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In my 15 years as field researcher, every time I have had to pull out a Consent Form in front of a participant, I have felt squeamish, sheepish, overbearing, and guilty. Why is it that, despite my sincere efforts to make my research as collaborative as possible, the simple act of requesting a signature on a form has often felt hierarchical, contractual, even exploitative — and fundamentally at odds with the spirit of collaboration?

During a Human-Centred Design (HCD) research on adolescent girl health in Chamarajanagar district of Karnataka (India), we found ourselves looking for ways to seek consent which caused less discomfort/hesitation and greater participation. The project sought to understand if adolescent girls’ health was a critical public health concern in the district, what realities influenced it and how communities themselves could help define the most pressing needs and solutions. To explore this, we held seven focus group discussions (FGDs) with 90 adolescent girls.

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Standing in school corridors, community halls and village squares, trying to start conversations about menstruation with girls and their families, it became clear that standard ethical requirements designed for Western/institutional contexts often do not work when researching sensitive issues in non-Western/Indian communities. Ethics is not just a matter of compliance and documentation; it is the difference between being invited in or being quietly shut out.

The on-the-go adaptation of participatory human-centred tools significantly shaped the participation we were able to build, improved the quality of data collected and may ultimately enhance the effectiveness of the interventions we go on to design in India’s diverse contexts.

What makes HCD an Ethical Research Choice?

HCD is a problem-solving approach (rather than a knowledge-generating one) that centres people’s needs, behaviours and lived experiences. In public health, HCD involves engaging communities to identify health challenges and co-create context-specific interventions through iterative prototyping, rapid feedback and constant adaptation.

At its core, HCD is hands-on, context-dependent and focused on creating practical solutions with and for communities. It is increasingly celebrated as a more ethical and effective way to improve healthcare in underserved settings because of its emphasis on collaboration, empathy and responsiveness. Multidisciplinary teams often use HCD methods that draw from traditional research while adapting them to the faster, more iterative pace of design.

However, this very pace and its design-driven ethos challenge conventional notions of research ethics. While HCD borrows from established research methods, it diverges significantly in ensuring ethics in data collection.

This post reflects on how holding on to HCD principles helps navigate the limitations of conventional research ethics, offering lessons from our exercise of embedding ethics into community-driven problem definition.

Consent Beyond Signatures

It is common knowledge that written consent inhibits even initial levels of participation. As we began discussing consent protocols with our field-based colleagues and local NGO partners, we were cautiously advised that reading out formal Consent Forms and asking for signatures might discourage both girls and their guardians from participating in discussions.

We had anticipated that conversations around menstrual health — especially in a district where female literacy is just over 54 per cent — would be sensitive and challenging. Yet, we felt compelled to first consider the most ‘foolproof’ and ‘credible’ method of recording consent: signatures on written forms! And once we were in the community and schools, our concerns were confirmed; written forms made participants visibly hesitant and uncomfortable.

However, the agility that HCD provides quickly came to the rescue and we soon engaged differently to seek and confirm consent in more intuitive, context-sensitive ways. In several FGDs, girls used emoji cards — sad, angry, neutral, happy, excited — to indicate whether they had been ‘sent’ to participate or were genuinely interested in talking. Those who selected ‘happy’ or ‘excited’ opened up with striking honesty about a subject usually wrapped in silence or shame.

Participants shared taboos, myths and local remedies like using Sprite (fizzy drink) or Eno (digestive salts) for cramps, along with deeper experiences — fears of harassment, lack of toilets and/or water at home, discomfort with sanitary pads, and other anxieties like fear of the father hearing about menstruation in ‘his’ household. These tools did not dilute ethical standards but adapted them to respect the girls’ literacy levels, social contexts and the sensitivity of the topic, making ethics both operational and empowering.

Group Consent for a Culturally Fit Participation

In many rural communities, especially tribal ones like Kambuduki village, consent is not an individual act but a collective one. Western-biomedical ethical frameworks do not align with diverse local cultural contexts (in this instance, of India). HCD processes and tools honour communities’ collective decision-making when determining participation.

We therefore moved to group consent formats, where we engaged both groups of adolescent girls and groups of their guardians in open, collective discussions to express their willingness (or lack of it) to participate or let their wards participate. These conversations not only made consent more culturally appropriate and less intimidating but also became rich spaces for dialogue. The settings allowed inter-generational narratives and peer influences that would have been entirely missed in traditional consent-seeking mechanisms like signatures on written forms.

Collaboration > Trust > Accuracy

In places like Dalit-dominated Gumballi, where historically marginalised communities have had prior negative experiences with research extractivism of strangers coming to seek information, trust was understandably fragile. As we kept waiting for the participants to arrive, we realised standard protocols of a structured FGD with relatively unknown facilitators may be the cause of reluctance to participate.

Thankfully, our months-long community immersion and commitment to HCD principles — collaboration, empathy and context-sensitive engagement — made us understand that community-based representatives from NGO partners and frontline health workers (Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) and Auxiliary Nurse Midwife (ANM)), who were already known and trusted in the community, were the best agents to facilitate discussions with adolescent girls. Held in a safe and familiar space of the local community hall, the restructured FGDs helped make participation feel less intimidating.

This shift in who led the engagement significantly increased trust and participation, and led to honest conversations. Girls who were initially unsure of joining the discussion began sharing personal experiences: untreated menstrual pain, infection-related white discharge, challenges of accessing menstrual health services, and lack of hygiene facilities.

Ethics as Design

Over two months of planning these FGDs and encouraging participation, we were once again reminded that ethical procedures around consent, power and inclusion are not just formalities. They shape everything: who feels safe enough to come for these discussions, what is shared and how deeply we can understand what is shared. The emphasis on working  with, and not on, communities turns research from an extractive process into a co-created one. And with that shift, participation rises, quality of data improves and ethical engagement becomes the foundation (and not just the framework or a procedural requirement) of the research project.

By centring local forms of consent, participation and trust, HCD allows research to align with indigenous and non-Western moral worlds rather than imposing external frameworks of compliance. In doing so, it not only makes research more ethical but also more effective because what is co-created is also more likely to be embraced, sustained and transformative.

Caring by design, then, is not just an ethos; it is a pathway to decolonising how we imagine and practice ethics in public health research in non-Western contexts like India.

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* Acknowledgements: The author acknowledges the invaluable support of Karthikeyan Gopinathan, Mallikarjuna and Nagendra P toward planning and execution of FGDs, and translations from Kannada into English.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science on 7 September 2026.’

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

Banner image © Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition, 2024, Unsplash.

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Bangladesh–India relations run deep. The two countries share a heritage of history, language, culture, and contiguous geography — an organic, deep-rooted bond. Over the decades, India has supplied Bangladesh with cotton, cereals, minerals, refined petroleum, vehicles, iron and steel, electrical equipment, energy, medicines, and medical supplies. India has also offered reduced tariffs, allowed goods transport through its territory, and helped build infrastructure. Yet, this goodwill — and India’s crucial support for Bangladesh’s independence in 1971  — is often overshadowed by one unresolved issue:  the long-pending Teesta River Water-Sharing Agreement.

Politics, Perceptions and Protests

The rise of anti-India sentiments in Bangladesh is complex. While the tenure of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was termed a ‘golden era’ for Bangladesh–India bilateral ties, her resignation amidst widespread youth-led protests and subsequent ouster from power, followed by her flight to India in August 2024, has sparked fresh waves of mistrust.

When protests erupt in Bangladesh — even regarding internal political issues and the tragic incidents of youth leader assassinations — fingers are often pointed at India’s alleged involvement in Bangladeshi politics. However, political alliances are only part of the story. The visible, tangible root of dissatisfaction is on the unsolved transboundary Teesta River Water-Sharing Agreement that has become a symbol of grievance and mistrust. Many protesters view India as the upstream  ‘hegemon’. Such an emergence of anti-India sentiments in Bangladesh is a reminder of how quickly water and politics mix with one another.

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India and Bangladesh share 54 rivers that cross their borders. The unresolved Ganga River Treaty sparked anti-India sentiments before 1996; Bangladesh, being downstream, blamed India for diverting water through the upstream Farakka Barrage, leaving less water for Bangladesh during the dry season when demand is at its highest.

It took years to recognise the Ganga as an international river since Indians consider it their national sacred river. Only in 1996 did both countries reach consensus on equitable (50–50) water-sharing, with India following a ‘neighbourhood first’ policy to strengthen relations.

