The Tamesis
April 9, 2026
kathmandu – A well-meaning friend made a non-social media post (a term that hints at the unethical nature of such platforms) asking for my opinion. The text is cryptic and no names are mentioned, making it difficult to assess its context. The message, however, marked a worrying spiral of silence following the formation of an ostensibly ideological but essentially neoconservative government that holds nearly two-thirds of the seats in the newly elected Platinidi parliament.
Since the content is not attributable, I believe sharing it publicly without authentication is allowed. The citation reads: “Nepal’s top diplomat has announced that starting today he will no longer speak or write letters and will impose a self-imposed suspension. Not only will he not post on social media, but he also told me that he will not make any comments to the media. He said this applies to journalists and mainstream media as well. Very tragic.”
That last sentence – “very tragic” – hits the nail on the head. Elected regimes with authoritarian tendencies rely on enforced quiet, fearing that even a hint of overt control could spark unrest. If democratic legitimacy is used as a political weapon to enforce self-censorship, speaking out is no longer optional—it becomes an obligation for every concerned citizen, no matter how lonely or costly the act.
The trend toward self-regulation was most evident in the recent internal split within the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist-Leninist Party. Not all party members agree with the statement made by Congress leader Ram Bahadur Thapa in the House, but the speed at which party workers have distanced themselves from his views is alarming.
Blaming all the country’s ills on the military, bureaucracy, foreign powers – especially “imperialist America and expansionist India” – and NGOs has been a common refrain of the Nepal Communist Party. Thapa made few new accusations that party president Khadgar Prasad Sharma Oli had not made before. Yet the leadership appears to be afraid of the consequences of past statements in the current context.
To be sure, Thapa’s choice of words does not pass the test of good taste, but politics has sunk so low that Prime Minister Balendra Shah has reportedly used the f-word ending in k in the past. President Donald Trump used harsher expletives. To the scrupulous guardians of elite conscience, the ideological “bad taste” of the opposition was worse than the rhetorical “bad taste” of their new masters.
If Thapa’s conspiracy theories sound controversial, Nepali MP Bhishmaraj Angdembe masks his inability to express pressing issues by repeating high-sounding platitudes. The two partners in the ousted regime appear to lack the moral courage to act as fearless and outspoken protectors of the public interest.
The ability of a large section of Nepali media to “comfort the suffering and torment the comfortable” is far from exemplary. It often promotes the strong in the name of protecting national interests and flaunts its courage in exposing the corrupt. It took a while for many of Kathmandu’s media outlets to muster the energy to put up the signs that had been hastily taken down.
When the traditional pillars of functional democracy—intellectuals, opposition parties, and the media—are silenced or aligned with the state, the burden of being the voice of the voiceless drowned in the cacophony of conformism shifts to individual citizens and informal collectives.
roaring approver
In shaky democracies, even prominent figures often succumb to the pull of power. The absolute majority is numerically impressive, but it stifles serious critics of the ruling party more than those on the opposition benches. Elected opposition representatives soon realized that they needed government support to fulfill the promises made to voters.
When governance is highly centralized, nothing happens without buy-in from the top. Every ambitious politician soon learns how to navigate between the sayable, the unsayable, the forbidden and carefully worded praise cloaked in criticism directed at the supreme leader – the country’s chief executive.
The media, which once regarded itself as a watchdog of public interests, has also begun to show “care”. In the vocabulary of power, “careful” is a polite euphemism for a spine paralyzed by the risk of being attacked by hired hooligans – a fact that was too obvious to ignore when Kantipur Media Group was set on fire during the autumn protests. Publishers and editors at small Moffhill outlets may have begun to consider closure due to the cancellation of government advertising, but metropolitan media are concerned about being denied access to information.
The dictator used midnight knocks on doors to intimidate the Fourth Estate into making it an affiliate of the Ministry of Information. Elected autocrats are even more cunning—they disdain independent journalists while indulging their own sycophants and unleashing their war dogs on any would-be critics.
When the political going gets tough, intellectuals—the “thought leaders” and “opinion makers”—look for new opportunities in the swamps of power in Baruwata. In a system where patronage is the only currency that matters, the intellectual class often finds that the path of least resistance leads directly to consulting assignments, lucrative consulting firms, seats on state committees, and even diplomatic posts. Their silence is not a lack of words, but a thoughtful investment. Regime change may deserve a chance, but the manner in which it is achieved requires eternal vigilance.
The “international community” – the diplomatic corps, donor agencies and high-profile international NGOs – may talk about the virtues of democracy, but it often prefers development to diversity, stability to freedom, authority to dissent. It is worth paying close attention to the symposium circuit as it reorients rhetoric away from hard-won paths to destinations of dignity and rights and toward apologetic and condescending symbolism.
The voices of approvers are loudest in digital spaces—once promised to be an arena for dissent—where addicts of Meta, Twitter, and TikTok disparage the criticism of out-groups while praising the excesses of in-groups. The non-social media landscape is no longer a public square; it has become a digital arena where state-sponsored trolls and passionate partisans drown out nuanced criticism with carefully curated collective praise. Those who question the dominant majority are labeled “jholes,” “traitors,” “relics,” or worse, “anti-nationals”—a term reminiscent of royal military regimes of the past.
responsible citizen
Who can hold a mirror when every institutional gatekeeper is bribed by patronage, bullied by the state, or bored into submission with apathy? To paraphrase Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan: “The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.”
It must be you – the lone individual remaining as the last remaining dissident in this age of artificial consent. Another Nobel laureate, Václav Havel, called this call “to live in truth.” In a system where everyone is incentivized to lie or remain silent, the simple act of refusing to participate in the dominant narrative becomes an effective form of criticism.
The oft-cited and easily misunderstood term “organic intellectual” refers to someone who refuses to remain silent. A wisecrack often mistakenly attributed to George Orwell embodies this moral perspective: “In an age of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
Lal is a writer and political analyst.
