Nepal: A Repeatedly Wounded Nation

My parents’ generation believed that in 1950, when the Ranas fell, democracy would bring dignity and prosperity to all. When I was a boy, Nepal was ruled by silence — to question authority was to invite arrest — and we, too, believed that 1990 would suffice. We failed again, and in 2008 the next generation marched, believing the republic would redeem what their parents and grandparents could not. But that promise, too, was betrayed — as we see unraveling today. Each generation thought it was healing the wound but ended up deepening it, turning Nepal’s struggle for freedom into a self-inflicted tragedy — a cycle of hope and betrayal.