In Bangladesh, 93 per cent of water demand is for agriculture, while 40 per cent of the population is involved in farming. The northern region, where the Teesta flows, is prone to drought, making it a decisive water resource. Bangladesh has built its own barrage to divert Teesta water to irrigate 750,000 hectares in the northern districts. Unfortunately, during dry seasons when water demand peaks for rice cultivation, this infrastructure cannot supply enough water. The apparently drying riverbed makes people suspect that upstream Indian dams are depriving Bangladesh of its fair share of Teesta water.

The Teesta Question: Why Not Replicate the Ganga Formula?

Globally, treaties often use a quantitative/volumetric formula for sharing river waters. South Asian transboundary water treaties,  without exception, rely on equitable quantitative frameworks — essentially, a  ‘50–50’ splitting of water, focussing narrowly on water division. In 1996, both nations agreed to the Ganga treaty to satisfy their people, and was politically gainful — especially to former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who used its  success for electoral advantage for decades.  But after the Ganga treaty, both sides felt pressure during low-flow years, while demand kept rising:

• When river flow is low, a fixed split in the Treaty satisfies neither upstream nor downstream water needs, causing dissatisfaction and growing mistrust.

• Climate change and variability make dry-season flows even less reliable.
• The Joint River Commission (JRC) was formed to manage 54 shared rivers; however, restricted data-sharing, inadequate joint operational mechanisms, and an absence of adaptive management strategies have fuelled water-sharing tensions.

After the Ganga treaty, Bangladesh hoped for a similar agreement on Teesta:  a 50–50 water split. In the Teesta, the dry-season flow has reportedly fallen sharply since the 1990s. Upstream, India faces challenges for its own irrigation and hydropower needs, so downstream dependence on reducing Teesta’s flow for massive irrigation expansion is unrealistic. Consequently, groundwater use is surging, with 80 per cent of Bangladesh’s agricultural development now depending on groundwater rather than surface water. This shift reduces surface water dependence in practice, yet the politics of rivers remains powerful.

In South Asia’s post-colonial legacy, borders and resource controls stir deep emotions, resulting in shared rivers often becoming political rivers. Hence, anti-India sentiment and provocation among Bangladeshis is common, based on the widely held belief that the upstream water hegemon deprives the downstream nation of development opportunities.

Beyond  ‘Water-Sharing’, Toward  ‘Benefit-Sharing’

If treaties are only about dividing water, they will keep failing in dry years under changing climate conditions. An alternative approach is to move from sole water-sharing to benefit-sharing. This will  mean that both countries work together to get the most value from the river system — then share those benefits in a mutually acceptable fair way, taking into consideration the river’s ecology. This aligns with the principles of equitable and reasonable use, and the no-harm principle. For example, Bangladesh’s massive groundwater extraction needs (clean) energy. If India shares hydroelectricity equivalent to the dam-induced flow reductions in the Himalayan Teesta while transparently explaining the challenges of extracting hydroelectricity and managing flood risks, it might foster mutual understanding about challenges both nations face in extracting river benefits, reducing mistrust.

This only works when joint river basin management led by an independent JRC with multidisciplinary teams gets priority, backed by strong political will for regional cooperation through shared river treaties.

Why This Matters Now

This year (2026) is decisive for Bangladesh–India relations. The Ganga Water Treaty is due for renewal. India’s long-term development goals depend on stable, cooperative ties with neighbours. Rivers can either deepen divide or build trust ensuing shared river diplomacy.

A goodwill gesture from India on Teesta water-sharing by overcoming domestic political hindrances — paired with a practical benefit-sharing strategy could transform public opinion in Bangladesh. Likewise, Bangladesh can recognise the real constraints of dry season flows and the shared risks from climate change. Both sides gain by moving from zero-sum politics to win-win cooperation.

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India and Bangladesh cannot change geographical realities. They cannot change their shared history either. But they can choose how to manage their shared rivers by learning from history. If India leans forward — reviving the spirit of 1996, backing the JRC, embracing benefit-sharing on Teesta and beyond, it can ease anti-India sentiments and open the door to wider cooperation. If Bangladesh meets that goodwill gesture beyond politics and joint problem-solving, bilateral relations will be stronger.

Nations may alter allies and enemies but they cannot choose their neighbours. For Bangladesh and India, the choice now is simple: to turn rivers from political flashpoints into shared ties.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science on 31 August 2026.’

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

Banner image © Kazal Mahmood, ‘Boat on the Teesta River at Mahipur, Rangpur (Bangladesh)’, 2025, Unsplash.

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The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Index Report 2025 by Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) shows that rate of adoption of AI is unprecedented, as millions now use AI on a regular basis. Alongside, Stanford University’s Global AI Vibrancy Tool (GVT) offers a comprehensive comparison of AI readiness and strengths across 36 countries. The ranking of these countries in GVT is determined on the basis of multiple factors such as Research and Development (R&D), talent, infrastructure, policy, and societal engagement.

According to the latest rankings of GVT, the United States of America is currently leading in AI across multiple domains with China a close second, followed by India at third place. Pakistan does not feature in the 36 listed countries that are ranked, indicating significant gaps in the country’s AI progress.

AI is no longer an optional technology; it has become one of the central pillars of modern governance, economic productivity, military modernisation, and geopolitical power. Nations that will lead in AI will also set global standards, achieve high-value economic growth and govern digital norms in future. Logically, therefore, countries that lag in AI development will face risks of becoming mere consumers of foreign systems.

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Over the past few years, the policy discourse in Pakistan has repeatedly invoked AI-driven governance and digitisation of public services calling for smart policing, biometric identity management, digital public services, and even digital courts. However, these ambitions largely remain disconnected from basic structural and governance constraints that hinder AI development in the country.

One key challenge is the lack of required infrastructure. AI development, especially training of large models and their deployment, depends on stable energy supply, reliable high speed internet, data centres, and advanced computational power. The digital infrastructure of Pakistan is currently struggling in all these areas. Energy instability is one of the basic challenges in AI development as sustainable research and deployment of AI demands huge amount of energy. In May 2025, Pakistan announced an allocation of 2,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity to Bitcoin mining and AI data centres, which signals the national priority towards the development of AI. However, such initiatives can only be effective if key underlying structural issues like frequent power outages, rising electricity cost, circular debt, and an over-burdened power grid, are resolved first.

Similarly, the country also struggles with securing uninterrupted high-speed internet, with service degradation and loss of connectivity being a common occurrence. Although Pakistan is now moving toward 5G and satellite internet, the overall pace has been lethargic so far. Next, while indigenous data centre infrastructure is emerging slowly and gradually,  it remains comparatively small as of now. Currently, there are 27 data centres spread across the major cities of the country. One of the most notable developments is the hyperscale data centre, which is to be established in partnership with National Aerospace Science & Technology Park (NASTP) and Khazana Cloud. However, despite the growing local data centre infrastructure, majority of users in Pakistan remain dependent on foreign cloud services (like Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure) due to reliability, scale and cost-effectiveness offered by these platforms.

Access to high-performance computational tools, including Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), is also limited in Pakistan. Thus, the AI ecosystem in Pakistan remains largely dependent on foreign services, tools and platforms, which carry serious risks of data sovereignty and security. Such dependency also leads to passive consumption of AI models rather than being an active leader in the development of AI. In terms of talent, around 73 thousand students graduate in Information Technology (IT) and Computer Sciences (CS) annually in Pakistan; however, it struggles to retain skilled workers due to lack of research funding and growth opportunities.

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The global tech ecosystem is also becoming increasingly exclusionist and competitive with contrasting tech ecosystems in the West, and in China. Developing countries like Pakistan have minimal participation in the global governance of emerging technologies such as AI; as such, Pakistan’s technical oversight and regulatory capacity is limited for now. The country therefore faces the risk of being exposed to unregulated AI tools, weakly moderated information systems and data exploitation.

AI is bound to revolutionise the global economy, governance, defence, growth, and society in the years ahead, irrespective of the readiness of individual nation-states. The technology is already integrated in governance, economic, political and security practices around the globe. For Pakistan, the window of opportunity is closing fast. With AI development taking place at breakneck speed globally, Pakistan needs to act urgently if it wants to catch up and secure a place in the global AI race.

