I. Introduction: The Unfinished Revolution
In 2006, Nepal’s streets erupted in celebration as a 240-year-old monarchy crumbled. The People’s Movement promised loktantra—a democracy where power would flow from village squares to Kathmandu. Two decades later, disillusionment hangs thick. The same faces—Koiralas, Prachandas, Oli—rotate through offices, while Kathmandu’s elite carve up the capital into luxury condos and the rural poor queue for passports to Gulf sweatshops. This paradox is not Nepal’s alone. From India’s farmer protests to Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya, South Asia thrums with democratic yearning—and elite betrayal.
French philosopher Jacques Rancière offers a scalpel to dissect this malaise. For him, democracy is not parliaments or parties but disruption—a rupture where the marginalised assert equality. When Nepal’s leaders invoke “democracy” while hoarding power, they enact what Rancière calls the “democratic illusion”: a system where oligarchs rule in the people’s name. This article asks: Can South Asia reclaim democracy not as governance but as rebellion?
II. Rancière’s Radical Blueprint: Democracy ≠ Oligarchy
Rancière’s work demolishes the myth that elections equal democracy. Representative systems, he argues, are oligarchic machines. Politicians—whether Nepal’s dynasts or India’s Gandhi family—form a self-replicating caste, validating their rule through rituals of voting. “People are subjected to a power they imagine emanates from themselves,” Rancière writes. This is the police order: hierarchies masquerading as democracy.
True democracy, or politics in Rancière’s terms, erupts when the excluded disrupt this order. Consider Nepal’s 2006 uprising: students, labourers, and rural poor shattered the monarchy’s police logic. Yet today, their victory is entombed in a republic where 65% of MPs are millionaires in a nation where per capita income is $1,400. The police didn’t vanish—it put on a democratic mask.
III. Nepal: Oligarchy in Red and Blue
A. Kathmandu’s Gilded Cage
Post-2006 Nepal promised inclusion but delivered cartels. Take Kathmandu’s “urban planning”: roads bulldoze squatter settlements for hotels catering to Gulf tourists, while lawmakers lease public land to cronies. The Bagmati River, sacred to Hindus, is now a sewage canal—its banks guarded by barbed wire to keep out the poor. This is Rancière’s police in action: spatial hierarchies reinforcing caste and class.
B. 2015: When Democracy Rumbled
The 2015 earthquake exposed the state’s hollowness. As bureaucrats dithered, youth brigades—students, motorbike gangs, LGBTQ+ collectives—moved rubble and distributed rice. In Rancière’s terms, this was politics: the “part with no part” reclaiming agency. Yet within months, NGOs and foreign donors monetised the crisis, reducing solidarity to spreadsheets.
C. Co-opting the Madhesi Spring
The 2015–2016 Madhesi protests—demanding federal inclusion for plains communities—were a textbook Rancièrean rupture. Protesters blocked India-Nepal trade routes, choking Kathmandu’s economy. But the state absorbed the fury: Madhesi leaders joined cabinets, while their demands for proportional representation diluted into tokenism. The police neutralised dissent by offering seats at the table—then shrinking the table.
IV. South Asia’s Democratic Spectres
India: From Farmers to Fakery
India’s 2020–2021 farmer protests saw millions camp on Delhi’s borders, rejecting corporate farm laws. A Rancièrean moment? Briefly. But when Modi repealed the laws, the movement fragmented—its leaders co-opted by parties or reduced to Twitter hashtags. Dynastic “democrats” like Rahul Gandhi now posture as rebels while upholding elite hegemony.
Pakistan: Populism’s Mirage
Imran Khan’s anti-corruption crusade channeled popular rage against military-judicial police. Yet his ouster revealed the playbook: Pakistan’s deep state allows episodic politics to vent steam, then restores oligarchic order.
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka: Ruptures and Retreats
Bangladesh’s 2013 Shahbag protests—a secular youth uprising—were diluted by Sheikh Hasina’s “developmental” authoritarianism. Conversely, Sri Lanka’s 2022 Aragalaya toppled the Rajapaksas but left the police intact: today, the same elites rule through new faces.
V. Challenges to Rancièrean Democracy in South Asia
- Elite Resistance: Nepal’s 2023 TikTok ban epitomises oligarchic panic—a bid to mute youth dissent. India’s sedition laws criminalise protest as “anti-national.”
- Cultural Hierarchies: Nepal’s Dalit activists fighting caste apartheid or Afghan women defying Taliban edicts face not just laws but millennia of police encoded as tradition.
VI. External Pressures: The Neocolonial Carousel
The 2024 “Monsoon Revolution” in Bangladesh—a Western-backed regime change operation allegedly funded by institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID—exposes how global powers weaponise “democracy promotion” to install pliable oligarchies. As economist Jeffrey Sachs notes in his critique of U.S. interventions in Pakistan and Bangladesh, such operations “[warrant] UN attention” for undermining sovereignty under the guise of liberal reform.
The post-revolution regime, lacking legal validity, has recycled long-retired bureaucrats linked to past authoritarian regimes, while shackling the economy to IMF conditionalities that prioritise debt repayment over public welfare. For Rancière, this is the police order’s ultimate triumph: a managerial coup where foreign technocrats and domestic elites jointly erase the disruptive potential of politics. The “Monsoon Revolution” did not dismantle hierarchies—it rebranded them, replacing one oligarchy with another, now draped in the legitimacy of global finance and diplomatic applause.
VII. Reclaiming Democracy: A Subversive Toolkit
1 Decentralise or Perish
Nepal’s 2017 local elections—the first in 20 years—hinted at possibilities. In Dhading, villagers redirected budgets from road contractors to landslide shelters. Yet Kathmandu starves municipalities of funds, fearing autonomy. Proportional representation could fracture elite monopolies: imagine Nepal’s parliament reserving seats for Dalit women or climate refugees.
2 Civil Society as Battlefield
Community forestry groups in Nepal’s mid-hills—managing 2.2 million hectares—show politics in action: marginalised castes governing resources once controlled by elites. Similarly, South Asia’s feminist movements—from Nepal’s #MeToo to Pakistan’s Aurat March—reject “polite” advocacy for street-level revolt.
3 Rancière’s Lesson: Democracy is a Verb
Democracy, per Rancière, is not a system but a “practice that dissolves regimes.” Nepal’s indigenous Adivasi movements—demanding citizenship beyond Hindu nationalism—embody this. So do Sri Lankan protesters converting presidential palaces into public pools.
VII. Conclusion: Let the Rivers Flow
Dipak Gyawali, Nepal’s visionary water expert, likens democracy to a river: stagnant pools breed disease; free currents renew life. South Asia’s task is not to mimic Western parliaments but to channel democracy’s disruptive tides—letting farmers, feminists, and forest-dwellers redraw the maps of power.
As Rancière reminds us: “Democracy is not a regime but a practice that dissolves regimes.” The gilded cages of Kathmandu, Dhaka, and Islamabad will only shatter when we stop asking for a seat at the table—and start building new tables altogether.
*Zakir Kibriais a writer and nicotine fugitive (once successfully smuggled a lighter through 3 continents). Entrepreneur | Chronicler of Entropy | Cognitive Dissident. Chasing next caffeine fix, immersive auditory haze, free falls. Collector of glances. “Some desires defy gravity.”Email: zk@krishikaaj.com
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of paper.
