Nepal is the latest victim of a romanticized Western media script — the tale of a student-led “revolution” toppling a supposedly corrupt, inefficient government in a developing country.

The same script sanctified the August 2024 ouster of “iron lady” Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh, which has since descended into intensifying repression and Islamist violence. Indonesia’s weeks-long unrest may yet be packaged as another “people’s revolution,” should its government fall.

This oversimplified narrative conceals the real drivers of upheaval — factional power struggles, economic stress and cynical opportunism — while implicitly condoning violence, including the torching of state institutions. Such acts would attract long prison terms in the West, but abroad, they are framed in terms of democratic romance. For Western audiences, it is spectacle; for the countries involved, it often entails extended disorder.

In Nepal, former Chief Justice Sushila Karki was rebranded by Western media outlets as an “anti-corruption crusader.” In reality, Karki — the wife of the mastermind behind the 1973 hijacking of a Nepalese airliner carrying millions of Indian rupees — now heads an interim administration with no constitutional legitimacy and little more than rubble to govern.

Nepal’s........

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