Breaking Political Chain

The moment we talk about politics in Nepal, the first question we get is “kun party?” (Which party?)

I think it’s safe to say that politics in Nepal to this date is limited to party loyalty, as if supporting a political party is a family heirloom handed down like it’s a sacred relic. I have seen my parents, grandparents, and their parents defend the same leaders through their empty promises, their scandals, and their repeated failures. And somehow, I am expected to bow to the same scared loyalty as if it were some cult we are bound to be a part of. 

I have lived for two decades, struggling to fit this mindset into my own family. How do you explain that the leaders your parents have shielded from criticism are now swimming in corruption like it’s a family hobby? How does one question them that their blind loyalty is holding the whole nation hostage? 

And the irony hits harder when I take a step back and look at the bigger picture of it. No foreign empire could ever claim our soil, and yet somehow, in our own homes, in our own minds, freedom is a crime. And the cruellest trick of all, you ask? The people believe it’s their free will to engage in this cult like behaviour. It’s laughable. The so-called leaders have mastered the game of making the prisoners feel like kings, thinking we hold the crown, but the strings have always been in their hands. 

We cheer, we vote, we defend, we argue, we think we decide the fate of the nation, we think we hold the power, but in reality, we’re still their pawns. The loyalists dance to the invisible strings, believing they are free, while the leaders, fingers stained with decades of betrayal, watch with quiet amusement. The nation that has never been conquered now watches its people being conquered by blind devotion, tradition, and manipulation. Freedom exists only in papers, while at home, at school, in our minds, we are still chained.

While this hits me like a punch in my gut, I wonder, are we, the Gen Z, the trusted chain breakers, chained too? Are we going down the same road? Mindlessly inheriting this curse, parroting the slogans we don’t even stand for as an individual. We like to call ourselves woke, rebellious, and independent, but are we really independent? Or are we just puppets pretending, acting out of freedom while the masterminds watch and laugh from behind the curtains, celebrating the illusion that they have created works perfectly on us, too?

 And the more I think about it, the more it terrifies me, because if we cannot break the chains, if we are going to fall into the same old tricks, what happens next? Do we pass down the same loyalty, the same unquestioned obedience, the same illusion of choice to the next generation? Or are we really capable of breaking, of shattering, this cycle once and for all, of finally being the chain breakers we like to imagine ourselves as?