Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka uprisings: Why and what next?

Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka: three uprisings in three years. Where did they come from?

Where are they going? And what lessons do they have for each other and the rest of Southasia

– including India?

Panelists:

Pranaya Rana – Editor, Kalam Weekly, Nepal

Ambika Satkunanathan – Former Human Rights Commissioner of Sri Lanka

Zyma Islam – Senior staff correspondent, Daily Star, Bangladesh

Co-hosts:

Roman Gautam – Editor, Himal Southasian

Harsh Mander – Peace activist and co-founder, Karwan-e-Mohabbat

This is a machine-generated, copy-edited transcript of the event Southasia’s Youthquakes, hosted on Zoom on 24 September, and has been edited for length. It may contain inaccuracies. For exactness, please refer to the recording here.

Roman Gautam:

I think, every time that we do one of these Southasian Conversations, for me, the overriding emotion is quite bittersweet. It is quite amazing that we can come together, even if it's virtually, to try and make sense of our countries. I mean, we're talking about three uprisings. But the number of similarities that we can find in the abuse of cyber crime laws, I think there are clear examples of how – from Bangladesh to Sri Lanka to Nepal – governments are learning all the wrong lessons in terms of how to abuse some of those laws, right? There are so many parallels between our countries and certainly there is nowhere near enough conversation on all of this and for Himal to be able to bring all of us together to do this, that's always an incredible feeling.

Ideally we should be living in a Southasia where we can pull everybody together across borders to have more of these conversations in person. But of course our barbed wire borders and strict visa regimes oftentimes really militate against that. So hence the bittersweet feeling. But for today, I am very glad that we are able to gather this incredible panel. 

Today's event, we're calling it ‘Southasia's Youthquakes’, starting with Sri Lanka in 2022, then Bangladesh last year, and now Nepal just in the last weeks. We've had three uprisings in Southasia in three years, that really have shaken politics in ways that I think are quite unprecedented for each country.

There are certainly differences, but also so many similarities. All of these are uprisings that have come from outside traditional party structures and the traditional systems of politics, right? There's so much churn and it's been a lot for us at Himal to try and take in and make sense of. 

For any of you who might not know me, my name is Roman Gautam. I'm coming to you from Kathmandu. I'm the Editor here at Himal Southasian. We have carried a lot of coverage on Sri Lanka when that was happening. Last year during Bangladesh’s crisis, we carried a lot of coverage and we've done the same thing again for Nepal because we believe that it's important for Southasians to tell our own stories and not always have them filtered through only the Western press, which is oftentimes how these things are reported to the world.

I want to invite you to please come to our website to see the coverage that we've done on Nepal and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. And I also want to tell all of you that we really depend on reader revenues to remain independent and to continue to be able to do this kind of journalism and these kinds of events.

We have the Himal Patron programme, which is how we appeal to our readers and our audience to step up and become paying supporters of Himal and good independent Southasian journalism. We really believe that Himal is doing something that nobody else is and that it is very important for us to continue to do this in an independent and high quality way. 

I want to dive into introducing our incredible panel. Our – well, my co-host today, is Harsh Mander, I think a name and a face that will be familiar to many of you. Harsh is best known for his work as an Indian peace activist, and also, I like to think, quite well known for the work that he has been doing with us. We are currently in season two of a podcast series that Harsh is hosting and Himal is co-producing with his organisation Karwan-e-Mohabbat. I hope you will be tuning into his podcast and following our channels to hear more. 

But Harsh is really joining us today, I think, not just as an Indian expert, as a Southasian, which I think is true of everybody on the panel. And also as somebody who has studied conflict in many forms and in many places has looked at the question of political violence very closely and asked – where does it come from, why does it happen, what comes next? All questions that I think are very relevant here today. And that is why we have Harsh as co-host for this event.

Also joining us, we have Zyma Islam from Dhaka. She wears many hats, senior correspondent, investigative and data journalist as well at the Daily Star. The Daily Star, for any of you who might not know, is one of the outlets that fought to remain independent under really difficult circumstances in Bangladesh under Sheikh Hasina and still very difficult circumstances now. I think Zyma has been very much on the front lines in a reportorial sense, in Bangladesh last year and now. 

We also have Ambika Satkunanathan. She is a human rights advocate coming to us from Colombo. She also has an incredible wealth of experience on Sri Lanka, serving as the Human Rights Commissioner from 2015 to 2020. And so she has seen the functioning of the Sri Lankan government and Sri Lankan politics and society, I think, from very many vantage points. 

Pranaya Rana is coming to us from Kathmandu, across town from where I am. He is a seasoned reporter in Nepal. He has worked with the Kathmandu Post among others and has done some really close and incredible reporting on Nepal. He also runs a weekly newsletter called Kalam Weekly. For any of you who are looking to follow Nepal more closely, you should sign up to Pranay's newsletter because in the English language, I can confidently say it's the best resource you have for making sense of what happens in this crazy country. 

So a  big welcome to all of you. Thank you so much for being here. And I think to kick things off, I wanted to ask each of you to just give us the state of play. I think the uprisings and revolutions are at various degrees of remove for each of us. And I think that we can take it broadly for granted that our audience would have followed what happened in each of our countries right at that moment of upheaval. And it's really, I think, the question of “What has been happening so far since then?” For us in Nepal, I think it's only starting to come clear. So I think for us, it’ll be many more questions than answers. Ambika, maybe I can ask you to start, because Sri Lanka led the way starting in 2022. So from 2022 to now, if you could briefly fill us in on everything that's been happening?