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Iih, whose original name is Ishan, is in news after completing 23 days of hunger strike (satyagraha). The 24 years old tall and handsome young man has been a known figure in protests in Kathmandu for many years now. He has completed second round of satyagraha, this week, against the criminal ineptitude and negligence this government has shown in issues of health in this pandemic.

Less than a month ago, he had led and completed a satyagraha for 12 days, along with Pukar Bam, against the same issue. It had ended with an agreement signed between them and government representatives. Bam is a PhD candidate, and a member of the youth-based political party Bibeksheel Nepali Dal, and has already fought two elections.

But Iih is an interesting phenomenon. He has come into limelight in many avatars. Originally Ishan, he doesn’t like to be called by that name, and doesn’t use his surname at all. From a well-to-do Kathmandu family and involved in political activism early in life, at the age of 15 he left home for such explorations, and has carved a place for himself slowly with a definitive assuredness.

He has swayed, zigzagged along the way. Once always seen fashioning a black Bhadgaule topi, he was part of the Hinduist Rashtriya Prajatantra Party led by Kamal Thapa, he was for some time part of the Bibeksheel, but has mostly been an independent activist. He is seen building alliances as well as character, in a slow yet steady manner, with a level of clarity much beyond his age.

The ‘Enough is Enough’ campaign initiated through his Instagram posts led to huge protests on streets all over the country. Hundreds of thousands of people marched on to the street defying the pandemic situation, ironically, demanding better government response to the pandemic. The satyagraha followed that. And the second satyagraha just ended this week with a record of 23 days of fasting.

The building of this movement and momentum hasn’t been easy. He has been supported individually and institutionally. He has mostly survived on the grace of friends in Kathmandu, and has been generating support and resources through his convincing.

During the protests, the core group that was formed centered around the Facebook group called ‘Enough is Enough’ got divided on the delicate issue of whether to protest or not on the day the New Emblem with the new map was proposed in the parliament. Many of the core team thought that the protest should be called off for the day, as it was sure to be manipulated by the Indian media and presented as a protest against the government stand on Lipulek and Limpiyadhura. But Iih thought otherwise.

The core team members had bitter arguments. Some of them were also unhappy that the protests were getting a political hue. Some core members of the steering team were members of the Bibeksheel Nepali Dal, and many influential celebrity protestors were angry that they were made to feel like pawns in a clandestine Grand Design that was controlled for a political cause.

Iih, however, ignoring the naiveté of the celebrity activists, seems to have navigated all this and trudged forward. He had a clarity on the strategy, and the way he had to fight the battle.

All his endeavors have continuously nudged the youth towards seeking a more aware role in the socio-political arena. He is a source of envy for many aspiring leaders, but he is inspiring too. Many leaders from different parties joined him in support for his fight. Iih seems on the path to build a greater coalition and support around him. Or, he might have to stand apart to stay tall.

But there is another young man who came in the news, and his image will be etched in our memory for a long time, as a symbol of the strange and precarious predicament of the Nepal society in the third decade of the 21^st century.

Nabaraj BK will now be remembered by the picture of a rustically handsome young man wearing a black Dhaka Topi and carrying the national flag attached to his rucksack, the picture that was splashed across news portals and social media. He was killed brutally and thrown into the river Bheri two months back.

A Dalit, and from a geographically distant land Kathmandu knows as the fortress of the Maoists, Nabaraj is a representative of the most marginalized community of Nepal and was killed by a group of upper caste men because he attempted to cross the lines of propriety set by the society, for his love. Strangely, the Maoists are hell-bent on protecting the perpetrators of the heinous crime, while the upper caste Thakuri community shows a hubris flared by the assurance of impunity.

From all we know of Nabaraj, he was a promising young man with a drive and patriotism not less in any way than Iih’s. But Nabaraj grabbed the headlines only after his death.

Somewhere, somehow, even after seven decades of fight for liberation, the fight for dignity of this oppressed community has failed to get a political voice in Nepal. The DalitLivesMatter hashtag came into being only after the George Floyd’s killing in America created a cyclonic effect with the BlacklivesMatter.

