activism that prizes visibility over effect treats suffering as a backdrop for virtue-signalling. Boats that sail with little more than canned goods make for better pictures than HGV convoys of aid routed through established crossings; arrests and deportations make for better copy than the patient slog of negotiation, logistics and reconstruction. If one’s professed aim is the relief of human misery, the metrics ought to be lives saved and supplies delivered rather than likes and retweets. 

Nepal’s public sphere – newspapers, activists, and campus intellectuals – ought to be especially careful. Small countries are vulnerable to the seductions of moral simplicity. It is easy to substitute solidarity theatre for sober policy. Doing so risks two injustices at once: the first to the Nepali victims, whose deaths and the fates of whose families deserve clear reckoning with the facts; the second to Palestinians, whose future will not be secured by viral outrage but by political choices that remove the incentives for jihadist rule and create space for governance, reconstruction and normal life. 

Practically, this means demanding nuance in coverage, accountability in advocacy, and humility in protest. Editors should insist on reporting that distinguishes between perpetrators and victims; student groups should trade performative marches for informed forums; civil-society leaders should press, loudly and plainly, for the dismantling of armed movements that use civilian suffering as a political tool. Those who genuinely care for Palestinians should be the first to denounce the organisations that keep them mired in violence. 

There is also a geopolitical lesson. Last month’s diplomatic manoeuvres of President Donald Trump, which yielded a ceasefire and a partial resumption of aid flows, show the only route out of cycles of violence: tough, patient diplomacy, backed by pressure on the violent actors who profit from chaos. 

No serious observer denies that Gaza has suffered immensely. But those who genuinely care for Palestinians must also acknowledge who brought this suffering upon them. Hamas is not a liberation movement, it is a cult of death. Its leaders boasted of the 7 October massacres, promised to repeat them “again and again,” and have treated Palestinian civilians as expendable human props. Every rocket launched from a schoolyard, every weapon stored in a hospital, every tunnel dug beneath a refugee camp exposes Hamas’s cynicism. To pretend otherwise is moral cowardice.

Nepal’s activists claim to champion justice, yet their outrage is selective and their compassion theatrical. They rage at Israel but are mute about the slaughter of Syrians by Assad, the internment of Uyghurs by China, or the killing of Nepalis by Hamas. The anti-Israel frenzy has become less about solidarity and more about identity, a borrowed moral posture imported from the global left and recited without thought.

Hamas remains the villain of this story. It is they who pulled the trigger, who glorified the bloodshed, and who have ensured Gaza’s destruction by embedding war into its very streets. Until Nepali activists can bring themselves to say that aloud, to condemn jihad as fiercely as they condemn Israel, their moral authority will remain as hollow as their chants.