“We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that stupid people will not be offended.”

The line circulates as a meme, but in Nepal, it functions less as satire than as a diagnosis. Intelligence here does not mean credentials or brilliance; it means memory, precision, and a commitment to accountability. These qualities are not outlawed; they are exhausted, drowned in delay, buried under procedure, and framed as destabilizing. Nepal is not governed solely by repression, but by amnesia carefully cultivated as policy.

After the Gen-Z movement, seventy-six young people were killed. Hundreds were wounded. Thousands were traumatized. Billions of rupees’ worth of public and private property wasdestroyed. A government collapsed, and the nation was solemnly assured that this rupture would compel justice.

One hundred and thirty-six days have now passed.

Let us begin, stubbornly and unfashionably, with the questions the state, and increasingly society itself, has worked hardest to avoid:

Who killed those young people?

And who was responsible for the destruction of public and private property?

These are not rhetorical devices. They are legal, moral, and political questions. Yet in Nepal’s public discourse, they have been systematically detached from responsibility. Death is mourned, but perpetrators are abstracted. Destruction is condemned, but authorship is blurred. Violence is treated as weather, tragic, sudden, and nobody’s fault.

More troubling than state silence is how quickly that silence has been socially normalized.

Why has no one kept asking?

Not political parties. Not senior commentators. Not the hyperactive social-media elites, many living abroad, who post endlessly about which candidate to vote for, which coalition is acceptable, which compromise is realistic. They curate outrage, gamify democracy, and optimize opinions, but rarely demand accountability for the dead.

How many times did they raise their voices for justice for mothers who lost children, for siblings who lost brothers or sisters, for neighbors who loved these young people as their own? Electoral preferences are debated with passion, and justice is treated as inconvenient.

In a functioning republic, unresolved killings would dominate public life until accountability was established. In Nepal, they have been quietly reclassified as complex, institutional languages and are no longer pursued. Committees study events without assigning blame. Investigations are promised without timelines. Reports circulate without consequence.

An interim government was formed under Madam Prime Minister Sushila Karki, presented as a moral reset. Politics would pause, justice would take precedence. The language of gravity was elevated. The word genocide was publicly invoked.

Such language carries constitutional and moral weight. It demands extraordinary action: resignations, prosecutions, exposure of command responsibility, institutional reckoning.

None followed.

Despite repeated calls for resignation, not personal attacks, but demands for accountability, the interim leadership remained in place. Justice was deferred. Silence hardened into normalcy. Vocabulary of outrage remained, stripped of consequence.

The question is not only who pulled the trigger but also how all institutions share moral responsibility for ensuring accountability, which is vital for justice and collective integrity.

After 136 days without answers, responsibility consolidates.

Four ministers, Jagadish Kharel, Bablu Gupta, Kulman Ghising, and Mahabir Pun, are now contesting elections. Their shared explanation for inaction is revealing. Nepal, they argue, is not governed by elected officials but by intermediaries, brokers, syndicates, and entrenched interests. Power lies elsewhere. Nothing meaningful could be done.

Can you believe that Mahabir Pun is running for election? Of all figures, his candidacy is the most revealing. Once celebrated as a moral outsider, he cultivated the posture of local humility while enjoying global acclaim, acting local, speaking universal, and remaining above the fray. That distance once conveyed credibility; it conveys exemption from scrutiny, from accountability, from the brutal moral reckoning that politics demands. When someone of his stature enters electoral life without confronting unresolved questions of violence and responsibility, it does not signal renewal. It signals normalization. The shift is subtle but decisive: moral capital accumulated outside politics is now being converted into political legitimacy, bypassing the hard work of justice. Whether one chooses to see this rupture or to look away is no longer an intellectual problem. It is an ethical one.

This explanation, intended as candid, exposes the central contradiction:

If elected officials were powerless, who would exerciseoperational control over lethal force?

If the system was captured by syndicates, who coordinated and protected organized arson?

If authority lay elsewhere, why was that authority never named, confronted, or resisted?

Power does not disappear; it relocates. Violence does not organize itself. When firearms are deployed, and cities burn, someone authorizes, someone enables, someone protects. To deny this is not humility, it is abdication.

Naming perpetrators requires overcoming systemic barriers such as political resistance, legal loopholes, and institutional inertia, because understanding these obstacles is essential to mobilizing effective action and accountability.

Instead, we are offered abstraction: “The situation deteriorated.” “Unidentified elements.” “Unfortunate incidents.” This is the grammar of evasion. Violence becomes ownerless. Responsibility evaporates. The dead are left without authors.

From a scholarly standpoint, this is an elite moral exit. Political actors retain access to power while abandoning responsibility for outcomes. They denounce the system while contesting elections run by it. They explain failure as helplessness, then seek renewed legitimacy at the ballot box.

Time’s quiet work makes delay feel like strategic inaction, urging the audience to recognize the moral cost of inaction and the need for prompt justice.

Justice delayed here is not denied; it is managed.

Recognition without accountability leaves families in grief; active public participation is essential to restore moral order and prevent symbolic containment from replacing real justice.

Committees absorb outrage. Reports placate donors. Press releases anesthetize memory. Each institutional gesture performs seriousness while avoiding consequence. Massacre becomes background noise. Arson becomes a footnote.

Responsibility is widely distributed.

Political parties normalize impunity as pragmatism.

The judiciary converts delay into neutrality.

The bureaucracy prioritizes continuity over conscience.

Civil society and international observers can play a crucial role by applying sustained pressure, advocating transparency, and supporting victims’ families, all of which are vital to breaking the cycle of impunity.

Human-rights organizations monitor rather than demand.

International actors mistake silence for stability.

Security institutions hide behind procedure and the chain of command.

This is distributed irresponsibility. Everyone is partially guilty, therefore fully protected.

Some argue the situation was chaotic, and violence came from both sides. Chaos does not erase command responsibility. Disorder does not suspend law. Complexity does not absolve authority. These are shields, not explanations.

The more profound tragedy is that participation continues as if memory were optional. Voting without accountability becomes political laundering. Citizens may trade outrage for economic comfort, but participation without memory reproduces the system that necessitated the transaction.

The opening aphorism returns: intelligence, memory, precision, and insistence on traceability are inconvenient. It disrupts stability. It offends power.

Intelligence must be dulled. Remembering becomes negative. Questioning becomes anti-national. Demanding to know who killed and who burned becomes destabilizing.

The state does not fear angry citizens. It fears precise ones.

Nothing here is hidden. Timelines are public. Actors are known. Evasions are documented. History will not struggle to reconstruct events. It will struggle to understand how so many institutions chose comfort over courage.

Until these two questions are answered, who killed those young people, and who was responsible for burning the country, every election conducted under this shadow remains morally incomplete—every promise of reform rings hollow. Every appeal to patience insults the dead.

Silence in this republic is not restraint. It is participation.

Author Subedi is a Professor of Medical Sociology at Miami University, USA 

@Desh Sanchar