What started as a threat to restrict social media in Nepal, without registration and rules, has overnight escalated into war. From my window on the Northern edge of Kathmandu valley I can see at least five separate fires burning in the homes of powerful entrenched politicians who the people see as responsible for the deaths of more than twenty people yesterday, including uniformed school children, who were protesting the failure of social media, including Facebook and YouTube, to load on their devices the day before.
While all apps have since been restored, even without the VPNs that made the outages pointless, military helicopters and trucks currently race over and through the valley, even up here below the fashionable Budanilkantha, accompanied by the sounds of machinegun fire.
The Hilton is engulfed in flames. The Parliament, Supreme Court, President’s home and Singh Durbar, the administrative seat of power, are on fire. The Prime Minister fled this morning by helicopter and resigned online by afternoon. Currently, the President is still alive and technically in power, though the only real authority currently rests with General Ashok Raj Sigdel, Chief of the Army Staff.
Kathmandu is under curfew. Bricks, burnt tires and steel cages litter the streets, and burnt cars and motorcycles surround our local police station. As dusk set in, I watched at least fifty riot police assembling next to the Narayantan Himalayan Java cafe while the Deuba Chowk area was littered with families on foot and two-wheelers.
The mood in the city is near manic jubilation. A mob mentality has turned otherwise soft spoken citizens into rabid anti-establishment zealots. The airport is closed. My gym and pool at the Holiday Inn has been evacuated and the remaining employees, 17 of them, are taking refuge at our family resort.
Living here as a sushi and Camembert eating American writer and athlete, it has, in hind-site, been obvious that the divide between rich and poor has grown too great and the pitchforks were about to come out. Geographic arbitrage, currency devaluation and the digital economy has brought the rich, or at least comparatively extremely comfortable, to the unignorable forefront of the poor’s attention.
I gasp now thinking of my last article about just how many luxuries I enjoy for how little. There is no one in the country who uses the steam room at the newest 5-star hotel more than I, nor anyone who knows better every employee’s name and how little each one makes or how illegal their employment has been. Everyone is overworked. Everyone is underpaid. Everyone is completely disillusioned by 18 years of Democracy ping-ponging between the same two men, a high school teacher and a high school dropout. Today, I saw signs demanding the heads of both competing parties, dead or alive.
The corruption is freely discussed. Democracy has not resulted in the rule of law and the average person sees little hope for their children’s future.
Air pollution is thick. Taxes are high. The politicians appear to have untold wealth and ownership, either directly or through surrogates, of major international hotels, real estate, and fungible wealth. Ex and planned future Prime Minister Deuba’s house was found to contain huge sacks of cash that the mob threw (at least some of) into the wind. As far as I know I had the only drone, a DJI Mini 2, at the scene from over a mile away and watched as hundreds of people surrounded the burning home until police and army arrived to quell the crowd.
A fire truck never appeared nor did anyone consider deploying even a garden hose. At the smallest scare, fifty of the crowd sprinted away and then slowly returned to try to smash down the Prime Minister’s garden wall.
Less than a hundred feet away a stoic line of dozens of soldiers waited behind the beautiful walls of a nearby neighbor, safe from street-side pedestrians with only a limited understanding of who wields the purse strings and real power in Nepal. Many here are already suggesting outside coordination from China as responsible for the crisis and unrest, as retaliation for denying China’s claim that Nepal had agreed to the Global Security Initiative.
The majority Indian tourists at the Holiday Inn were evacuated to Lemon Tree and currently the US Embassy has issued no response.
General Sigdel, nominally in charge at the moment, is an honorary Indian General and has served with UN Peacekeeping missions in Yugoslavia, Tajikistan and Liberia and received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from China’s National Defense University in Beijing.