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Nepal is days away from electing a new House of Representatives on March 5. This is an election born out of one of the most dramatic political upheavals the country has witnessed in recent time. The GenZ protests of Sept 8–9, shook the foundations of the Nepali Congress and CPN-UML-led coalition government, forced the dissolution of Parliament, and propelled former Chief Justice Sushila Karki into the role of interim Prime Minister. In many ways, this election carries the weight of a nation’s renewed hope to bring the constitutional processes on track.  And yet, something is quietly poisoning that hope—not a foreign enemy, not a natural disaster, but something far more insidious: a flood of propaganda that is dividing Nepalese society in ways that may take years to repair. This is not the first election Nepal has held in the wake of political transformation. But it may be the first where the election campaign itself has become more dangerous than the political crisis that preceded it. Across social media feeds, public rallies, and private conversations, Nepali citizens and political cadres are not debating policy, rather they are choosing sides in a war of narratives. And the longer this goes on unchecked, the harder it will be to put the country back together once the votes are counted. A campaign built on slogans Walk through the current election campaign landscape and one phrase captures the spirit of it all: ‘Desh banaune ra desh jalaune’—those who will build the country and those who will burn it. It sounds dramatic. It is meant to. And therein lies the problem. Nearly every major political force, either old or new, has reduced the complexity of Nepal’s governance challenges into a simple binary: us versus them, nationalists versus traitors, reformers versus the corrupt establishment. Nepali Congress, reinvigorated under Gagan Thapa following a special party convention, presents itself as a fresh political alternative.  The newly formed Nepali Communist Party (NCP), which brought together nearly a dozen leftist factions after the September protests, also claims to represent a new dawn. The Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), with Balen Shah now formally in its ranks and declared as their prime ministerial candidate, pitches itself as the true outsider ready to dismantle the old order. Meanwhile, CPN (UML) under KP Sharma Oli, who led the government during the protests that triggered this election, is somehow also claiming the nationalist high ground. The problem is not that parties are presenting themselves favorably. Every political party in every democracy does that. The problem is that these competing narratives have little to do with actual governance proposals. Manifestoes promise extraordinary things: CPN (UML) pledges one million youth jobs in five years. RSP commits to per capita income crossing $3,000 USD. Others promise to slash corruption overnight and send corrupt leaders to jail, without specifying a single credible legal mechanism for doing so. These are not policy platforms. They are propaganda dressed in the language of policy. Old wounds reopened, new fractures created Perhaps the most telling sign of how propaganda-driven this election campaign has become is the return of debates that most people assumed were settled by the 2015 Constitution. The monarchy question, which was resolved when Nepal became a federal democratic republic, is somehow back on the table. The Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) has made monarchy restoration a central demand, positioning itself as the only truly nationalist force, implying that everyone else is, to varying degrees, compromised by foreign interests and imposing foreign agenda. The “who is a nationalist” debate has spread like wildfire. CPN (UML), despite bearing significant political responsibility for what happened during the Sept 2025 protests, now presents itself as a bulwark against foreign interference. RSP’s candidate Sobita Gautam and others were labeled “American agents” on social media—a claim later fact-checked and found to be based on a deliberately misleading photograph. Manipulated AI-generated images of Gagan Thapa being chased by crowds were widely circulated before being debunked. According to Nepal Fact Check, such incidents are not isolated—they reflect a systematic effort to use digital tools to shape perception rather than inform it. A recent survey by the Center for Media Research Nepal found that over 95 percent of online users in Nepal had encountered false information at some point. With 73 percent of Nepalis now using smartphones and over 37 percent having internet access according to the 2021 National Census, the infrastructure for mass misinformation has never been more complete. Beyond the monarchy-versus-federalism divide, the Sept 8–9 protests themselves have become a battleground of competing narratives. Sept 8, when security forces killed protesters in the streets, is remembered by some as a day of martyrdom and used by RPP as evidence of state brutality under the then-ruling coalition. Sept 9, when mobs destroyed public and private property, is the image CPN (UML) prefers to amplify, using it to