Young Nepalis Are Outraged by the Govt's Pandemic Response. Critics Say They Should Be Protesting About More

Since June 9, large groups of young people in Nepal have been taking to the streets in various towns and cities across the country to demand a better response from the government in handling the COVID-19 crisis.

Facilitated by a Facebook group called “Covid-19 Nepal: Enough is Enough” that has over 200,000 members, protests have been spontaneous, sporadic, and largely led by middle and upper-middle-class people in urban areas.

The protestors are demanding that the government expand PCR testing, a more reliable test for COVID-19 than RDT which has led to misdiagnoses and deaths; fix the quarantine strategy, which has been to leave large groups of people in buildings without adequate food and water; protect healthcare workers; provide relief for migrant workers who have been stranded at the Nepal-India border or abroad; increase medical capacity and stop corruption.

There have been over 13,000 cases of COVID-19 in Nepal, and the frustration at the government response comes from the already-existing weaknesses of a barebones public healthcare system being exacerbated by allegations of massive corruption and misallocation of funds.

In early April, several senior members of the government were accused of taking kickbacks from the money that had been allocated for the purchase of personal protective equipment (PPE). There were delays in the delivery of testing machines and some of the machines that were purchased did not work.

Since then, much of the responsibility for purchasing PPE and testing has been given to the Nepali Army, which does not fall within the purview of the country’s corruption watchdog agency. The Army has also been accused of corruption and mismanagement. Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli has repeatedly made statements underplaying the seriousness of the crisis, stating that the virus is like the flu and can be dealt with by drinking hot water.

While the COVID-19 protestors have been critical of government policy, they have been insistent that they are not “anti-government” per se.

“We are the government’s friends,” 26-year-old Kathmandu native Iih, one of the leaders of the protest, told VICE News on June 30. “Without a proper strategy to manage the crisis there will be a lot more frustration and riots will start breaking out, which is not good for the people or the government.”

Bhaskar Gautam, a political scientist who has written extensively about Nepal’s social movements, critiqued the protestors’ unwillingness to take a clear critical stand against the government.

“For the protests to have consolidated, deepened, and had a clear direction, a strategic decision needed to be made to challenge the nationalist rhetoric, but many of the protestors seem like they are embedded in the nationalism themselves, which has limited their ability to hold the powers accountable,” Gautam said.

The COVID-19 protests come at a time when other grievances against the government have also piled up, most notably, state apathy towards the killing of Dalits—members of castes that were once considered untouchable—and the passing of a citizenship bill that discriminates against women and gender minorities.

Many Dalit activists have been taking to the streets since late May when six young Dalit men from a village in western Nepal were lynched after one of them tried to marry a girl from a dominant caste. The government response was to underplay the seriousness of the crime: the Home Minister said that the young men ran and jumped into the river.

There has also been a spate of smaller protests against the passing of a citizenship amendment bill that places restrictions on women passing citizenship to their children in the absence of an identifiable father, a seven-year waiting period for foreign women marrying into Nepal to obtain citizenship and a requirement for trans people to “prove” gender transition through medical certificates in order to get citizenship that corresponds with their gender.

Many of the issues with the current government led by the Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) come from the feeling that it is exclusionary towards women, marginalised caste groups and ethnic minorities.

The ruling party came to power through a people’s movement which culminated in the toppling of the monarchical regime in 2006, but many perceive the revolution to have failed in important ways. A new Constitution was promulgated in 2015, a result of the demand of the 2006 people’s movement to radically restructure the state, but the Constitution enshrined Federalism that was rejected by a large section of the population and rolled back some affirmative action measures that had been instated to combat historical exclusion.

Dalits and women are underrepresented in the Parliament, the judiciary, and even when they are represented, critics say that there are roadblocks to substantive participation.

While protestors concerned with the Dalit killings and the citizenship bill have been expressing discontent with the make-up and priorities of the government in structural terms, the COVID-19 protestors have been narrower in their focus, critiquing the public health response specifically.

Dhana Sunar, a former commissioner at the National women’s commission and an active member of the Dalit movement, said, “The COVID-19 protestors are clearly doing something good. I wonder if their lack of participation in the Dalit movement comes from the fact that they don’t see Dalit and women’s issues as ‘national’ issues in the same kind of way as public health policy, which is a problem.”

The insistence on the moral righteousness and non-partisan “apolitical” nature of the movement may have mobilised many of the young COVID-19 protestors, but the absence of a clear political program and the articulation of the problems in technical rather than structural terms is a potential pitfall.

“I am impressed by the organisational ingenuity of the young protestors,” Bhaskar Gautam said, “but the second phase of protests is a crucial time. Without setting specific goals to challenge the power structure, the movement can be very easily derailed.”

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