Pakistan needs to actively build AI governance and regulatory capacity as it serves as a prerequisite for AI development. The underlying structural issues related to stable energy supply and high speed internet connectivity also need to be addressed. Similarly, access to high performance GPUs and expansion of local data centre infrastructure are highly critical for building national computational power for AI. Finally, Pakistan needs to explore South–South AI cooperation which could be highly effective in addressing shared challenges. Such cooperation could also offer a greater participation of the Global South in setting customised norms and standards of AI globally.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science, on 24 August 2026.

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

Banner image © Igor Omilaev, 2023, Unsplash.

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In the West, rhetoric is often perceived to be a set of universal techniques governed by common rules.  In practice, these rules reflect particular intellectual traditions that do not always travel easily across cultural contexts.

Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian and their Greco-Roman contemporaries still anchor most mainstream Western thinking about how we argue and how we convince. Yet what lies at the heart of rhetoric — reasoning, arguing, persuading — is not confined to any single intellectual tradition. Every society has developed its own ways to debate, evaluate, claim, and convince. Then how and why did one tradition come to dominate how persuasion is practiced internationally?

Part of the answer is disciplinary. Comparative rhetoric, the field that studies parallel traditions outside the Greco-Roman world, remains small, strictly academic, and largely invisible to the layperson. The other part, one could argue, is that the average person has no interest in reading about dense, esoteric texts that supposedly have no relevance to their modern lives. Yet that would fail to explain the plethora of books on the topic that use classical Western stalwarts as the basis for teaching the art of persuasion.

But that is far from the full story.

The central problem is how different cultures build trust, construct arguments and persuade one another. Indian philosophy offers a compelling parallel tradition, offering a depth of thought that is rarely acknowledged in mainstream narratives of rhetoric especially in the West.

India’s Parallel Tradition

There is no Indian equivalent of Aristotle’s Rhetoric or Cicero’s De Oratore. But there is a wide body of work in which reasoning and debate feature prominently. But the absence of a single canonical text is not evidence of a missing tradition; quite the contrary, it is, rather, proof of how deeply these practices are rooted in the cultural psyche such that they are dispersed (and embedded) across multiple works through the ages.

Take, for example, the Nyāya Sūtra (compiled in Sanskrit c. 6th century BCE–2nd century CE in India), which analyses how we know what we know, how we justify claims, how we test evidence, and how we resolve disagreements. It offers a five-step model of argument and a thorough account of how arguments can go wrong.

Nyāya and Aristotle: Two Different Approaches

Let us take a simple claim to dissect the difference in approach.

Claim: ‘The hill has fire.’

Aristotle’s method focuses on how to secure the audience’s acceptance of a claim. His primary tool is the ‘enthymeme’, a compressed argument that omits a premise the audience already accepts. The full reasoning would be: ‘Wherever there is smoke, there is fire. This hill has smoke. Therefore, the hill has fire.’ But an enthymeme drops the general rule and states only the part the audience needs to draw a conclusion: ‘This hill has smoke; therefore, it has fire.’

This method is quick, efficient and persuasive because it draws the audience into the reasoning, allowing them to feel they have arrived at the conclusion themselves.

Nyāya takes a different route where analogy and shared experience are critical. Its standard five-part structure would look like this:

• Proposition (pratijñā):
  The hill has fire.
• Reason (hetu):
  Because it has smoke.
• Example (udāharaṇa):
  Wherever there is smoke, there is fire, as in a kitchen.
• Application (upanaya):
  This hill has smoke, just like the kitchen.
• Conclusion (nigamana):
  Therefore, the hill has fire.

Although Aristotle links rhetoric to careful reasoning elsewhere in his work, his Rhetoric is largely focussed on shaping arguments for particular audiences. He values examples and analogies, but does not treat them  as a structural necessity.

The contrast between the approaches becomes clearer when we look at the classification of arguments. Nyāya classifies debates by their underlying intention. Vāda is a genuine search for truth, jalpa is a competitive contest aimed at victory, and vitaṇḍā is a destructive mode concerned only with refutation. These categories describe how participants conduct themselves within an argument.

Aristotle’s divisions, by contrast, map the social arenas in which speech takes place. Deliberative for politics, judicial for the courts, and epideictic for praise or blame.

This distinction suggests that Nyāya’s central concern is the quality and rigour of reasoning, where a relatable example from daily life is essential to bringing people on board. Aristotle, by contrast, is primarily (though not exclusively) concerned with the uses of speech and the most efficient means of persuasion.

A Missed Dialogue

What is striking is that when 20th-century Western theorists reconstructed modern rhetoric (such as Stephen Toulmin and Chaim Perelman), they developed models remarkably close to Nyāya’s insights. Toulmin’s argument structure (designed to reflect how people argue in daily life rather than through formal, abstract logic) echoes Nyāya’s step-wise reasoning. Perelman’s ‘new rhetoric’, centred on audience-based justification, overlaps strongly with Nyāya’s insistence on common, shared experience. Yet, as Keith Lloyd, a leading scholar on comparative rhetoric, observes, ‘Western rhetoric has long ignored India’s Nyāya Sūtra, dismissing it as “primitive logic”.’

This matters now because the world is entering an era in which persuasion can no longer be understood through a single cultural lens. Effective international cooperation increasingly requires what might be called rhetorical multilingualism — the ability to recognise not only different languages, but different logics of persuasion. Translation (into a Western language) alone is insufficient, because an argument that is coherent and compelling in one tradition may need to be fundamentally restructured, rather than simply reworded, to be convincing in another.

For example, imagine a scenario in which the scientific basis for urgent action is widely accepted and supported by extensive expert consensus. Yet consensus on the evidence fails to produce binding commitments.

In this hypothetical negotiation, some participants frame the issue primarily as a technical and legal problem, emphasising models, quantified risk, and formal obligations. Others do not dispute the scientific findings. Rather, they challenge the premises underlying the proposed obligations, highlighting questions of historical responsibility, prior commitments, trust, and the distribution of costs.

The disagreement is therefore not over evidence, but over the basis on which obligations are understood. Some actors reason forward from projected future risks; others reason backward from past experience. Even the meaning of ‘success’ may vary, from legally binding commitments to more flexible political arrangements.

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This scenario illustrates a broader dynamic in contemporary diplomacy. Many negotiations continue to rely on a Western tradition of persuasion that presumes shared standards of evidence, authority, and reasoning. Where these assumptions are not shared, arguments that appear compelling in one context may be interpreted differently in another.

A Nyāya-informed approach to diplomacy would not treat scientific consensus as a self-sufficient argument. It would explicitly build persuasion around shared cases, acknowledged histories and clearly articulated intentions. In practice, this means structuring negotiations around agreed examples, demonstrable cooperation or instances where responsibilities were fairly distributed, ensuring that commitments are both understandable and accepted.

Applying insights from multiple rhetorical traditions to contemporary challenges could offer a more effective approach to persuasion in a multipolar world. The Nyāya Sūtra offers a compelling model by grounding arguments in shared experience and relatable examples, showing how persuasion can cross cultural divides. Cultivating this kind of rhetorical awareness could prove to be highly beneficial in an era where success depends both on what we say and how we make others see and accept our reasoning.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science, and should not be taken as an expression of policy of His Majesty’s Government. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science, on 17 August 2026.

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

Banner image © Sergiu Valenas, ‘Old Book’, 2018, Unsplash.

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Sri Lanka’s education story cannot be understood without its crisis history. The country has endured not one emergency but a compounding sequence of them — each arriving before the last has been absorbed, each eroding the institutional capacity needed to withstand the next. The 26-year civil war between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which ended in 2009, left the Northern and Eastern Provinces educationally devastated. Approximately 800,000 people were displaced; schools were destroyed or militarised; and post-conflict curricula entirely avoided the historical roots of the conflict, leaving a generation without the tools to understand its own country.

Then came the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 which killed over 35,000 Sri Lankans and destroyed schools across the southern and eastern coastlines. In 2019, the Easter Sunday bombings killed at least 269 people, including children attending Sunday school services. Schools closed immediately, a state of emergency was declared and, as the International Crisis Group noted, social media was shut down at a level not seen even during three decades of civil war.

