TIL Nepal had a communist PM until recently.
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2025
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Can they still be called communist if there has been no progress in socialist construction at all?
Paywalled website, but I hope there’s an article in there explaining how the headline is misleading
I haven't read it but here you go. Not sure I got the entire article:
Nepali protesters use ChatGPT to pick their new leader
A youth movement that ousted the government used AI to select their candidate to be interim prime minister and represent them in negotiations with the army
It took less than 48 hours of protest for the youth of Nepal to oust the prime minister. Their next task was not so simple: how would they decide who would be the leader of their interim government?
In true Generation Z fashion, they turned to technology and asked ChatGPT, The Times has learnt.
The artificial intelligence chatbot served up a list of potential candidates at the request of young Nepalis on an online forum called Youths Against Corruption. The list included Sagar Dhakal, an engineer who did his MSc at Oxford; Sumana Shrestha, a politician and former education minister; Balen Shah, a rapper who is the mayor of Kathmandu; and Sushila Karki, a former chief justice of Nepal.
Members of the forum then asked ChatGPT to debate the pros and cons of various stand-in leaders.
“If I were to pick, I would lean towards Sushila Karki for an interim/transitional government,” the AI tool said in response to one user’s prompt, “because she seems likely to command trust across different groups and could help oversee reforms and the path to fair elections. For a longer-term PM, someone like Balen Shah might be very suitable if they can build the political support needed to avoid being co-opted into old dynamics.”
Violent protests against the government of KP Sharma Oli, Nepal’s four-time prime minister and longstanding leader of the Communist Party, erupted on Monday after he shut down 26 social media platforms.
Nepalese politicians across Kathmandu were attacked and their homes were set on fire by demonstrators before Oli resigned on Tuesday.
Karki, 73, the only woman appointed as Nepal’s most senior judge, will represent the Gen Z protesters in negotiations with the army, which has imposed a curfew in the capital, on Thursday.
She was chosen as interim leader by the youth group Hami Nepal, a previously little known collection of Gen Zers apparently leading the movement for political reform that runs the Youths Against Corruption group on the social media channel Discord. The channel has also been holding livestreams on YouTube, in which important decisions for Nepal’s future have been made.
One prompt to ChatGPT had pitted Karki against Harka Sampang, the mayor of Dharan, who was considered a “grassroots” candidate. The AI tool said: “If Nepal needs a technocratic interim leader to stabilise the system and prepare for elections, Sushila Karki may be the safer choice. If Nepal wants a symbolic shift toward grassroots activism, Harka Sampang could energise the youth — but risks being overwhelmed by national complexities.”
Dhakal, one of the other suggested candidates, backed appointing Karki to lead the country during a YouTube livestream.
Shah, the Kathmandu mayor, also voiced support for Karki in a Facebook post. “The work of this temporary government is to conduct a new election and guide the country towards a new direction,” he said.
He praised Gen Z protesters for their “fire, vision and honesty”. Many in the Gen Z Discord group want him to take on a permanent role as prime minister.
Not everyone was convinced by the tech-forward approach to picking a candidate.
“To change laws, you need research, legitimacy and a real mandate,” one Nepali wrote in another online forum. “That’s not something you can just achieve using ChatGPT. If there’s even one wrong move made and political players from the outside take advantage — BOOM. You guys are not representing Gen Z as a whole. The intention is good, but it’s like building a castle in the air.”
Dikysha Koirala, a Nepali student in Delhi, said: “This has a direct impact on our future. The state is being destroyed. We have to go back and live there.”
The Discord group is chaotic and riddled with memes, insults and curses. Many users have been banned for making comments deemed inappropriate by the moderators — who are themselves anonymous.
One user aged 17 claims he was kicked out of the group for disagreeing with moderators: “I was talking to the guys on the server and correcting them, telling them, this is wrong. And they blocked me from the server.”
Documents generated by the Gen Z groups are often headed with a Jolly Roger skull-and-crossbones symbol. It was adopted from the Japanese anime show One Piece, popular among youths in Nepal — many of whom see it as an inspiration for and symbol of their movement. The show also inspired Gen Z protests in Indonesia in August.
