Nepal’s Violent Gen Z Uprising

On the morning of September 6th, a black S.U.V. carrying a provincial minister from Nepal’s ruling party ran over an eleven-year-old girl, Usha Magar Sunuwar, outside her school in the city of Lalitpur. Rather than stop to help the injured victim, the occupants of the vehicle sped away. Many of the powerful in Nepal, like their brethren across South Asia, believe themselves to be exempt from accountability. And Sunuwar, who miraculously survived, became, in the eyes of the public, another casualty of the governing élite’s contempt for ordinary Nepalis. When K. P. Sharma Oli, the country’s seventy-three-year-old Prime Minister, was questioned by the press about the incident, he shrugged it off as a “normal accident.” Oli, a Communist who began his political career as a tribune of the oppres