Before communities had recovered, Covid–19 arrived. Approximately 4.3 million school-age children experienced prolonged school closures — among the longest in South Asia. Remote learning was introduced without the infrastructure to sustain it: internet-based education reached only 45 per cent of students, and device ownership in estate sectors was as low as 4.6 per cent. The digital pivot that might have cushioned the blow became another vector of inequality. By 2022, economic collapse had arrived. Sri Lanka defaulted on its external debt — the first time since her independence in 1948 — and, as Human Rights Watch (2025) documents, education spending fell to just 1.5 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the third-lowest in the world. School meals were cut by two-thirds. Attendance has not fully recovered in 2026.

A QR Code System, and What it Reveals

In July 2022, at the height of the fuel crisis, Sri Lanka’s Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) built and deployed a nationwide QR code-based National Fuel Pass in under three weeks. Working with the Department of Motor Traffic and private sector partners, the system linked every registered vehicle to a verified digital quota, eliminating queues, black market trading and hoarding. Sri Lanka’s monthly fuel import bill fell from US$500 million to US$240 million. By March 2026, when the Middle East conflict disrupted global oil supply and triggered fresh fuel shortages, the government reactivated the system within days.

The contrast with the education sector is stark. The same government that mobilised cross-sectoral digital infrastructure for fuel in three weeks has not applied that urgency to the learning loss affecting 4.3 million children over the same period. The Educational Publications Department’s Smart Textbook platform and e-Thaksalawa e-learning portal are genuine innovations but they were built over years without emergency mandate or commensurate funding. As one analyst observed, the readiness to deploy digital public infrastructure is unevenly distributed: resource emergencies trigger it; learning emergencies do not. The barriers to agile education response in middle-income countries are not primarily technical. They are political. Learning loss is invisible until a generation later. Policy-makers respond to what they can see.

Two Covid Lessons for the Classroom

The pandemic generated two lessons Sri Lanka has yet to institutionalise. First, that the digital divide is a rights issue, not a logistical inconvenience. A LIRNEAsia survey in 2021 found only 63 per cent of enrolled students had accessed online learning at any point during the pandemic. Colombo Urban Lab research showed that working-class families could not facilitate learning on shared devices because parents needed those same devices to earn a daily wage. The Ministry of Education’s  National Education Policy Framework (2023) set ambitious digital targets but was criticised for treating device access as a market problem rather than a public infrastructure obligation.

The second lesson is the structural cost of a dense public holiday calendar. Sri Lanka observes up to 26 public holidays per year — including 12 full-moon Poya days (holiday on full moon day each month) — placing it among the countries with the highest number of school holidays in the world. The 2025 school calendar included 22 public holidays falling on weekdays. When crises compress the school year, this calendar provides no slack. This is not an argument against Sri Lanka’s rich multi-religious traditions. It is an argument that the school calendar — like the fuel allocation system — should be subject to dynamic, crisis-responsive management, with pre-agreed recovery protocols when emergencies consume instructional time.

Looking Ahead

The Education in Emergencies (EiE) field has moved beyond minimum standards toward what researchers now call ‘systems resilience’ — the capacity to absorb repeated shocks without permanently degrading educational outcomes. Sri Lanka’s experience, from post-conflict reconstruction through to the energy crisis, points to three concrete reforms:

Build a National Education Continuity Protocol (NECP):  The Fuel Pass worked because there was a clear trigger, a known beneficiary population, and pre-existing infrastructure. The Ministry of Education should develop an equivalent NECP — a tiered plan that activates automatically when school closures exceed two consecutive weeks. It would pre-position offline curriculum packs on e-Thaksalawa, community learning hubs in temples, mosques, and community centres, and a teacher welfare fund covering transport costs — eliminating the reliance on the improvised coping strategies documented among principals during the 2022 crisis.

Establish a Student Digital Entitlement Register:  The Fuel Pass worked because every vehicle was registered and traceable. Sri Lanka has no equivalent for student device and connectivity access. A disaggregated national register — mapping each enrolled student’s household device ownership, connectivity, and language medium — would identify excluded students before a crisis strikes, target subsidies where they are needed most, and enable real-time monitoring of whether digital education policies are actually reaching their intended beneficiaries.

Adopt a Crisis-Responsive School Calendar:  The Ministry should embed into every annual school calendar a pre-agreed Crisis Recovery Schedule — designated make-up days activatable by ministerial declaration within 48 hours of a trigger. Countries including Bangladesh and Pakistan have introduced comparable mechanisms following flood and earthquake cycles. This framework should be developed in genuine consultation with religious and community leaders, so that the cultural significance of Poya days is respected while children’s right to education is equally protected.

From Reactive Response to Standing Readiness

Sri Lanka has demonstrated, through the National Fuel Pass, that it possesses the state capacity, digital infrastructure, and cross-sectoral coordination to respond to emergencies with speed and precision — when political will is mobilised. The INEE Minimum Standards remind us that education in emergencies is not a second-order concern, it is a rights imperative. For countries like Sri Lanka navigating polycrisis conditions, the traditional EiE framework of linear phases must give way to standing institutional readiness: pre-designed protocols, pre-positioned resources, pre-agreed triggers. The Northern Province’s post-conflict education recovery showed what sustained investment can achieve but it did not embed preparedness for the next crisis. When Covid–19 arrived a decade later, the province suffered disproportionate learning loss.

A next shock will arrive at some point in time. Sri Lanka has already proved it can respond: a simple QR code tamed the fuel queues. It does not need a grand solution for education. It needs the same thing: a small innovation, applied with urgency, before the next emergency arrives.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science, and should not be taken as an expression of policy of His Majesty’s Government. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science, on 10 August 2026.

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

Banner image © Javier Saint Jean, 2021, Unsplash.

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On 29 October 2025, in the small village of Mirzapur (Itail Union, Jamalpur Sadar) of Bangladesh, a farmer knelt in the muddy field, his hands trembling over the lifeless body of his cow.  Three more lay still around him, their breath taken by acid-poisoned water.  The pond and its surrounding grass, which had supported them for many years, had become poisonous due to heavy metals (lead in particular) and acid from discharge from a neighbouring battery recycling factory.

The farmer’s story is told in human terms: his livelihood is destroyed, his daughter’s education is now uncertain. His vulnerability is a stark human tragedy. However, if we shift our gaze from the owner’s financial loss, we feel a more profound, more silent tragedy. These cows were not mere assets but sentient beings who endured terror and agony before death — a suffering that calls for justice grounded in animal rights and the prevention of cruelty.

The Animal Welfare Act 2019

The Animal Welfare Act 2019 is the principal legislation in Bangladesh that aims to ensure animal care, prohibit cruelty, and foster compassion.  Wilful poisoning of cattle is a clear instance of deliberate cruelty and the imposition of needless suffering, covered in Section 11 of the Act.  However, the law does not address acts of negligence and fails to acknowledge animals as legal beings with rights.  Further, upon considering the severity of these acts, the prescribed penalty (per Section 16) for deliberate cruelty is simple imprisonment for up to two years, or a fine of BDT 50,000 (US$410 approx.), both unduly light punishments.

The  ‘Property’ Trap in the Penal Code

Section 429 of the Penal Code, 1860, deals with ‘mischief by killing or maiming cattle’. While it frames the crime as damage to property, the prescribed punishment — imprisonment of up to five years — reflects the serious economic and social value of these animals. For the farmer, this section is a path to ensuring the polluter is punished for its tangible loss. However, treating cows merely as property feels inadequate. It ignores their suffering. This is where the global evolution of animal law provides a more compelling framework.

Internationally, the conversation has moved beyond just preventing cruelty to actively upholding welfare. While no single international court prosecutes cases like this, powerful soft laws and principles set a global standard. The most important of these are the Five Freedoms, a globally accepted benchmark for animal welfare. The poisoned cows were brutally denied every single one:

• Freedom from Hunger and Thirst: Replaced by consuming a toxic, burning substance.
• Freedom from Discomfort: Replaced by the acute physical distress of poisoning.
• Freedom from Pain, Injury, and Disease: This was the direct cause of their death.
• Freedom to Express Normal Behaviour: Their natural behaviour of drinking water led to their death.
• Freedom from Fear and Distress: Their final moments were undoubtedly filled with both fear and distress.

Bangladesh, as a member of the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), is committed to advancing these very standards. This tragedy is not just a violation of national law but a breach of a global ethical compact.