The nature of Nepali society shows severe inadequacy in being inclusive. Power is centered in and around Kathmandu and among the upper caste people. The mass that surged onto the streets following Iih’s call for action are the representative voice of the privileged youth of this country. And they have displayed a hunger for change. But a true dedication for social justice demands more. 

Why does sensitivity of Nabaraj's death have to be routed through America to get its space in the urban youth’s radar in Nepal? Are the fights that Nabaraj had to fight in Rukum aligned to the wars Iih is waging at Basantapur? I believe not. But I believe the day these fights become one, we will have the beginning of a new revolution.

Those invested in the political system in Nepal are either living in a state of denial or day-dreaming, and that includes the pro-democracy intelligentsia. It should not take much deliberation to conclude that Nepal is a failed state, infected with political decadence beyond correction, characterized by kleptocracy and mafia-rule.

What is on display in Nepal today, in front of one of the youngest populations in the world, is not just befuddling stupidity. It’s a relentless interplay of criminal intents among the political forces. Polity has lost its ground of ideals and discarded all pretense of justice. It’s rather entangled in a naked power-play.

This era of technological shift has unforgivingly un-flattened the world in favor of the nations ruled by adept and collaborative leaders. It has rewarded societies led with well thought out strategy. And leaders with hardcore dedication to commit to the ideals, in the midst of a global crisis that has shattered power structures, have emerged as heroes.

Unfortunately, none of this is true in Nepal. What is worse, we have a concoction of criminal intent and a feudal hunger for power in most of the leaders at the helm.

We have wasted 30 years of democracy driven by the political parties that came as a replacement of the Panchayati democracy. With the king ousted, there is no one to be blamed. Therefore, the slow disappearance of hope is not just disheartening, it’s utterly confusing for the youth and has become a serious threat for democracy itself.

Is there hope for change? Is there a way out of this crisis? What will lead us out—a change to Presidential system, a new political party emerging as an alternative, or the present parties correcting themselves to be better version of themselves?

There is no indicator of any of these happening soon.

As the ruling party, led by KP Sharma Oli, and Pushpa Kamal Dahal, is in the middle of a fierce power struggle, the whole country is forced to watch in angst. The power of a near two-thirds majority is almost wasted. What could have been an opportunity to fortify growth through policy reforms and game changing infrastructure development, has been turned into an era of senseless stalemate. Half the government’s term has passed, and we are not even sure the parliament will complete its tenure.

Self-survival has become the only issue that the government is worried about. And the challengers are from the ruling party itself.

But how about the alternatives? The picture is gloomy everywhere.

The Nepali Congress, in the role of opposition, has utterly failed. And now, it also seems to be engulfed in a power struggle of its own, with the party convention planned at the end of this year. Recently, an ex-Mahamantri was expelled from the party for five years. Sher Bahadur Deuba, the current party president, has taken initiatives to fortify his hold over the party.

The Koiralas, who have been in charge of the party for 49 years since BP Koirala founded it 79 years ago, are trying to get the hold back. Shashank Koirala (BP’s youngest son) will probably claim the leadership.

More than half of Nepal’s population is under 25, and in the next election in less than three years more than 20 percent of voters will be new. That is a huge chunk of the electorate, and because they will all be young they will look for fresh, youthful leaders. This is where the NC disappoints as an alternative. Gagan Thapa, the charismatic leader of a new generation, hasn't shown a clear indication of staking leadership.

This is the gloomy state of affairs. And there seems to be no plausible best-case scenario out if this muddle. And there appears no end to the instability; in last 70 years, we have seen a change of government 42 times.

Will there be a rise of an alternative political force that can downsize the present political parties? Will we have a real stability anytime soon? The answer seems to be a ‘No’ on both counts. At least not without a revolution.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. When the polity indulges in dark self-serving pursuits, and the people have lost all hope from the system, political revolutions are the only option left. Will Nepali youth rise to the challenge that time has imposed on them?