Sure, why not have this “grassroots” youth movement—which is in no way another CIA/MI6/NED color revolution—ask Grok or Claude or ChatGPT—none of which are part of the US MIC—to select the candidate. Sound perfectly normal and not the least bit astroturfed.
welcome to the resitance
It's not looking good for Nepal if these ghouls are praising the regime change:
this has been such a transparent regime change operation
I don't know that it's completely clear but more indications point to it than not. I think we still need to wait to see what really comes of this, but one thing is clear, the country is now in a very dangerous situation.
Even if these protests were 100% organic and the West had nothing to do with them (unlikely imo given the orgs and platforms involved and just the sheer speed and violence with which this happened, but possible seeing as the discontent over the corruption and the poor economic situation are definitely real), this has still caused immense damage to the country and has for sure opened the door wide open to Western interference.
If the West's regime change tentacles weren't involved at first they are for sure involved now. Seeing a country in such a destabilized position with a fragile interrim government "elected" by a few thousand anonymous users on a discord server and still months away from holding real elections, the regime change industrial complex are like sharks who have smelled blood in the water. They will swarm all over it and all the usual suspects will be claiming to be concerned about making sure that there is a "democratic transition" and promoting all the usual liberal clichés.
Unless the military seizes control of the interrim government, keeps potentially compromised actors away from any levers of power, and makes sure that the elections are held without outside interference, whether it's in the form of a western funded media blitz, astroturfed "youth" social media campaigns, western funded electoral organizing, "civil society" groups with ties to western foundations, etc., the result will undoubtedly be one that has been highly predetermined by the West, just as it was in all of the post-Maidan Ukrainian elections.
It has been a bit disappointing to see some really good commentators such as Arnaud Bertrand, whose analysis i have a lot of respect for, not get how the dynamics of such a situation work. I'm not even saying he's completely wrong to be skeptical of the idea that this started out as a deliberate western op to begin with (although some people make a pretty good case). I also think we shouldn't jump to conclusions.
But i think he is seriously underestimating the danger here. And as Brian Berletic points out in his reply, it's not that people in countries where this happens don't and can't have agency, or that most of the people involved don't genuinely think that they are doing this on their own initiative and for a good cause. It's that most of them are not aware when they are being manipulated and used to create a chaos that will allow nefarious actors to insert themselves.
And it's not that you can't have genuine revolutions anymore, or that we must always immediately suspect everything is a color revolution... it's that genuine revolutions don't tend to look like this. Genuine revolutions take real organizing and groundwork, they revolve around organized groups and movements with a history of struggle, not social media campaigns and online chatrooms. They don't spontaneously erupt out of a mass with no ideological program and no leadership. And we can see the huge and glaring issues with such a spontaneous uprising:
First of all, no vanguard or leader from the movement itself has stepped up to fill the power vacuum. They don't have a real plan for how to organize a new political and economic system, all they say is "we want to end the corruption". Great, but what does that mean concretely? How will you ensure that the system does not reproduce itself? If we take everything at face value, they have simply delegated all of that to this interim government which they hope will be incorruptible and will hold real elections, and that this will then all somehow result in a much improved situation than before. To call this idealistic is an understatement.
I really hope someone writes a proper piece on this whole affair once the dust has settled and we have some more clarity, to set things straight and to help people clear up these misconceptions about how color revolutions work, what the inherent problems are with spontaneous uprisings (particularly when they are youth led and have such vague grievances as "corruption") and why they are vulnerable to co-optation, and what (historically) a real revolution usually looks like.
Right, I think the key part to keep in mind is that color revolutions do tend to have an organic component to them. You have to have existing discontent or tensions that are exploited. The trick is to direct the discontent towards political goals that favor the west. This is done through NGOs, western media, grooming young people, and so on.
As you point out, a spontaneous uprising isn't going to have the necessary structures to create a functioning and independent government. When the dust settles, the existing power structures will reassert themselves, but under new leadership, one that's likely to be favorable to the west.