After the hashtag: Nepal's '#NepoKids' fall silent as election tests Gen Z anger

KATHMANDU: Nepal's Gen Z uprising last Sept did not begin with a speech or a scandal. It began with screenshots. Images of politicians' children posing beside designer shopping hauls, on luxury holidays, stopping traffic with lavish weddings. Those pictures travelled rapidly across social media platforms, becoming symbols in a widening argument about privilege in a country where youth unemployment stood above 20% and nearly 30 lakh citizens worked abroad. What had once been curated displays of wealth became fuel for public anger.

Six months later, as campaigning fell silent ahead of Thursday's vote, many of the social media accounts once linked to that backlash have gone quiet. During last year's protests, "#nepokids" was among the most widely used hashtags appended to screenshots as they ricocheted across Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. Profiles that once documented luxury and proximity to power are now locked or pared back. Search for them and you find little.


At the height of the trend, one photograph stood out. Saugat Thapa, the 28-year-old son of a former minister, posed beside Louis Vuitton, Cartier and Gucci boxes stacked into the shape of a Christmas tree. By evening, the image was in university WhatsApp groups; by the next day, it was clipped into TikTok loops. Someone added music.

Far away in Doha, a construction worker forwarded the same screenshot to a group chat called 'Home'. The caption read: "See." The hashtag followed soon after, and it stuck. What might once have passed as aspirational content became shorthand for inherited privilege. "When you're on a 12-hour shift and you open your phone and see that," said Manoj Gurung, a 27-year-old electrician from Pokhara working in Qatar, "it makes you quiet for a while."

Six months on, the digital noise has faded. "I think many people have forgotten the nepo babies trend," said Radhika Mugar, 24, a postgraduate student. "That trend is over and there is a shift in focus."