Analysing Nepal’s Gen Z revolution from a communication perspective offers interesting insights.
Most people in Nepal did not know what Discord was until September 10, when thousands of Gen Z revolutionaries used the social platform to select their prime minister candidate and finalise the agenda for negotiations with the president. Even top leaders of virtually all prominent parties—the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), the Nepali Congress (NC) and Maoist groups—were unaware of Discord until protests erupted on September 9.
Nepal’s Gen Z had been using Discord for at least two years. They had been hitting out at ‘Nepo Kids’ on Tiktok, Instagram and Reddit, but their primary platform for organising protest groups was Discord. Protesters also reportedly used Facebook, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Clubhouse and Telegram. The ruling elites, on the other hand, were largely dependent on the so-called mainstream media and, to an extent, Facebook and X.
The huge gap between the communication channels used by the elites and the youth caused problems. They were compounded by the failure of political leaders in identifying and reaching out to their audience.
The sense of discontent was strong among common people, especially the youth. As they saw it, the country was caught in a game of musical chairs between three old leaders—K.P. Sharma Oli of the CPN(UM-L), Sher Bahadur Deuba of the Nepali Congress, and Maoist leader Prachanda. As corruption, inflation and unemployment gripped Nepal, causing a mass exodus of young people to foreign countries, these leaders were competing for the post of prime minister. They turned a blind eye to Gen Z. And, with the political lines of communication largely confined to them and some dissenting groups within their parties, they could not sense the brewing rebellion.
Gen Z activists were engaged in political messaging in their own conventional way, using the channels they preferred. Having ignored the demographic, politicians could neither receive nor decode those messages. Unaware of the new audience, messages and channels involved, the politicians set themselves up for failure.
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In communication, messages can be polysemic—the same message can mean different things to different people. A modern society is also an information society, so the chances of the sender being able to control, or engineer, the decoding of messages by a receiver are slim. The leaders of the three big parties appeared unaware of this rule, or were too confident to notice it. While political leaders proclaimed that the country was developing and prospering, ordinary people decoded their rhetoric in a completely different way. For them, the establishment symbolised rampant corruption, impunity, inflation, unemployment, and outward migration. Gen Z went a step further, exposing the Nepo Kids and their affluence.
Instead of accessing the new communication channels, getting in touch with the audience, and understanding them, Prime Minister Oli and the political leadership decided to ban social media altogether. This was the trigger; the aftermath, everyone knows.
The author is head of the department of languages and mass communication, Kathmandu University