The Hobbesian turn in Kathmandu: What it means for Nepal and India

The word revolution comes from the Latin revolutio, denoting a turning back, a cycle. Originally used for celestial motions, it entered politics to describe the overturning of established orders. The etymology is instructive. Revolutions promise rupture but often reproduce continuity in another form. They are imagined as forward leaps yet frequently prove to be rotations of the wheel, bringing old patterns back in altered guise.

This paradox has preoccupied political thinkers for centuries. Hannah Arendt argued that revolutions should be judged not by the intensity of their eruptions but by their capacity to found lasting institutions of freedom. Theda Skocpol showed how they are rooted not only in popular grievances but in the brittleness of states weakened by fiscal strain, factionalism, and international pressures.

Tocqueville observed that revolutions erupt less under absolute oppression than when reforms raise expectations that rulers cannot meet. Marx cast them as the inevitable working out of class conflict, while Burke warned that they destroy the ballast of tradition without securing liberty. Charles Tilly emphasised the mobilisation of networks and the openings of political opportunity, while Fanon imagined them as violent catharses of decolonisation. Their vocabularies differ, but a shared insight runs through them. Revolutions are symptoms of legitimacy collapsing at the summit of power, rather than mere eruptions from below.

On September 8-9, 2025, Nepal furnished a dramatic instance of this collapse. A government led by veteran communist K.P. Sharma Oli fell in two days of youth-led protest. Nineteen were killed, hundreds injured, and symbols of permanence, the parliament, the supreme court, the prime minister’s residence, set ablaze. The prime minister resigned abruptly, his authority evaporating as crowds filled the capital.

The trigger was the decision to ban more than two dozen social media platforms, ostensibly in the name of regulation but widely seen as an attempt to silence the very spaces where corruption and nepotism were relentlessly documented. For a digitally native generation, the ban was more than a technical measure. It was rather seen or made to portray as an assault on their public square. Police violence, which left even schoolchildren dead, turned outrage into insurrection.

The paradox is that a government which traced its legitimacy to its own revolutionary past now fell to a revolution directed against it. Communist leaders once proclaimed themselves tribunes of the people against monarchy and oligarchy, yet they became the objects of popular wrath. Youth who set fire to Singha Durbar, the colonial-era seat of government, were not animated by ideology but by anger at gerontocracy, impunity, and the extravagant lifestyles of politicians’ children.

The cycle had returned. Revolution against revolutionaries, a repetition of revolt under new banners. Arendt would have seen here the collapse of a shared world of truth, leaving violence as the only path to renewal. Tocqueville would have recognized the frustration of a generation educated and connected yet denied opportunity. Skocpol would have noted the brittleness of a state hollowed out by corruption, unable to command loyalty in crisis.

But September 2025 revealed another dimension of revolution. Its Hobbesian underside. When Leviathan collapses, the restraints of law vanish and the nightmare of the state of nature intrudes into modern streets. Ministers were seen stripped of dignity, paraded in public, beaten as they fled from mobs. The image was not merely of rulers losing power but of the symbolic destruction of authority itself, reduced to naked bodies running for survival. Hobbes had warned that without sovereign power to awe, human beings descend into a war of all against all, where life becomes solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The scenes in Kathmandu seemed to fulfill that prophecy in miniature: an interlude where sovereignty evaporated, and political contest was replaced by the raw exposure of vulnerability. The fury of the young was directed not only at policies but at persons, and the line between justice and vengeance dissolved. Such moments reveal that revolutions are not only promises of freedom but also descend into the abyss where authority, once despised, is nonetheless necessary to contain violence. And those are the shoes which the army is filling now.

The immediate implications for Nepalese democracy are grave. First, the events have deepened the fragility of institutions by demonstrating how quickly they can be reduced to ashes. Parliament, courts, and ministries, once symbols of permanence, now bear the scars of fire. Second, the uprising has delegitimised the political class as a whole, not just one leader or party, making democratic trust harder to restore. Third, the entry of the army into the role of guarantor of order risks shifting the balance of power away from civilian institutions, a temptation historically difficult to reverse.

