Country of protests

Nepalis have stopped believing that their grievances will be heard without a show of force.

It’s hardly a surprising figure. If anything, the number sounds like a gross underestimate. According to a new Nepal Police report, there were 3,963 protest-related events in the country in the past 10 months. The form of protests runs the whole gamut: 12 general strikes, 12 transport blockades, 816 lockouts, 782 sit-ins, 134 hunger strikes, 118 road obstructions, and 2,089 protest rallies. Really, most Nepalis are used to witnessing protests of all kinds, nearly every single day, nearly everywhere they go. Teachers, civil servants, lawyers, journalists, victims of Maoist insurgency and cooperative frauds, taxi drivers, businesspersons—they all feel the need to band together and assert themselves to get the relevant government bodies to heed their demands. These folks have long stopped believing that their grievances, even legitimate ones, will be heard without such a show of force. In other words, they have no faith in the government machinery to act fairly and independently. In a seemingly zero-sum game, if they don’t secure their rights and privileges through protests, rival groups might beat them to the prize.