Western audiences never seem to tire of revolutions. The imagery is irresistible: young students taking to the streets, chanting against corruption, defying an unpopular government, and, in the end, forcing an entrenched leader from power. It is a story tailor-made for headlines and cable news soundbites: the triumph of “people power” over tyranny.

But as Nepal demonstrates yet again, such stories are often less about democratic awakening and more about democratic breakdown.

In September, Nepal descended into chaos after the government of Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli, a self-described Marxist, banned 26 social media platforms, from X to WhatsApp. The ban struck a raw nerve in a country where more than 7.5 percent of the population works abroad, and remittances make up a staggering 33 percent of GDP. For families dependent on these lifelines, the inability to communicate with loved ones was intolerable.

At first, protests were peaceful. Students gathered, ordinary citizens marched. But by evening, police gunfire had killed several demonstrators, and the tenor changed. What followed was not civic disobedience but orchestrated violence: mobs armed with gasoline torched the parliament, the supreme court, banks, hotels, supermarkets, and even private homes. Police officers were lynched. Government armories were looted, putting rifles and grenades into civilian hands.

Western media quickly framed the events as a “student-led revolution against corruption.” Yet the real spark — the government’s misguided but hardly unprecedented attempt to regulate social media — was pushed to the margins of the narrative. The destruction of institutions was sanitized into an idealized “uprising.” The violence was romanticized as the sound of democracy being born.

What was left in the ruins was not democracy, but devastation.

To grasp the........

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