question the legitimacy of the entire protest movement—while staying conspicuously silent about the bloodshed the day before. Nepali Congress and the Nepali Communist Party have taken a more measured position, acknowledging the protests and calling for an independent investigation into both days. But measured voices struggle to compete in an environment where outrage is the currency of engagement. The invisible global agenda One of the quieter failures of this election campaign is the near-complete absence of serious debate on the issues that will most shape Nepal’s future over the next decade. Climate change, which threatens Nepal’s glaciers and water security. The restructuring of the global economy, which directly affects remittances—currently surging by over 32 percent and sustaining a foreign reserve of $22.47bn, but fragile nonetheless.  Youth unemployment and economic inequalities, which were the original fuel behind the GenZ protests. These are the issues that demand substantive policy discussion. Instead, what voters are getting feels less like a parliamentary election and more like a local government campaign—personal, parochial, and driven by personality over platform. Meanwhile, some leaders, including deposed King Gyanendra, have stated that Nepal’s very existence as a sovereign nation is in question, that the country is ‘close to a major accident’. These are extraordinarily alarming things to say, and they are being said without a shred of evidence. When leaders speak this way without backing, they are not sounding alarm bells, rather they are manufacturing fear. And manufactured fear is one of the oldest and most effective propaganda tools known to politics. What happens the morning after When the results come in the following week of March 5, one side will have won and several will have lost. But the deeper question is: what kind of country will Nepal be when the campaign posters come down? Polarization of the kind being manufactured right now does not disappear after election day. It settles into communities, strains friendships, fractures families, and hardens into the kind of social division that festers for years. None of the current political forces, neither the so-called new ones nor the established ones, seem interested in stepping back from the propaganda machine. Because, simply put, it works. At least in the short term. This is precisely why the responsibility now falls on those who stand outside the electoral arena: civil society, independent media, academic institutions, and think tanks. Nepal urgently needs serious investment in propaganda fact-checking, not as a reactive exercise after falsehoods have gone viral, but as a proactive, institutionalized function embedded in the election cycle. Organizations like Nepal Fact Check are doing valuable work, but they cannot carry this alone. Tech platforms operating in Nepal, the Election Commission of Nepal, and policy bodies need to come together to build the infrastructure like technical tools, regulatory guidelines, and public literacy programs that can hold propaganda accountable in real time. There is also a deeper structural issue. Many of the propaganda narratives that have taken hold during this election campaign—about the September protests, about foreign interference, about the monarchy, about federalism—thrive precisely because there has been no credible, independent, evidence-based account of these events that the public can trust. When authoritative information is absent, rumor and spin fill the vacuum.  Nepal needs white papers from concerned authorities, investigative reporting from independent media, policy briefs from research institutions, and reels and TikTok videos from ethical content creators that can put facts on the table with enough credibility and reach to shift the public conversation. The question, honestly, is whether Nepal has yet built the institutional capacity to do this. If not, that capacity needs to become a priority after this election, regardless of who wins. A paradigm shift Nepal cannot afford to delay Nepal has come a long way from a decade-long armed conflict to a constitutional republic with federal democratic governance. That journey was not easy, and it was not free. Thousands of lives and decades of struggle went into building the political framework that now exists. To watch that framework hollowed out by propaganda, not by armed insurgents, but by politicians with microphones and social media accounts, should concern every Nepali citizen deeply. The March 5 election will happen. A government will be formed. But the work of preventing propaganda from becoming the permanent language of Nepali politics must begin the moment the voting ends. Civil society must speak louder. Journalists must hold the line. Citizens must demand more from their leaders than clever slogans and manufactured fear. Because a country that chooses its leaders based on who tells the most convincing lies is not choosing its future—it is surrendering it. The author currently serves as a Visiting Research Fellow at Kroc Institute of International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, USA. The author writes on political affairs, peace, governance, and social policy in Nepal