Bridging Environmental Justice and Human Rights

The case of the battery recycling plant highlights a critical gap in Bangladesh’s legal regime. Legal cases related to environmental pollution are often handled by the Environment Courts. Under the  ‘Polluter Pays Principle’, companies are held liable for ecological damage and human health impacts. However, the law rarely quantifies the  ‘sentient loss’ of non-human life. Industrial negligence that poisons an ecosystem harms both humans and animals. Justice, therefore, should not only compensate the farmer’s economic loss but also address the suffering of sentient creatures. By incorporating animal welfare standards into environmental lawsuits, Bangladesh can develop a holistic  ‘Ecological Justice’ framework that recognises the interdependence of all life.

Global Precedents and the Way Forward

Courts around the world are increasingly acknowledging that the law must see animals as more than property. Landmark judgments provide a powerful precedent for what justice could look like in Bangladesh; in Animal Welfare Board of India vs A. Nagaraja And Ors (2014), the Supreme Court of India declared that, like citizens of the country, animals too have ‘Right to Life’, one of five fundamental rights guaranteed in Article 21 of the Constitution of India. The court also stated that  ‘Every species has an inherent right to live’. A court in Argentina granted a writ of habeas corpus in the case of Cecilia the Chimpanzee — a tool used to free humans from unlawful detention — to a chimpanzee, declaring her a ‘non-human legal person’. These rulings establish animal welfare as a constitutional obligation of the state and its people, rather than merely a rule or ethical value.

For the farmer in Jamalpur Sadar, compensation may be a form of justice. Real justice, however, necessitates holding authorities and the firm responsible to environmental and animal welfare standards.  It will not be accomplished until the legal system recognises not just the material loss but also the four sentient ‘persons’ who shared his struggle and hope, as well as their stolen lives and extreme pain.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science on 3 August 2026.’

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

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The Aravallis have long served as the geological foundation of the Indian subcontinent. For northern India it is an ecological lifeline, offering much-needed protection against the intense heat and rapidly spreading desertification in states like Delhi, Haryana and Rajasthan. The Constitution of India under Articles 48A (‘Protection and Improvement of Environment and Safeguarding of Forests and Wildlife’) and 51A(g) (‘Protection and Improvement of Natural Environment’) has imposed a duty on the state and citizens to safeguard the natural environment, including forests. However, the Aravalli range has long been the subject of legal discussion, with the central question being deceptively simple yet crucial: what exactly constitutes the Aravalli range?

The Aravallis

Maps show a lengthy but fractured mountain chain stretching 650 kms from western to northern India. It starts close to the Delhi Ridge, travels across the rocky plateaus of southern Haryana, crosses the expansive, scorching Rajasthani landscapes, and ends close to Ahmedabad in Gujarat. This mountain range is the Aravalli. In some places it is almost invisible while in others it is fragmented.  

Formed over centuries by tectonic movements, erosion, wind, and rain, its dust, ash and soil contain remnants of the planet’s early eras. It acts as a buffer against desertification and prevents the Thar Desert from expanding into eastern Rajasthan and the Gangetic plain. The Aravallis are abundant with sandstone, limestone, marble, granite, and minerals including lead, zinc, copper, gold, and tungsten. Additionally, by preserving watersheds that supply the Chambal, Luni and Sabarmati rivers, it helps alleviate water scarcity in drought-prone Rajasthan and Gujarat.

Disagreement over precise identification of the Aravalli range has come up over the years in the context of mining limitations and environmental regulations in judicial and policy discourse, with practical ramifications for the level of protection granted to the range.

Legal Boundaries of the Aravalli Range

The Supreme Court of India has been considering the issue of defining the Aravallis for nearly three decades. However, what started as a sincere attempt by the Court in the late 1990s to preserve and protect this unique habitat may now accelerate its degradation.

An earlier ruling (M.C. Mehta v. Union of India & Ors (2006)) prohibited mining in the Aravalli Hills; while the prohibition was clear in intent, the absence of a uniform definition meant that states interpreted the term ‘Aravalli Hills’ differently. Haryana, Delhi and Gujarat either followed different criteria or none at all, whereas Rajasthan adopted a formal definition in 2006 (based on a study from 2002 and previous geological classifications). This approach weakened enforcement mechanisms and created loopholes that have been consistently misused by mining mafias, arguing that certain hillocks did not legally qualify as ‘Aravallis’, even if they were linked to the ecological system.

In 2010, Rajasthan submitted the ‘deemed definition’ of the Aravallis to the Supreme Court according to which only peaks or parts of hills that are 100 metres above ground level (based on the Richard Murphy Classification) were to be considered as Aravalli hills, which would also make mining easier. However, this was not accepted by the Supreme Court.

In May 2024, the Supreme Court while deliberating over the mining issue in the Aravallis, observed that, ‘one of the major issues is with regard to the different definitions of the Aravalli hills/ranges, as adopted by different States.’ The Court requested a more precise, consistent and scientific definition of ‘Aravalli Hills’ and ‘Aravalli Range’, observing that conflicting descriptions had made land-use planning, environmental control and enforcement against illicit mining more difficult over time.

The New Definition

The MoEFCC-led expert committee, constituted pursuant to the Supreme Court’s order of May 2024, submitted a Report on the Uniform Definition of the Aravalli Hills and Ranges, stating that ‘a uniform definition of the Aravalli hills and ranges could not be arrived at based on hardcoded slope and elevation criteria.’ Even as deliberations were ongoing, the Supreme Court bench led by Justice Gavai heard the T. N. Godavarman Thirumulpad vs Union of India & Ors (2025) case on 12 August, and emphasised the need for a ‘policy decision with respect to the definition of Aravalli hills and ranges’.

Pursuant to this, the Committee, without providing any justification for departing from its initial view that a ‘uniform definition’ is not possible, abruptly came to the conclusion that in order to ensure sustainable mining, ‘any landform in the Aravalli districts having an elevation of 100 metres or more from the local relief shall be termed as Aravalli Hills’.

Controversy began as soon as the Supreme Court accepted this definition in November 2025 because a seemingly small change in fact represented a fundamental shift. Per the logic of the definition, any landform in the Aravallis that was less than 100 metres of elevation or located more than 500 metres from adjacent peaks would not be considered a mountain or part of a mountain range.

It should be noted here that lower slopes, foothills and transition zones, frequently lying much below these arbitrarily determined heights, are where biodiversity is concentrated, heat is controlled, moisture is stored and recycled, and hydrological processes are most active. Peaks may be considered mountains on paper, but the lower and mid-elevation landscapes are what allow mountains to serve as climate systems.

Further, at least 90 per cent of the Aravallis would no longer have legal protection under this revised definition. According to a report in The Indian Express, internal documents of the Forest Survey of India (FSI) showed that only 1,048 of 12,081 Aravalli Hills, spread across 15 districts in Rajasthan, are 100 metres or more in height. This indicates that only 8.7 per cent of Rajasthan’s Aravallis would be protected under this criteria.

The Aravalli Notification (1992) and the National Capital Region (NCR) Planning Board’s Natural Conservation Zone declarations (2021) had protected the entire range based on its ecological value, not merely by its height. This was undermined by the new definition, a fundamental shift in India’s environmental governance, giving technical definitions precedence over ecological importance.

The 0.19% Clarification and Subsequent Abeyance

The judgement triggered widespread protests from Rajasthan to Haryana; politicians, environmentalists, social media influencers, and citizens cautioned that this would have a detrimental effect on the environment and the economy. Activists demanded that the entire Range be declared an Ecologically Critical Area, and called for an end to the quarrying of raw stone from the hills.

Following this backlash, the Central Government issued a clarification denying allegations that the definition had been altered to permit large-scale mining. Additionally, it was said that no relaxation had been granted for mining activities and that more than 90 per cent of the ecologically delicate mountain system would remain protected. In a press conference on 22 December 2025, Union Minister Bhupendra Yadav stated that,

‘In the total area of 1.44 lakh sq. kms of the Aravalli, mining eligibility can only be in 0.19 per cent of the area. The rest of the entire Aravalli is preserved and protected […] people have created confusion that you can mine below the 100-metre elevation in a hill, but it is not so […] areas lying within 500 metres between two hills would also be treated as part of the same range. After this definition, more than 90 per cent of the area will be protected.’

