By Binod Dhakal

Nepal’s recent Gen Z protests were not simply an outburst of generational anger. They were the eruption of a long and festering delusion at the heart of the Nepali state. What unfolded in September 2025 was not a clash between government and citizens but between reality and illusion. The political class, insulated from the social body, operates as though the state were a coherent organism, while ordinary people inhabit a parallel world of unemployment, migration, and disillusion. The distance between these worlds has now become the most defining feature of Nepali politics.

The Nepali state, for decades, has lived in a condition of misrecognition. It believes itself to be a democracy, yet behaves as a closed oligarchy. It imagines its economy as self-sustaining, while depending almost entirely on the sweat of those who labor abroad. It praises inclusion and modernity, but its institutions are held captive by medieval patronage. This is not merely hypocrisy; it is a collective illusion that sustains a political order incapable of seeing itself as it truly is.

Recent figures from the Nepal Rastra Bank(central bank of Nepal) show remittance inflows surpassing all previous records. That money, earned by over a million Nepalis scattered around the world including the Gulf, Malaysia,Korea, Australia, Europe and US, now constitutes more than a quarter of Nepal’s GDP. It feeds the families of the working poor, funds urban consumption, and props up the illusion of stability. Yet remittance is also the mirror of failure. Every rupee that arrives is a silent reminder of a state that could not offer work or dignity at home. It is the lifeblood of the poor and the narcotic of the elite. It allows the government to postpone reform while claiming growth. The streets of Kathmandu gleam with imported cars bought from remittance money, while the villages that supply that labor empty of youth and hope.

Unemployment has become the central wound of Nepali society. The youth unemployment ratehovers far above regional averages, and even those counted as employed are trapped in informal, insecure work. A generation has grown up watching their elders toil abroad and their leaders squander opportunities at home. It is no wonder that the young no longer believe in institutions. The protests, though sparked by a single issue, were an indictment of decades of neglect, of a system that rewards loyalty over equity, and of an economy that excludes the very people it depends on.

The delusion is not confined to politicians. It pervades the entire architecture of power. The Nepal Army, constitutionally tasked with defending the nation, now operates as a corporate entity , investing in construction, hydropower, and housing. When a military becomes an economic stakeholder, it ceases to be a neutral guardian of sovereignty. It becomes a custodian of the status quo. The fusion of force and finance turns the army into both protector and profiteer, and in doing so, blurs the boundary between the public good and institutional greed.

The universities, once the seedbeds of critical thought, have collapsed into bureaucratic silence. Professors whisper, students migrate, and knowledge has been replaced by credentialism. Nepal has no living tradition of social critique; the intellectual class either serves political patrons or survives in exile. Without independent thought, politics becomes a theater of repetition. Each crisis is narrated as new, yet each ends the same. No lasting reform, no collective awakening, no shift in consciousness.

Journalism, too, has been hollowed out. The once vibrant press now trades in fear and obedience. Most outlets have become extensions of corporate or political patronage. The symbolic irony reached its height when almost all major Nepali portals uncritically cited a New York Times articlethat speculated about preplanned arson during the protests. Instead of investigating the conditions that led to public rage, they echoed foreign narratives as if validation must come from abroad. The incident revealed a profound epistemic crisis. The Nepali media, stripped of confidence, now depends on foreign authority to interpret its own reality. The national imagination itself has become outsourced.

The myth of development and stability

The philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis once wrote that every society is sustained by its imaginary institutions—those stories it tells itself to make sense of its existence. Nepal’s tragedy is that its stories no longer align with its lived reality. The political elite clings to the myth of development and stability, while the majority live through dislocation and despair. The collective imagination of the state remains trapped in a fantasy of progress even as its social fabric unravels.

This delusion expresses itself through ritual. Leaders inaugurate half-built bridges, cut ribbons for projects financed by debt, and praise their own success in speeches few believe. Bureaucrats and ministers perform governance as ceremony. The Parliament sits, debates, and adjourns, but the machinery beneath it no longer moves. It is not corruption alone that paralyzes the state; it is the deeper sickness of make-believe. Nepal acts out the gestures of democracy without embodying its spirit.

The absence of an intelligentsia intensifies this void. The state fears intellect because intellect threatens illusion. Critical voices are marginalized as radical or unpatriotic. Academics who question official narratives are silenced by institutional lethargy. Public discourse has been reduced to noise—tweets, slogans, and reactionary outbursts. In such a vacuum, protest becomes the only remaining language of truth. The streets are now the sole university where the young learn to articulate discontent.

But the tragedy of these protests lies in their ephemerality. They rise and vanish without transforming structures. The same police that repress today will guard tomorrow’s new cabinet. The same ministries that promise reform will bury reports. The cycle of anger and forgetting repeats because the system itself feeds on confusion. Every institution—political, military, academic, media—is entangled in the same web of self-deception. The collective psyche of the state has become incapable of self-recognition.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once said that domination is most effective when it is misrecognized as natural. In Nepal, inequality persists because it is experienced as fate, not injustice. The poor internalize deprivation as destiny, while the powerful justify privilege as competence. This is the ultimate delusion—the normalization of absurdity. When a state cannot distinguish exploitation from order, repression from discipline, or governance from spectacle, it ceases to be political in any meaningful sense.

The September Gen Z protests, then, were less a rebellion against authority and more a cry for recognition. They revealed not only anger at the rulers but also the absence of any believable alternative. The youth are not merely protesting unemployment; they are protesting unreality itself. Their revolt is ontological as much as political—a demand that the state wake from its dream.

Nepal lacks lucidity, not potential 

The lesson is not that Nepal lacks potential. It lacks lucidity. A delusional state cannot reform because reform requires the capacity to perceive truth. The first act of liberation, therefore, is epistemic: to see the nation as it is, not as it pretends to be. The political class must abandon its fictions of stability, the army its fiction of benevolence, the media its fiction of independence, and the citizens their fiction of helplessness. Only then can politics become a field of possibility rather than of performance.

Until that awakening, Nepal will remain trapped in its own dream. It will keep mistaking remittance for prosperity, migration for mobility, and repression for order. Its leaders will continue to speak of reform even as they reproduce decay. Its journalists will quote foreign voices because their own have gone mute. And its youth will continue to rise, burn, and disperse—haunting the streets of a state that no longer knows itself.

For now, the delusion remains intact. The lights of Kathmandu still glow, the speeches still echo, the ceremonies still proceed. But beneath that glitter lies a nation suspended between memory and amnesia, reality and fantasy. The Gen Z revolt has cracked the mirror. Whether Nepal dares to look into it is the only question that matters.

(The author is coordinator of Nepalnews.com English edition and can be reached at binoddhakal75@gmail.com)