Blood and Ballots: Nepal’s Test of Justice

Grief, when it runs counter to the natural order, acquires a different weight.

A friend of mine, now in their mid-seventies, lost a child in their late thirties to a sudden accident. At that stage of life, one is meant to be handing down memories, not receiving loss. Generations are supposed to move forward quietly, passing experience from old to young. When the rhythm reverses, life itself becomes destabilized.

At seventy-five, grief is not a storm but a persistent companion. It sits beside a person, appearing in small, piercing moments: an empty chair, an unfinished sentence, a habit that no longer has a place.

If such a personal loss, natural in cause but unnatural in sequence, can quietly dismantle a life, what must be the inner world of families whose children were taken not by fate, but by force, by bullets deliberately fired? This contrast underscores Nepal’s moral failure in responding to state violence and questions the pursuit of justice.

This is not sentimental indulgence. It is a sociological and moral inquiry into the modern state, its legitimacy, and its capacity for, or lack of, justice.

On September 8 and 9, 2025, law enforcement agencies, operating under a chain of command that remains unclear, used lethal force against unarmed civilians, including schoolchildren. Eyewitness accounts, forensic details, and a leaked report reveal troubling patterns: vague orders, ignored crowd-control protocols, and a collapse of the line between containment and coercion, highlighting Nepal’s political response to state violence.

In classical political theory, the legitimacy of the state rests on a simple premise: citizens surrender certain freedoms in exchange for protection. When the state becomes the source of an existential threat, the contract inverts. Citizens are no longer shielded from violence; they are exposed to it by the very institutions designed to prevent it.

The government fell. Parliament was dissolved. In the vacuum, an interim authority emerged under former Chief Justice Madam Sushila Karki. Her appointment was framed as restoring moral order, promising that legality, justice, and moral clarity would guide the republic through crisis. This should inspire a sense of moral responsibility and reflection on leadership’s role in justice.

An investigative committee was constituted, led by a jurist whose independence and experience were limited. On the surface, this appears to be a glaring weakness. Yet in political theater, weakness can become a strength. By constraining the inquiry’s scope and shaping its methodology, the leadership revealed how narrative, procedure, and optics can be leveraged to achieve predetermined outcomes. In other words, they wrote the story while the country was still reading the headlines.

From the outset, Madam Karki’s priorities were visible. While publicly emphasizing accountability, she accelerated preparations for national elections. The committee’s mandate was narrow, structurally incomplete, and methodologically weak. It could not assign responsibility effectively. The result resembled an answer that entirely missed the question. To borrow Bhimarjun Acharya’s metaphor, it was like a student instructed to write an essay on a cow who instead produced a detailed account of a donkey.

Yet here is the clever part: the misdirection itself exposes how leadership manipulates narratives and the sociology of power. When process substitutes for justice, narrative becomes the instrument of authority, and timing dictates outcome. The committee’s limitations were deliberate, turning weakness into control, revealing how Nepal’s political leaders craft stories to serve their interests.

The election proceeded, and the Rastriya Swatantra Party gained a near two-thirds majority. Institutional timing, strategic appointments, and procedural framing advantaged a party that would have faced obstacles under genuine accountability. Public affection sometimes labeled Madam Karki “Aamaa,” a figure of maternal protection. Yet, analyzed strategically, she resembles KaiKai more: composed, deliberate, cautious in appearance, but relentless in pursuit of predetermined objectives. Ethical responsibility was subordinated to political and institutional design.

Every great political change carries its conspiracies. Kaikai always wins, and Raam always goes to the forest because duty or destiny compels withdrawal. These stories are not just myths; they are archetypes of power in action. Leadership and compliance, calculation and sacrifice, narrative and obedience, they coexist in every historical upheaval.

The Gen-Z movement, presented as organic, leaderless, and spontaneous, illustrates this dynamic vividly. Balendra Shah and Sudan Gurung, the invisible architects behind the scenes, carefully curated participation, discouraging infiltration by other groups. The result was not mere control; it was legitimacy through the appearance of authenticity. By shaping the movement’s narrative, they positioned themselves to benefit from both domestic approval and international recognition while shielding it from internal disruption.

The first rupture occurred on September 8. State forces deployed lethal violence against unarmed civilians. Nineteen schoolchildren were killed. Their deaths were immediate, brutal, and profoundly unjust. The investigative report acknowledges leadership failures, command ambiguity, and procedural lapses. It meticulously addresses the factual events of September 8. Yet it is strikingly quiet on September 9, when destruction escalated, properties were burned, and the second wave of the so-called revolution unfolded. One is compelled to ask why such silence. The omission is not accidental. It reveals how power chooses what to document and what to leave in narrative shadows.

From tragedy, a new narrative emerged. The movement demanded leadership. Balendra Shah’s name circulated, yet he declined, redirecting legitimacy toward Madam Karki, a surrogate maternal figure. This strategic deferral consolidated political capital. It ensured that the narrative remained coherent, moral legitimacy appeared intact, and subsequent institutional gains were unobstructed.

Today, the arc completes itself: Balendra Shah is Prime Minister, and Sudan Gurung is Home Minister. The architects of narrative orchestration now occupy the structures of state power. Some independent critics and pundits in mainstream and social media ask: Sudan Gurung and Balendra Shah are on a roll, hijacking the Gen-Z movement and now the Rastriya Swatantra Party. What is next?

Congratulations, Gen-Z. You formed the government. You got rid of the old, corrupt political parties. Let us hope you provide justice to the families of those martyred by your “Aamaa.” Yet the question remains: will justice follow power, or will expedience shield the architects? Time will tell if Nepal truly secures accountability.

In every revolution, sacrificial figures are inevitable. Sometimes dozens, sometimes thousands. They are elevated to martyrs, transformed into symbols, and absorbed into collective memory. Yet families do not experience martyrdom abstractly. A child standing on a balcony, observing events unfold, struck by a stray bullet, becomes a martyr in name, but the family cannot contest it. They cannot demand recompense. They cannot reclaim their loss. The dead cannot speak, and the living are rarely heard.

Declaring the deceased as martyrs, while culturally resonant, carries moral ambiguity. Martyrdom implies agency, choice, and conscious sacrifice. To apply this designation to schoolchildren or bystanders caught in state violence is to transform victims into symbols rather than restore justice. Narrative, in this sense, becomes both instrument and shield.

Modern societies are governed not only by institutions, but by stories. Power operates through defining what is central and what is peripheral. Here, killings that should occupy the moral center of national consciousness were repositioned as a prelude to democratic exercise. Collective trauma was instrumentalized. Justice became a subordinate concern.

Nepal faces a deeper risk: normalization of deferred justice. When delay becomes routine, accountability is postponed, societies adjust, and injustice becomes less shocking. Memory becomes negotiable. Responsibility diffuses. Impunity evolves from exception to cultural norm.

The quiet grief of my elderly friend offers a final reflection. Time has not healed them. It has only taught them to live alongside absence. At the national level, the same principle holds. Without acknowledgment, without accountability, without truth, collective wounds do not vanish; they embed themselves in the structure of society.

A republic is not judged by the elegance of its elections, but by the integrity of its response to injustice. Ballots can change governments, but they cannot, by themselves, deliver justice.

For families of the deceased, for the wounded carrying visible and invisible scars, and for a society that must decide what it is willing to accept, the question remains unresolved. Not what happened is known. But whether it will be named, confronted, and acted upon. Until then, the distance between blood and ballots will remain the measure

Author Subedi is a Professor of Medical Sociology at Miami University, USA