General Secretary of the Opposition Indian National Congress, Jairam Ramesh asserted that the 0.19 per cent figure equated to a sizable area of 68,000 acres, and that the 1.44 lakh sq. kms figure was misleading because it covered the whole area of the 34 Aravalli districts in four states that the Ministry had specified. This denominator was incorrect since the area within these districts, which is under the Aravallis, should have been used instead. ‘If the area under the Aravallis is used as a base, then 0.19 per cent will turn out to be a very huge under-estimate’, he stated, asserting that the Aravallis make up almost 33 per cent of the total landmass in 15 of the 34 districts where statistics can be verified. Further, and as mentioned earlier, according to FSI documents, just 8–9 per cent of the Aravallis in Rajasthan qualified for protection as per the new definition, leaving over 90 per cent of the forests unprotected. On being asked, the Minister failed to provide a definitive response on how many hills would be protected and how many affected.

Environmental activists remained unconvinced by official assurances. They contended that hills, woods and watershed areas serve as interconnected landscapes, and that ecological systems cannot be reduced to mathematical criteria. A number of organisations called on the government to take a preventive stance and treat the Aravalli ecosystem as a whole, regardless of its height or slope.

In response to mounting pressure, the Ministry of Environment ordered the states to enlarge the protected zones and completely prohibit new mining licenses in the Aravalli range, aiming to safeguard the Aravallis as a continuous geological crest and prevent unregulated mining across the region. However, Ramesh (on X) criticised the measure as inadequate, arguing that the core issue (of redefinition based on height) remained unaddressed.

The controversy eventually reached the Court itself. On 29^th December 2025, the Supreme Court stayed its own judgement in a suo motu proceeding, keeping the 100-metre definition in abeyance pending review by a High-Powered Expert Committee of domain experts yet to be constituted. The Court acknowledged that the Report of the Committee and its own judgement had failed to clarify certain critical issues, and that the definition had the risk of narrowing rather than securing the range’s protection.

The Way Forward

This controversy demonstrates how a legal definition can shape ecological features. A height-and-distance classification may be suitable for mapping and mining purposes but it fails to capture how mountains actually function as climate systems, where different parts work together rather than in isolation. At a deeper level, the debate highlights a larger problem in India’s environmental governance: how to balance development demands with the preservation of natural systems that do not fit neatly within administrative borders or numerical thresholds.  

Environmentalists have noted that decades of legal and illegal mining have already damaged the Aravallis severely. Any dilution in protection, they contend, might hasten the extinction of wildlife, deteriorate Delhi–NCR’s air quality further, and exacerbate the region’s already severe water shortage. Articles 48A and 51A(g) of the Constitution impose a clear duty on the state and citizens to protect the environment, which has been consistently reinforced by the Supreme Court through Article 21 (‘Right to Life’), making environmental protection an integral part of it. By excluding a substantial portion of the range from legal protection, the current approach risked diluting the safeguards established under the Indian environmental jurisprudence. While the Supreme Court has temporarily restored the previous framework, the underlying risk of definitional dilution remains unresolved pending the Expert Committee’s assessment.

Ultimately, whether the Aravallis endure as a living climate shield or fade into fragmented quarries will depend on how seriously the judiciary and the bureaucracy choose to prioritise ecological reality over administrative convenience.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science on 27 July 2026.’

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

Banner image © Aditi Gupta, ‘Leopard Trail (Aravalli Hills)’, Haryana, 2024, Unsplash.

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Mahr (dower) occupies a central place in Muslim personal law across South Asia, functioning simultaneously as a religious obligation, a contractual entitlement and a legally enforceable claim. Far from being a symbolic payment, mahr is conceived as a mandatory right of the wife arising from the marriage contract itself. Courts across Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka have long affirmed that mahr is enforceable through law.

Yet contemporary litigation reveals a significant shift. Mahr is increasingly tested against broader constitutional norms of equality, maintenance and effective access to justice. Across South Asia, courts are reassessing whether mahr can continue to function as a sufficient mechanism of women’s financial protection or whether it must be understood as one element within a wider bundle of post-marital remedies. This layered understanding of mahr reflects broader debates in comparative family law on how religious legal institutions are accommodated within plural legal orders.

This post argues that South Asian courts are not abandoning mahr but reworking it — embedding it within constitutional, economic and procedural frameworks that reshape how women’s financial rights are protected in practice.

Nature and Timing of Mahr

In classical Islamic law, mahr consists of a sum of money or, in some cases, property rights owed by the husband to the wife. South Asian courts have consistently rejected the idea that mahr constitutes consideration for marriage; instead, it is treated as an essential incident of the marital relationship. Its validity does not depend on the husband’s financial capacity at the time of marriage.

Mahr may be either prompt (mu‘ajjal), payable immediately upon marriage or on demand by the wife, or deferred (mu’akhkhar), payable upon dissolution of marriage by divorce or death. Where deferred mahr is stipulated without a specific time for payment, courts have generally presumed it to be payable at the termination of the marriage. This presumption reflects a protective interpretive approach designed to prevent deferral from becoming de facto non-payment.

Courts across South Asia have long rejected the idea that mahr is consideration for marriage, instead treating it as a mandatory proprietary entitlement. Where it is deferred without a clear payment date, courts generally presume it becomes payable upon divorce or death — a principle established as early as Abdul Kadir vs Salima And Anr (1886) and still applied today.

Mahr as a Legal Debt

South Asian courts have gone further by consistently treating unpaid mahr as a legal debt, enforceable against the husband or his estate. In Kapore Chand vs Kadar Unnissa Begum And Ors (1950), the Supreme Court of India confirmed that mahr ranks as a lawful debt, while earlier Privy Council jurisprudence recognised a widow’s right to retain possession of property as security until payment. This judicial framing allows mahr to operate not only within personal law but across inheritance, property, and creditor regimes.

Possession as Security for Mahr

South Asian courts have also recognised a distinctive remedial mechanism in the form of a wife’s right to retain possession of the husband’s property after his death or upon divorce until her mahr is fully satisfied. This right does not confer ownership but operates as a form of lawful security for the unpaid debt.

Courts have consistently upheld this possessory right even against heirs, provided that the possession was peaceful, lawful and referable to the marital relationship. The doctrine illustrates how mahr has been judicially operationalised as an enforceable economic safeguard rather than a merely symbolic entitlement. This principle, firmly articulated in (Syed) Sabir Husain vs S. Farzand Hasan (1937) has been repeatedly applied in subsequent Indian High Court decisions, reinforcing the treatment of mahr as a debt secured by possession where necessary.

From Doctrine to Reform: Constitutional and Economic Pressures

Across South Asia, mahr is no longer treated as a standalone or self-sufficient form of protection. Instead, it is increasingly litigated alongside maintenance claims, post-divorce financial provision and inheritance disputes. This shift reflects broader constitutional and socio-economic pressures that expose the limits of mahr as a sole safeguard.

Two distinct but overlapping reform trajectories are visible: Constitutionalisation through rights discourse, particularly in India; and Constitutionalisation through procedure and enforcement, most clearly in Pakistan.

At the same time, economic realities, especially inflation and currency devaluation, have prompted courts in Bangladesh and elsewhere to question whether historical mahr amounts retain real protective value.

Afghanistan

Afghanistan highlights the most acute version of a South Asian dilemma: a legal right without access is not a right. While statutory frameworks regulating marriage and mahr continue to be cited internationally, post-2021 restrictions on women’s mobility and court access have fundamentally altered enforcement conditions. In this context, mahr remains a doctrinal entitlement but is often difficult to claim, value or enforce. Its fragility under such conditions makes mahr a diagnostic tool for assessing whether personal-status guarantees have any practical bite.

Bangladesh

In Bangladesh, mahr is widely recognised as a binding legal obligation, with litigation focusing less on doctrinal recognition than on effective recovery. Family court cases increasingly expose the gap between nominal entitlement and real economic value. Inflation and currency devaluation have become explicit legal concerns. Courts have begun to reason in more economically realistic terms, asking whether mahr operates as genuine financial security or merely as a historical figure emptied of practical meaning.

India

In India, mahr is enforceable as a debt or contractual entitlement under Muslim personal law, with procedural enforcement through civil or family courts. In practice, women increasingly pursue multiple, parallel monetary pathways: recovery of mahr, matrimonial financial claims and maintenance under general law. Recent Supreme Court jurisprudence has repositioned maintenance as a constitutional floor, grounded in equality and non-discrimination. This has significant implications for mahr. Courts are increasingly careful to ensure that it is not treated as a token substitute for ongoing support, while also preventing unjust double recovery. In this way, mahr is indirectly constitutionalised through equality-based reasoning rather than challenged head-on.