Fourth, the radicalisation of youth, who have discovered the potency of direct action, may weaken their faith in slower democratic processes, prioritising immediacy over deliberation. Fifth, by collapsing yet another government within two years of office, Nepal has underscored its chronic instability, a cycle that threatens to hollow out the very meaning of parliamentary democracy and leave the public cynical about its efficacy.

To view Nepal’s September convulsion as a purely domestic affair is to miss the larger geopolitical shadow that loomed over it. Oli was not merely another embattled prime minister; he was a leader who had tilted Nepal decisively towards China, cultivating economic ties, diplomatic warmth, and symbolic gestures of alignment. Only weeks before his downfall, he and his wife were in Beijing, attending the SCO summit and even participating in the national parade, presenting himself as a dependable partner in China’s regional orbit.

It is inconceivable that, sensing his ground slipping, Oli did not reach out for help before tendering his resignation. Yet Beijing did not take a single extra step to shield him. The silence was telling. In the cold arithmetic of power politics, even loyal allies can be abandoned when they become liabilities.

The possibility of a foreign hand in encouraging, amplifying, or at least permitting the intensity of the protests cannot be dismissed. Such a pattern is not unprecedented. The Indian subcontinent in recent years has been repeatedly convulsed by sudden popular uprisings that coincided with sharp turns in external alignments. In Bangladesh, mass street movements erupted against governments accused of overreach and corruption, with whispers of foreign encouragement never far from the surface. In Sri Lanka, the crisis of 2022 that saw the Rajapaksa family chased from power unfolded against the backdrop of mounting debts, Chinese infrastructure entanglements, and shifting external calculations.

Nepal now joins this gallery of instability, a reminder that the fires consuming regimes across South Asia are rarely self-contained. They are fanned by winds that sometimes rise from within the region and at other times blow in from far beyond Asia. The method is rarely overt intervention; rather, it is the quiet calibration of when to hold onto an ally and when to let him fall. Oli, for all his loyalty to Beijing, discovered in the end that he was expendable.

The tragedy of Nepal is that this was not its first revolution. In 2006, mass protests toppled a 239-year-old monarchy, hailed as the dawn of a democratic republic. Yet in the decades since, politics became a carousel of elites alternating in office while insulating themselves from accountability. Each turn brought promises of renewal, each ended in corruption and paralysis. The events of 2025 are thus both rupture and repetition, confirming the etymological sense of revolution as a turning of the wheel. Youth once again supplied the spark; fire once again consumed the symbols of permanence. Yet whether this turning will find freedom or circle back into disillusion remains uncertain.

Revolutions are judged not by what they topple but by what they create. It is one thing to burn a parliament, another to build institutions that command trust. Nepal’s youth have demonstrated their capacity to bring down rulers. Whether they or their successors can build a political order that escapes corruption and impunity is the
more difficult test. Without such institution-building, revolutions risk becoming cycles of expectation and betrayal. What begins as liberation devolves into exhaustion, a polity that loses faith not only in its rulers but in politics itself. The Hobbesian nightmare of rulers paraded, stripped, and beaten dramatises not only the fury of the moment but the vacuum that follows when sovereignty disintegrates.

The events in Kathmandu thus provide a philosophical reminder. Revolutions are symptoms of legitimacy lost, not cures for it. They dramatise the collapse of authority, but they do not by themselves establish freedom. They are moments of fire rather than foundation. Unless the work of creating durable institutions follows, each revolution risks revolving back into the same corruption under new names. The external hand cannot be ignored, for Nepal’s fate is bound to larger rivalries, but more decisive still is whether its people can break the cycle of revolt without renewal. To remember the etymology of revolution is to remember this warning, that every turning, unless anchored in foundation, risks becoming not progress but a circle.

The author (X: @adityasinha004) writes on macroeconomic and geopolitical issues. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.