As someone who grew up in Nepal's post-monarchical noughties but now feels an odd sense of royal nostalgia for a time I never lived through, I confront this paradox every day. My fellow republic-raised millennials who never experienced royal rule first-hand seem to increasingly romanticize a bygone era through viral tributes to King Birendra's reign, glamorized recreations of royal pageantry and wistful debates about Nepal's supposed golden age under the crown. This nostalgia blooms alongside profound disillusionment with incumbent politicians who appear to my generation as corrupt, inept and utterly oblivious to the lived realities of their constituents.
State malfeasances, inefficient bureaucracy and partisan impasse often render current government functionaries as uninspired demagogues. Engulfed in a kleptocratic morass, contemporary politicos operate as transactional snollygosters, fractious in their divisions and morally decrepit within this kakistocratic apparatus. By stark antithesis, monarchs are mythologized as embodiments of regal poise, resolute in their sovereignty and transcendent unifiers of national ethos. After years of political unrest, Nepal's absolute ruling institution was abolished in 2008 but why are a portion of post-monarchy youth still drawn to this fictitious grandeur based on its selective memory?
This sentiment transcends mere organic longing for bygone eras; it constitutes an artifice of curated remembrance and painstakingly fabricated nostalgia inculcated within our generation (which remains woefully ignorant of the monarchy's autocratic hegemony) through manufactured memories that venerates regal authority while completely obfuscating its systemic pathologies. This nostalgia is indoctrinated and propagated by three interconnected forces: political Reactionaries, Cultural Gatekeepers and a compliant Media Ecosystem upon Cognitionally Vulnerable Public.
Allure of a Heroic Savior
It is our society’s collective psychosocial disposition to seek solace in one's personality rather than institutionalized collective action during times of adversity and uncertainty. South Asia demonstrates a particular susceptibility to authoritarian proclivities where idol worship, cultic devotion and heroic idealization take root. Our collective psyche’s infatuation with personality-driven authoritarianism finds vivid expression in figures like Kathmandu Mayor Balendra Shah who has transformed municipal governance into a theatrical one-man spectacle. Exploiting this tendency, he has become an enigmatic and brash political gladiator, openly defying democratic norms and undermining institutional integrity.
Nepal's Constitutional Framework and the Future of the Monarchy
Similarly, the deification of Kulman Ghising reveals our dangerous penchant to seek saviors over systems. No phenomenal individual can sustainably overhaul Nepal's energy sector through force of personality alone - systemic challenges demand enduring institutional solutions that outlast any one leader's tenure. Yet public imagination distilled this intricate institutional success to a cult of personality, epitomized by the chant: ‘Kulman Forever, Everyone Else Never’ as if sustainable reform hinges solely on his perpetual presence. This craving for heroic saviors over systemic solutions and a longing for a singular, decisive leader amid democratic dysfunction has fueled for making monarchy another 'messiah myth', a manufactured nostalgia, projecting onto kings like Birendra an imagined golden age of stability and benevolence. We reveal our collective impatience with the necessary but unglamorous work of institutional reform and preferring instead the seductive fantasy of royal deliverance conveniently overlooking the historical realities of autocratic excess and systemic stagnation.
Selective Memory
Seeking refuge in a bygone era and perceiving as better even if the evidence shows contrary has at least two scientific explanations for this perception. First is Decline bias: human tendency to imagine the past not by painstaking investigation of the historical record but by opposition to the present – if society is now precarious and difficult, it must previously have been certain and easy. Second psychological phenomenon is termed the 'rosy retrospection bias.' Studies reveal that as people age, they increasingly reconstruct memories from their youth through an optimistic lens, often embellishing past experiences beyond reality. These reconstructed nostalgic narratives create an illusion that the past was universally superior - a cognitive distortion that significantly impairs our judgment, as human nature drives us to seek replication of remembered pleasures.
This dual mechanism of memory distortion collectively manufactures a romanticized 'golden age' fallacy which has become a potent political tool exploited by leaders across the ideological spectrum. FromNarendra Modi’s invocation of a lost “Vishwa Guru” nostalgia to Trump’s MAGA rhetoric, all are weaponizing manufactured nostalgia to promise a return to imagined glory. Botanist and researcher Uttam Babu Shrestha has eloquently articulated on his social media site on how many Nepalis today see King Birendra’s era through a romanticized lens. They recall his soft-spoken demeanor, image of his smiling family on calendars and the perceived stability of his rule. However, the harsh realities of autocratic rule, be it press censorship, political repression, or economic malaise are slowly fading from collective memory. This is further fueled by the fading effect bias, where negative memories diminish faster than positive ones.