Pakistan

In Pakistan, dower is a legally enforceable right typically recorded in the nikahnama (marriage contract). Enforcement is primarily routed through Family Courts, but constitutional petitions under Article 199 are frequently used to challenge or defend family court decrees. This procedural pathway constitutionalises mahr by embedding it within public law frameworks of due process, jurisdiction and judicial review. Reform debates therefore focus less on identity-based constitutional conflict and more on administrability: documentation, valuation (particularly where dower is specified in gold or property) and effective enforcement.

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka presents a distinct but revealing case. Muslim personal law operates within a plural legal system shaped by statutory intervention and constitutional oversight. Mahr is recognised as a core incident of Muslim marriage, enforceable through Quazi (Islamic) courts. However, Sri Lankan debates around Muslim personal law reform — particularly concerning women’s rights, procedural fairness and judicial accountability — have increasingly foregrounded the institutional context in which mahr is enforced. Questions about access to justice, delay and appellate oversight often determine whether mahr functions as effective protection in practice. As in Pakistan, the constitutional dimension emerges less through substantive equality claims and more through concerns about procedure, forum and legal accountability.

Mahr in European Jurisdictions

European courts approach mahr differently. Rather than embedding it within family law, they tend to enforce it, if at all, through contract or private international law. In Shahnaz v. Rizwan (1965), English courts treated deferred mahr as a contractual obligation, while later cases show caution where it overlaps with statutory matrimonial finance. This contrasts with South Asia, where mahr is integrated into inheritance, maintenance and post-divorce frameworks.

In the United Kingdom, courts have tended to analyse mahr through the lens of contract or trust law, enforcing it where intention, certainty and voluntariness can be established. In Shahnaz v. Rizwan, the English High Court enforced a deferred mahr as a contractual obligation, while later cases such as Uddin v. Choudhury and Ors (2009) demonstrate judicial caution where mahr intersects with statutory matrimonial finance and financial relief on divorce.

In France, courts have recognised mahr as a civil obligation where it functions as a contractual financial commitment rather than as an institution incompatible with French family law. The leading authority is the Cour de cassation, Première chambre civile, 22 November 2005 (No. 03-14.961), which held that a mahr agreement was not contrary to French international public policy (ordre public international) because it constituted an agreement accompanying the spouses’ consent to marriage rather than the sale of the wife. The Cour de cassation, Première chambre civile, 28 March 2012 (No. 11-12.940) observed that mahr formed part of the marriage contract and conditioned the spouses’ consent, while holding that the marriage contract did not constitute a matrimonial property agreement.

German courts have similarly treated mahr as a private law commitment that may be enforceable if compatible with domestic family law. The Bundesgerichtshof (BGH, 6 October 2010, XII ZR 141/08) recognised mahr as a contractual obligation under private international law, while stressing that enforcement remains subject to constitutional principles of equality and proportionality.

Across Europe, therefore, mahr is neither ignored nor fully assimilated into family law: it is selectively accommodated through contractual reasoning, private international law and human rights considerations. This cautious but pragmatic approach contrasts with South Asian jurisdictions, where mahr is embedded within personal law and routinely integrated into inheritance, maintenance and post-divorce frameworks, highlighting different models of pluralism and legal integration of Muslim family law institutions.

Conclusion

Across South Asia, mahr continues to demonstrate a remarkable capacity for legal adaptation. Far from remaining a static or purely symbolic institution, it has been progressively reinterpreted by courts as a legally enforceable entitlement, a recoverable debt and, in some contexts, a secured financial claim. Through sustained judicial reasoning, mahr has been integrated into wider legal frameworks governing inheritance, maintenance and post-marital support, allowing Muslim personal law to engage meaningfully with evolving understandings of women’s economic rights. The cumulative effect of landmark decisions — from Hamira Bibi, Amina Bibi And Ors vs Zubaida Bibi And Ors (1916) and Kapore Chand vs Kidar Nissa Begum (1953) in South Asia to Shahnaz v. Rizwan (1965) and BGH jurisprudence in Europe — demonstrates that mahr has become a site of sustained judicial engagement rather than doctrinal inertia.

What emerges from the comparative South Asian picture is not a narrative of doctrinal exhaustion but one of adaptive pluralism. Courts and institutions have shown a consistent ability to reconcile religious legal concepts with constitutional principles, economic realities and procedural safeguards. In Bangladesh, this reconciliation is most visible through economically responsive approaches to valuation and enforcement; in India, it is most visible through equality — and maintenance — based reasoning; and in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, through procedural constitutionalisation and institutional oversight. Even in more constrained contexts, such as Afghanistan, the persistence of mahr as a recognised entitlement underscores the enduring normative force of women’s financial rights within personal-status law, notwithstanding severe barriers to enforcement.

A comparison with European jurisdictions further sharpens this insight. In countries such as the United Kingdom, France and Germany, mahr is usually not embedded within family law as such but is selectively accommodated through contract law, private international law or proprietary reasoning, subject to public policy and gender equality constraints. European courts tend to approach mahr cautiously, enforcing it where it can be framed as a voluntary civil obligation compatible with domestic legal principles while keeping it at arm’s length from statutory matrimonial finance regimes. This contrasts with South Asia, where mahr is treated as an internal component of family law and routinely integrated into inheritance, maintenance and post-divorce frameworks. The comparison reveals different models of legal pluralism: one based on cautious accommodation at the margins, the other on internal doctrinal evolution.

The caveat, across both regions is not conceptual but practical. The effectiveness of mahr depends less on its formal recognition than on the surrounding legal infrastructure: access to courts, institutional capacity, procedural fairness, and socio-political conditions that enable women to assert their rights. Where these conditions are present, mahr operates as a meaningful site of integration between personal law and contemporary rights-based norms. Where they are absent, its protective potential is correspondingly weakened, regardless of doctrinal sophistication.

Rather than treating mahr as an obstacle to women’s rights, South Asian courts have increasingly used it as a site of legal adaptation — embedding it within constitutional norms, economic realities and procedural safeguards. The lesson is not that personal law resists reform but that meaningful change often occurs through judicial practice rather than wholesale replacement. Whether mahr protects women in practice ultimately depends less on doctrine than on access to courts, enforceability and the broader conditions that allow legal rights to be claimed.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science, on 20 July 2026.

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

Banner image © Khadija Yousaf, 2018, Unsplash.

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Last year’s Pakistan–India conflict has calcified into an uneasy peace. What has not calcified is the ambition of (then) General (now Field Marshal) Asim Munir, who rode the conflict to a Field Marshal’s baton within days of the guns falling silent. General Munir was promoted little more than a week after the brief conflict with India; it was as much a political signal as a military honour. This post explores the weaponisation of external conflict to suppress internal dissent through manufactured narratives, pageantry and patriotism in Pakistan.

History offers many examples of rulers who converted military spectacle into political authority. One of the most revealing is Field Marshal Idi Amin of Uganda. Starting as a cook in the British colonial army, Amin clawed his way up to becoming the President (1971–79) of the country, bestowing titles like Field Marshal and Conqueror of the British Empire upon himself. But times and circumstances change: from Presidency to an unmarked grave in exile, the rise and fall of Idi Amin reminds us of the pitfalls of such ambition.

Institutions outlast those who temporarily command them. The Pakistan Army is no exception. The argument here concerns the political choices of those in command. It is in that light that General Asim Munir’s promotion to Field Marshal should be analysed.

War Within, War Without

Pakistan–India rivalry offers valuable insights into the external and internal dynamics of inter-state conflict. In the aftermath of what could easily have escalated into a nuclear Armageddon, how do we make sense of the merriment and self-congratulatory vibes coming from the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi , the seats of political and military power respectively? Should battle honours be dished out at the end of a war or immediately after the first skirmish? Does the haste signify a certainty about victory or an utter lack of it?

A year later, the self-congratulation has not faded; rather, it has been institutionalised. The state has retrospectively named the conflict ‘Marka-e Haq’ (lit., ‘Battle of Truth’), given it an annual commemoration and woven it into the military’s ceremonial calendar, rituals usually reserved for decisive national victories. But Pakistan’s military establishment is no stranger to cultivating a notion of victory contrary to ground realities. Both Field Marshal Mohammed Ayub Khan (after the Pakistan–India War in 1965) and General Pervez Musharraf (after the Kargil War with India in 1999) claimed victories that remain contested to this day.

