A demonstrator holding Nepal's flag celebrates at the Singha Durbar office complex, which houses the prime minister's office and other ministries, after storming it during youth led protests that toppled Nepal's prime minister, in Kathmandu, Nepal, on Sept. 9, 2025.Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters
Manjushree Thapa is a Nepali-Canadian author of 10 books of fiction, non-fiction and literary translation.
Last month, on the eve of becoming Nepal’s new prime minister, 35-year-old Balendra Shah dropped his latest rap video. Like millions in Nepal, I immediately watched it on YouTube.
Donning his signature Ray Bans, Mr. Shah belted out a fiery, jingoistic anthem called Jay Mahakaali urging national unity. Gone was the righteousness of his past videos, in which he raged against power. The footage was from the campaign that brought his party, the Rastriya Swatantra Party, only two seats away from a parliamentary supermajority. “Balen! Balen! Balen!” voters chanted as the candidate waved from makeshift stages, crowded streets and the backs of flatbed trucks. This was a declaration of victory by the country’s most powerful man.
Every time I come to Kathmandu from Toronto, I struggle to catch up with the frenetic pace of change here.
During my visit last autumn, Nepal was stunned by its own violence. Police atrocities at a “Gen Z” protest on Sept. 8 and widespread arson attacks that followed had claimed at least 77 lives. The government lay in ruins. The public mood was bleak.
Demonstrators celebrate as smoke rises from a fire set at the Parliament complex during protests in Kathmandu, Nepal, on Sept. 9, 2025.Adnan Abidi/Reuters
When I returned following successful elections this spring, the mood was ebullient.
Millennials had stormed into power on the strength of the Gen Z movement.
On X, I watched clips of the new parliament taking the oath of office in a nondescript hall with which it had to make do, since the parliament building had been set on fire in September. The median age of the MPs was 45. The oldest member of Mr. Shah’s cabinet was 51, and the youngest, 29.
If my generation, Gen X, had suddenly aged out, it was because of our hopeless loyalty to Nepal’s old parties of liberal and left persuasion. We knew they were dismal at governance. But we saw them sacrifice all to bring democracy to Nepal in 1990. We joined them in saving democracy from assault by the far-left during a 10-year Maoist insurgency that began in 1996, and by the far-right during a military coup by Nepal’s last king in 2005.
Through these and other ructions, the left/liberal parties promulgated a constitution in 2015 that turned Nepal into a secular and inclusive federal democratic republic.
Prime Minister of Nepal Balendra Shah takes a selfie with children and supporters during a door-to-door election campaign on Feb. 16.PRAKASH MATHEMA/AFP/Getty Images
From its founding in 2022, Mr. Shah’s party of self-described conservatives bristled against the Canadian-style federation of strong provinces that this constitution established. They preferred a powerful executive prime minister instead. On its first day in office, the cabinet released an ambitious plan which included all-party consultations on possible constitutional amendments.
It also promised reform through tech and non-tech solutions, including a rash of sensationalist arrests which saw KP Sharma Oli, the prime minister during the Gen Z movement, hauled into police custody on manslaughter charges.
Not everyone applauded these populist measures. Computer scientist Dovan Rai was speaking out about social media manipulation well before the Gen Z movement, which famously coalesced on a quasi-anonymous gaming platform, Discord. Mr. Shah and his party owed much of their electoral victory to their savvy deployment of social media before and after that movement. When I saw Ms. Rai write on Facebook that she saw “a glimpse of a wanna-be fascist,” in the new prime minister, I met her to ask if she could parse through the spectre of technofascism in Nepal.
“There’s always been a yearning for a benevolent dictator here,” Ms. Rai explained. If the far-right couldn’t emerge till now, it was because they were every bit as mediocre as the country’s democratic forces, she said. They developed new expertise during the extremely-online Gen Z movement.
Ms. Rai maintained that the far-right had waged “psychological warfare” on Nepal’s democracy by burning down its symbols during that movement. Even before Mr. Shah took office amid jarringly religious pageantry, she believed that his government could, and would, usher in authoritarianism: “Soft Hindu fundamentalism, soft fascism.” One needed only to look across the border to Narendra Modi’s India for an example.
This warning disquieted me. Mr. Shah and his party were inescapable on TikTok, which alone consumes nearly 40 per cent of Nepal’s available bandwidth. At social gatherings, in parks, at temples, I watched people performing in front of their phone cameras, trying to produce viral reels. And I realized that the country’s public discourse was taking place not IRL, but in post-literate forums online, with memes, fake news and AI slop in the mix.
A Rastriya Swatantra Party supporter photographs a friend in front of a large banner depicting party leader Balendra Shah during an election rally in Chitwan, approximately 180 kilometres west of Kathmandul, on Feb. 27.Niranjan Shrestha/The Associated Press
My anxieties eased somewhat after I met up with University of Toronto educated scholar-activist Sabin Ninglekhu.
He saw the dangers of populist politics. Yet Mr. Shah’s party contained several factions, he said. Mr. Shah’s was the most popular one. Another was headed by his party’s charismatic if ethically compromised president Rabi Lamichhane, currently battling multiple fraud charges in court. A third one consisted of celebrities and influencers.
Mr. Ninglekhu held out hope for two other factions. One consisted of young activists who rose to prominence on an anti-corruption platform. And then there were the professionals in Mr. Shah’s cabinet. Armed with PhDs, masters degrees, and a host of other qualifications, they represented the single most educated government in Nepal’s history.
The coming months will reveal which brand of conservatism Mr. Shah himself, and the rest of his party, will pursue in power. Meanwhile, civil society must stay vigilant to guard Nepal’s hard-won liberties.
It was already doing so. Less than a month into the new government’s tenure, leaders of the Gen Z movement were already calling out its early excesses. The media was also reporting fearlessly, acting as watchdogs. And writers were writing, painters were painting, and singers were singing in the spirited tradition of opposing social and political injustice.
On a rainy evening I entered a crowded theatre to watch poet Ujjwala Maharjan release a new rap video. Its title, Apwoh Misa, translates into “Girls Who are Extra.” Ms. Maharjan and her artistic collaborators rapped, recited, and crooned in English, Nepali, and Ms. Maharjan’s mother tongue, Nepal-bhasa, urging girls and women to demand more than society allowed them.
They soon had the audience chanting: “Gimme extra extra!”
I was roused by the joyous feminism on display. I was also moved by the story of Ms. Majarjan’s journey into rap. Growing up in the Indigenous Newar community, Ms. Maharjan spoke a “low” vernacular form of Nepal-bhasa at home. The language of literature, by contrast, was “high.” Ms. Maharjan found her voice only after encountering Philadelphia’s rappers while she was studying at the University of Pennsylvania.
And so here she was, rapping in the vernacular in favour of liberation:
I’m claiming my space now
gimme extra extra
Raising my voice loud
gimme extra extra
This, I thought, is what rap does. It fights the power.
I joined the crowd in chanting the feisty chorus: “Gimme extra extra!”