This golden age fallacy stems partly from cognitive bias of older generations and partly from the intentional and artificial promotion of a sentimental yearning for a so-called glorious monarchical past. Young Nepalis embracing this manufactured nostalgia fail to realize the harsh history of monarchy, be it from Mahendra’s coup d'état in 1960, which dismantled Nepal’s nascent democracy, suppressing political dissent through arrests and executions and curtailing press freedom followed by the 30-year regime of ‘Monolithism,Censorship,Tokenism (in development and governance) and Cronyism (patronage)’. Nor do they recall Gyanendra’s autocratic takeover in 2005 where he dissolved the parliament, censored the media, arrested political leaders and ultimately led the monarchy to the depths of despised and failed despotism culminating in its abolition in 2008.
Progressophobia and Availability Heuristic
Nepal reduced extreme poverty from 55% to 0.37% over the past 30 years, a feat unmatched in South Asia, as per the World Bank. In three decades, Nepal's income disparity shrank from 21 times more than the poorest 10% (1995) to 6 times (2023), and consumption inequality from 9 times to 6.5 times. In three decades, road expansion has increased more than twelvefold. Nine airlines and a dozen helicopter operators provide domestic air services today where there were no private airlines until 1991. In 1990, there was one telephone per 3,000 people and no internet. Today, tele-density exceeds 100%, with 75% having internet penetration. Electricity production has increased by 15 times while per capita electricity consumption has grown by 10 times in these 33 years.
Many Nepalis still believe that "everything was better before" or that the nation is stagnating in spite of notable advancements in important areas. Tragically, our generation perpetuates this myth uncritically. This is consistent with what Steven Pinker, seasoned psycholinguist, refers to as "progressophobia”, a cognitive bias in which people primarily focus on topical shortcomings and are incapable of celebrating the progressive changes. This bias is exacerbated by the nature of news which tends to highlight disruptions and failures while ignoring consistent progress or slow-steady-wins. While disasters strike suddenly, progress takes time to build and as it unfolds gradually, it often goes unnoticed in the fast-paced news cycle.
‘Day 5,000 Without a Political Disappearance or repression or censorship' or ‘100 people escaped from absolute poverty yesterday’ are not headlines we ever see every day for the last 30 years. However, cynical reports of corrupt politicians ,corruption scandals and unfortunate events make the front page. The collective psyche of Nepali progressophobesis shaped by this asymmetry, while setbacks appear to be ubiquitous, incremental progress occurs in silence. This perception is reinforced by the ‘availability heuristic’ (identified by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman) which causes people to overlook slow progress that doesn't make the news and place too much emphasis on recent negative events. The outcome? The romanticized past appears to always be better than the underreported present in a country that has been conditioned to perceive stagnation in the midst of transformation where democracy's visible failures overshadow its unseen successes.
Escaping the Golden Age Fallacy
Despite inefficiencies, Nepal's republican era has achieved increased political freedom, inclusivity, civic engagement, activism and democratization in development. Political and social minorities now voice their grievances through federalism and affirmative policies transforming development from royal edicts to a participatory process. However, widespread clientelism, kleptocracy and crumbling institutions have created such disillusionment that many people romanticize a bygone era of monarchy as a haven from the shortcomings of the present.
Democracy's ability to self-correct is its greatest strength, not its perfection. Its openness to criticism, adaptation and reform makes it uniquely resilient. Unlike rigid autocracies, democratic system institutionalize dissents and adapt through public accountability that enable societies to address failures without collapse. This ‘self-correction’ hinges on informed citizens actively engaging with flawed institutions rather than abandoning them for the false certainty of strongmen or nostalgic myths. Strengthening institutional resilience, inclusive governance, power devolution and protecting civic space is how democracies evolve and autocracy fossilizes.
Our generation stands at a crossroads: we must either commit to the hard work of democratic renewal or surrender to the seductive lie of a glorified past. The choice should be obvious: we need to employ our frustrations into the fuel for rebuilding democracy, not to indulge in nostalgia. Notwithstanding the deficiencies, democracy is still the only system that believes that people can sculpt their own destiny instead of bowing down to manufactured myths from the past. The monarchy’s golden age is a mirage; democracy’s messy road is real.
