Recent remarks attributed to Sushila Karki, Nepal’s interim prime minister and former chief justice, have sparked debate across South Asia. Her reported insistence that Nepal will not allow itself to descend into the kind of political instability now associated with Bangladesh has been interpreted in some quarters as a rebuke—others see it as a warning. For Bangladeshis, the moment invites a harder question: what lessons, if any, are actually transferable from Nepal’s current discourse to Bangladesh’s present crisis?
The short answer is that there are lessons—but only if they are understood structurally, not rhetorically.
The Principle: No Democracy Can Be Governed by the Street Alone
At a basic level, the principle articulated by Karki resonates across democratic theory: no government can function if policy and authority are determined by mob pressure rather than constitutional process. When streets replace institutions as arbiters of power, governance becomes reactive, unpredictable, and vulnerable to capture by the loudest or most coercive actors.
In that sense, the warning is sound. Democratic accountability requires elections, courts, legislatures, and lawful protest—not perpetual brinkmanship. Any interim or transitional government, whether in Nepal or elsewhere, has a duty to prevent governance paralysis.
But principles do not operate in a vacuum.
Bangladesh’s Crisis Did Not Begin with the Mob
To suggest that Bangladesh’s interim authorities simply “succumbed to mob violence” is to misread the sequence of events. Bangladesh’s current turmoil did not begin with crowds overpowering a stable and legitimate state. It emerged from years of institutional exhaustion, political exclusion, shrinking civic space, and the erosion of trust in electoral and judicial mechanisms.
When institutions lose credibility, the street does not replace them by choice—it fills a vacuum. Protests that begin with legitimate grievances can spiral into disorder when there are no trusted channels for mediation. In Bangladesh, the tragedy is not that the state faced street pressure, but that it reached a point where large segments of society no longer believed institutions could deliver accountability or reform.
This distinction matters. Condemning mob violence without addressing the causes that make mobs politically decisive risks treating symptoms while ignoring the disease.
Nepal and Bangladesh Are at Different Stages of the Same Risk
Nepal’s current debate—whatever one makes of the media framing—reflects a country still at a warning stage. Youth movements are impatient, political parties are unstable, and institutions are strained, but the core architecture of legitimacy has not yet fully collapsed. The discussion there is preventive: how to stop erosion before it becomes irreversible.
Bangladesh, by contrast, is in a damage-control phase. The erosion has already occurred. Elections have lost trust, institutions are contested, and politics has been pushed into the street not as an alternative, but as a last resort for many citizens.
This is why direct comparisons are risky. Nepal is asking how to avoid Bangladesh’s fate; Bangladesh must ask how to rebuild legitimacy after institutional failure.
The Real Lesson: Authority Must Be Earned, Not Asserted
If there is one lesson Bangladesh can draw from Nepal’s current discourse, it is not the rejection of protest or the assertion of state power. It is the reminder that authority without legitimacy cannot survive, and legitimacy cannot be restored through force, rhetoric, or moral superiority.
Governments do not prevent mob rule by denouncing mobs. They prevent it by:
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restoring credible elections,
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reopening civic space,
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ensuring judicial independence,
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and allowing dissent to be channelled through institutions rather than suppressed into the streets.
Equally, protest movements must recognise that permanent mobilisation is not governance. Without organisation, discipline, and respect for democratic procedures, even just causes can be hijacked by opportunists, extremists, or external actors.
A Shared South Asian Challenge
What is unfolding across South Asia is not a contest between governments and citizens, but a deeper struggle over institutional credibility. Bangladesh’s experience is a warning not because it is uniquely dysfunctional, but because it illustrates how quickly stability can unravel once trust is lost. Nepal’s debate matters because it shows a society still arguing about how to prevent that unraveling.
The choice facing Bangladesh is therefore not whether to imitate Nepal’s rhetoric, but whether to undertake the far harder work of institutional reconstruction. And the choice facing Nepal is whether to heed its own warnings before erosion becomes collapse.
Conclusion
The claim that Bangladesh should “learn from Nepal” is correct in spirit but flawed in execution. The lesson is not obedience to authority, nor resistance to protest, but the urgent necessity of rebuilding democratic institutions so that neither mobs nor repression become substitutes for governance.
In the end, no country is saved by strong words alone. Democracies survive when states earn trust and citizens defend institutions—not when either side attempts to rule by force, fear, or fatigue.
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