If you are an outsider in Nepal, the handout your outpost provides you must have elaborately covered the seismic dangers. But it probably needs a complimentary explainer about this equally volatile realpolitik zone. This is my attempt.

For the sake of clarity, let’s cover it in three bullet points: do not trust the elites; forget everything that you know about political and ideological categorization; and, federalism as a political experiment, so far, has misfired.

Let’s tackle them one by one.

As all forces, internal or external, needed the elites of Kathmandu to manage the country, these forces danced to the tunes of the powerful. But the vice versa was also true, up to an extent. These forces helped King Mahendra overthrow an elected government and have consistently been partners in crime in every plunder that has taken place in this country. As a result, one can observe with some discretion that Nepal has become a country run by selfish elites without devotion or dignity.

Writers experienced in statecraft, like Rishikesh Shah and Lokraj Baral, have hinted about the parasitic and disgraceful nature of the elites of Kathmandu and how this has proliferated all the state machineries. (‘Essays on the practice of governance in Nepal’ by Shah; ‘Nation state in Wilderness’ by Baral).

By showing neither the gumption nor the determination to be the pathfinders, the elites have betrayed the nation. They have been the silent observers in every political change but have jumped in the fray to benefit the most after every transition.

Strangely, this nature of the Kathmandu elites hasn’t changed even after the democratic movements and the mainstreaming of the Maoists. The revolutionaries took the place of the elites, but borrowed their character too and got sucked into the bandwagon of shameless skullduggery. 

The servitude to influential powers has increased and the attitude to always look for the low-hanging fruits is more evident than ever. For example, the finance minister of the Nepal Communist Party recently said that the government would encourage the youths to go abroad.

Connected to this is our second point: forget everything you learnt about political ideological categorization. It’s confusing in Nepal.

The Maoists, who launched a decade-long armed struggle, came to mainstream politics aligned with the other democratic forces to overthrow the king. In the past seven decades, Nepal hasn’t really seen a revolution. It has always creeped from one change to another, without truly delinking itself from the past, and yet pretending to have adopted some newness.

The three milestones in the journey towards progress in the past 70 years—1950, 1990 and 2006—are significant as a whole but not revolutionary on their own. The 1950 overthrowing of the Rana regime came as a compromise that left room for the coup. The 1990 people’s movement came merely as a score settling of the 1959-60 coup, and the feudal and Kathmandu centric equilibrium made the Maoist war possible.

The overthrowing of monarchy came out of the blue, but the elites failed in institutionalizing the change. The constitution was a result of a compromise between descendants of different ideological interest groups and the lines were blurred beyond distinction over the long years of transition politics. The state hasn’t yet come out clean on war crimes and justice, nor has the issues of institutional discriminations been fully addressed. In fact, the polity has been on a downward spiral since being hit by a worldwide wave of populism.

So, this lack of an ideological commitment lies at the center of the political decay in Nepal today. Nepal has become a nation ruined by crony capitalism with words like ‘socialism’ used for cosmetic purposes in the constitution.

As Nepal lacks an elite class that can stand for its dignity, and political forces deeply committed to their ideologies, all the political experiments here have backfired. Our latest attempt at finding the ‘One Cure’ for all the ailments led us to federalism. But the indicators suggest it is turning out to be a disaster.

Local governments are not running any better than in the earlier set up. The constitution has put the governments of the three levels on an equal footing with coexistence and collaboration as the binding principle, but in practice the center controls the resources.

This paradox has turned federalism into a costly misadventure. State governments everywhere are jobless and purposeless, adding to the financial burden without making an iota of difference in people’s lives or nation building. This federal government, with a huge mandate, had the historic responsibility to institutionalize the change and stabilize politics. Sadly, it has failed its people, many times over.

When we connect the dots, we see a grim picture. Nepal seems to be in an endless downward spiral of political decay that is accentuated by a head of government who seems to have no control over his faculties.

If you are an outsider in Nepal, this for you is grim but probably not heart-wrenching. But for those in this country, it’s a different story.

We need to find the dignity and the devotion to tackle it.