From the terrorist attack in Pahalgam in India-administered Kashmir, to the anti-corruption Gen Z protests and a deadly uprising that forced the prime minister and government to resign in Nepal – we take a look back at some of our top stories on politics through 2025.
In no particular order, here are a few of Himal’s most-read political stories of the year:
India is home to 200 million Muslim people. Yet in 2023, the country’s ruling party – the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), controlling a comfortable majority in both houses of parliament and governing, either alone or in coalition, in 15 of the country’s 36 states and Union Territories – had an almost complete absence of Muslim representation, to an extent never seen since India’s first general election as an independent nation in 1952. And, for the first time since India won its freedom, there was not a single Muslim minister in the national cabinet.
With this exclusion, the country’s elected leadership sent out a stark and unambiguous message to the Muslim citizens of what is now the world’s most populous country: we don’t need your votes to hold political power. The absolute absence of Muslims from any elected office in the BJP’s control portended their descent into lesser substantive citizenship.
The peace activist Harsh Mander writes on how the Hindu Right has dispossessed India’s Muslims of meaningful political participation and fair representation while altering electoral politics to cast Muslims as a political liability.
In April 2025, a young woman was discovered face down and unmoving on the tin roof of a warehouse in Malé. She had evidently fallen from a nine-storey apartment building next door. Gravely injured, she was taken to the government-run Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital in the city, then transferred a few days later to a hospital in Malaysia.
In the aftermath, hundreds of young people brought the Maldivian capital to a standstill every evening for over a week, determined to know the truth and seek justice for the injured woman.
J J Robinson writes that the protests go far beyond the plight of the injured woman alone. Already the largest explosion of discontent since Muizzu won power in 2023, it represents a new generation raising its voice against the Maldives’s entire political culture, putting to rest earlier notions of the political apathy of young Maldivians.
How much space is there in India for citizens to question and dissent from the actions of their government in a time of war or near-war?
The answer is not very much, or maybe none at all, Rahul Rao writes – looking at how Operation Sindoor, India’s strikes on Pakistan after the Pahalgam attack, set off unprecedented warmongering, with the media, the Hindu Right and even the opposition baying for an India–Pakistan war.
In May this year, Pakistan and India engaged in armed hostilities for four days after the Pahalgam attack – the most serious crisis between the two nuclear-armed neighbours in decades. The conflict helped further raise the profile of the military and its current chief, Asim Munir. He was promoted from a four-star general to field marshal – the highest rank in the Pakistan Army – expressly for his leadership during the standoff.
Salman Rafi Sheikh writes that although Munir has not made any moves to formally take over political power, the promotion to the lifetime rank of field marshal is important in terms of its symbolism and timing. It consolidates his position as the most powerful man in the country, despite not being the head of the government, giving him even greater power over the state, the civilian government and the judiciary.
When Myanmar’s brutal campaign against them forced the Rohingya out of the country in 2017, Bangladesh opened its borders and offered them shelter – a gesture that earned Dhaka international praise as a compassionate host. Over a million Rohingya refugees now live in southeastern Bangladesh. However, they are under severe restrictions and exist in conditions of great deprivation.
Bangladesh has treated the Rohingya not as human beings deserving of refuge but as a disposable population to be contained, controlled, exploited and ultimately abandoned.
In his report, Shafiur Rahman finds that Bangladesh’s management of the Rohingya, while seen as humanitarian goodwill, is part of a modern capitalist system that exploits their labour, commercialises their misfortune and locks them into depending on foreign aid.
Since March 2025, more than 717,000 Afghan refugees and migrants have been forcibly deported from Iran. The Afghan arm of the International Organization for Migration says the total number of people deported in 2025 has already crossed one million. The campaign intensified, targeting undocumented Afghans and also those holding temporary census slips that granted them recognition of their refugee status and access to essential services, which were abruptly cancelled by the Iranian government.
Afghan families are navigating growing hostility, scapegoating, systemic neglect and violence while being forcibly returned to Afghanistan. Although Pakistan’s similar deportation campaign has received more media coverage, Iran’s actions are larger in scale, quieter in execution, and arguably more brutal. According to Afghan and international observers Zahra Nader, the combined effect of both countries’ deportation drives has created a humanitarian emergency that the Taliban government is ill-equipped to handle.
Jeevan Ravindran presents an in-depth profile of Galkande Dhammananda, a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk striving for reconciliation between the country’s Sinhala-Buddhist majority and Tamil and Muslim minorities. This, she writes, makes him a rare exception – and his views are all the more remarkable for the fact that he lost his brother, a police officer, in an attack by the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war.
In conversation with Dhammananda, and delving into the history of political monks and Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, Ravindran considers how much one monk can change a long tradition of hardline politics and ethno-religious hatred. As a young Tamil journalist, she discovers Dhammananda’s deep sympathy with Sri Lankan Tamils – as well as the limits of that sympathy.
Young people in Nepal, under the banner of “Gen Z protests”, took to the streets in September 2025 – sick of a corrupt political system and political class, sick of seeing the same discredited old men taking turns to lead and loot the country, sick of seeing no future path but to leave for work abroad, which thousands do every single day. The peaceful protests suddenly veered into violence, and after police opened fire the death toll climbed to 19, with hospitals packed full of the injured. It was the single deadliest day of protest that Nepal has ever seen.
Himal’s Editor Roman Gautam reflects on the anti-corruption Gen Z protests and a deadly uprising that forced the prime minister and government to resign, as Nepal searches for a new politics that can jettison its failed establishment.
As the region continues to position itself as a key player in global pharmaceutical supply chains, there’s much to unpack – from the unprecedented growth in the industry to the hidden perils and ethical questions surrounding production practices, regulations, and public health impact.
“Pills, Perils, Profits” Himal’s in-depth investigative series on the intricate and often opaque world of Southasian pharmaceutical manufacturing and exports. Vidya Krishnan and Arshu John raised hard questions and uncovered hard lessons that need far more attention: how the WHO leaves poor countries exposed to dangerous Indian drugs, how India’s drug regulatory system continues to fail at mass scale, how Bangladesh’s pharma revolution has lessons to teach India and the rest of Southasia, and how US and Western aid cuts expose global health’s rotten core and leave millions facing preventable deaths from HIV, TB, malaria and more.
When the history of India’s profoundly troubled current times is written, there will doubtless be a great deal that the Narendra Modi-led government will be held to account for – the choking of democracy; the state-fuelled hate targeting India’s Muslim, Christian and other minority citizens; the surge of oligarchic capitalism; the enfeeblement of a developmental state; levels of economic inequality even higher than in colonial times. Also very high on the list of the Modi regime’s gravest moral and political transgressions will surely be its barely tacit support for the genocidal war and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in Gaza – crimes against humanity unleashed with unmitigated savagery by the Israeli government, armed and financed zealously by Western powers.
Harsh Mander states that among the Modi regime’s gravest moral and political transgressions is its support of Israel’s genocidal war and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in Gaza.