Inconsistencies between the scale of last year’s conflict and the magnitude of the celebrations point toward a much deeper reality: the true conflict is not external but internal. The external threat subsided as soon a ceasefire came into effect; theatrics and manoeuvres post ceasefire are exclusively aimed at what the regime perceives to be the real threat — the domestic population.

Checkmating Internal Dissent

War has differing meanings for the ruled and their rulers. This is even more so in an era of nuclear deterrents where conquest is not an option. For the people, war brings existential threats, economic disruption, suppression of dissent, and a false sense of unity. For hybrid regimes (electoral democracy overseen by military establishment) like that of Pakistan, war and its aftermath become a ritual of self-preservation. Like saviours descending from a moral high ground, the rulers make full use of the distracting effects of war by brushing aside the failures of governance and indulging in pageantries. 

Opportunity often follows on the heels of adversity. The military establishment showed an uncanny presence of mind to capitalise on the gains of Pakistan Air Force. The shooting down of several Indian fighter jets came as a godsend to wrest back control of the national narrative from former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who remains the most popular leader of the country but is in prison on politically motivated charges. Khan fell out of favour with the military establishment after defiantly challenging his ouster, and has since become a symbol of resistance against the hybrid regime that came to power as a result of allegedly rigged elections.

In retrospect, the political utility of Munir’s promotion has become increasingly apparent. State pageantry has reshaped the political terrain on which dissent now has to operate. Political dissent has been recast as treason, while criticism of the military’s political role has become easier to dismiss as sympathy for the enemy. The language of war has steadily migrated into domestic politics. And the conflict’s official commemoration reinforces the military establishment’s claim to political primacy.

Munir’s promotion has become more than a military distinction, a part of the state’s architecture of legitimacy, securing a tactical advantage for the establishment. Whether it amounts to a lasting strategic victory remains far less certain. Across the border, the Indian government has likewise folded the conflict into an expanding narrative of national resolve and military preparedness, using its political afterlife to reinforce domestic authority. The war lasted just some days. Its political afterlife endures.

Long Shadows at Dusk

Munir is only the second Field Marshal in Pakistan Army’s lacklustre history. Luckily for him though, he need not worry about either filling big boots or the weight of history. His predecessor, Field Marshal Ayub Khan was also hero conveniently minted in the hazy corridors of political intrigue. And both signify similar notes in the long symphony of military overreach in Pakistan’s unfortunate constitutional history.

But ground realities have changed in the intervening years. In an era characterised by the machinations of the Cold War and black-and-white television, Ayub’s meteoric rise in the 1960s marked the beginning of an era of seemingly unopposed military dominance. Pakistan today is a country teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, burdened by a restless youth bulge and awash with the unforgiving glare of social media. Against this backdrop, Munir cuts a tragic figure: part preacher, part Praetorian, part statesman, and hardly recognisable as a soldier.

If Ayub signified reveille, ushering the army to Pakistan’s political stage, Munir marks its retreat. At dusk, even shrinking figures cast long shadows. Over the last year, Munir has acquired an unusually prominent international profile, emerging as an intermediary during the crisis involving Israel, Iran and the United States. Donald Trump praised him, referring to him as his favourite Field Marshal. Whether these gestures reflect genuine strategic influence or Pakistan’s continuing utility to Washington is beside the point because international visibility has done little to arrest the erosion of credibility at home.

The stage, however, is larger than its leading actor. Most of the institution continues to perform the ordinary work of soldiering. The political drama belongs to a small cast at the top. Constitutional innovation, diplomatic prominence and ceremonial honours project an image of expanding authority, yet each also betrays the growing need to manufacture it. The shadow lingers. The figure casting it has not grown. Foreign applause rarely repairs domestic legitimacy.

Fools’ Hegemony and the Global South

In the long-drawn history of inflated egos and unchecked ambitions, the likes of Idi Amin have unsuccessfully attempted to mask their lack of achievements behind high-sounding titles. When institutions falter and legitimacy runs thin, pageantry steps in to fill the void. Marshals are cast for stagecraft rather than strategy.

The Marshal may command the stage but seldom performs alone. Every political theatre requires its fools, those who manufacture applause, rationalise excess and transform power into spectacle, who thrive on half-truths, mistake expediency for wisdom and applause for legitimacy. Similar acts from Pakistan’s history involving Ayub Khan, Zia-ul Haq and Pervez Musharraf (all military officers turned Head of State) remind us of apparently all-powerful Marshals being led by fools, only to be discarded eventually. What appears to be a uniquely Pakistani phenomenon is, in fact, just another brushstroke on a larger canvas, one that depicts the recurring crises of governance, legitimacy and élite capture across the Global South.

The choreography repeats itself with almost bureaucratic fidelity, whatever the local costume. In Sudan, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan purged his own general staff to guard against rivals even as the civil war he is fighting grinds on. In Myanmar, Min Aung Hlaing engineered a military-run election and, in April 2026, traded his uniform for the presidency. In Egypt, the military establishment leans on monuments of concrete, new capitals, bridges and mega-projects, alongside periodic constitutional amendments to project permanence even as the economy buckles beneath it. The same hands remain on the same levers, just dressed in different clothes. The cast and the setting change; the choreography remains the same.

The Fools/Marshal analogy provides a compelling insight into the mechanics of élite capture. In the absence of radical reforms from within and without, this malignancy is likely to metastasise. If so, it may not be far-fetched to imagine a revolt of the oppressed with chaos spreading across borders, states falling like dominoes, shattering the illusion of stability that undergirds the global order. The West’s backing of despots for the sake of regional stability through diplomatic recognition, military cooperation and financial lifelines has steadily eroded its own claims to moral authority. A fundamental recalibration of both foreign policy and the international monetary system is long overdue.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science, on 13 July 2026.

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

Banner image © Zino, 2022, Unsplash.

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‘We are here to fight institutionalised corruption’ echoed through the streets of Nepal in September 2025, with hashtags like #NepoBabies and #NepoKids becoming central to Gen Z protests till elections in March 2026 brought a new government to power, led by 36-year-old rapper-turned-politician Balendra Shah. 

To understand the landslide victory that brought Shah and his Rastriya Swatantra Party to power, it is necessary to situate it in the political upheaval that preceded it. The youth-led protests which escalated into violent confrontations and culminated in then Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli’s resignation, a 6-month Interim Government led by former Chief Justice Sushila Karki, and the March 2026 elections emerged from a profound crisis of political legitimacy and Gen Z’s saturation point with long-standing corruption, deep frustration with entrenched party politics, economic precarity, unemployment, and a growing distance between the establishment and a generation that saw existing institutions as incapable of meeting its aspirations.

Yet, the transformation of a movement of dissent into an overwhelming electoral mandate raises important questions: how did fragmented public anger consolidate into a coherent political project, and what social forces, institutional failures and popular aspirations enabled it? It must be understood as the outcome of a longer crisis of representation, one that reshaped the dynamic between state and people.

The core of Gen Z’s protests lay in their disillusionment with political promises made since the democratic transition in Nepal (2006 onward), whether in relation to economic precarity, unemployment, migration pressures or shrinking opportunities within Nepal. This situation was very much anticipated when looking at the contemporary situation of Nepal, where corruption, patronage politics and the dominance of the ‘Old Guard’ had long corroded trust in governance.

Resistance and Reimagination

Starting in September 2025, large scale protests led primarily by unemployed youth were not just acts of resistance but also a reimagination of Nepal’s political future. For this Gen Z, dissent was not optional but necessary.

The protests were unconventional in comparison to earlier waves of dissent in Nepal. Hami Nepal, a civil society organisation, called for peaceful demonstrations, building solidarity among young people and mobilising them in large numbers despite the government’s ban on social media and increasing restrictions on public mobilisation. The protests were directed against the corruption, economic decline, and political unaccountability of the government led by Prime Minister Oli.

The state’s violent, arbitrary and repressive response to dissent rather than addressing demands for accountability, employment and economic justice exposed the widening disconnect between the establishment and Nepal’s youth. By suppressing the movement through force instead of political engagement, the state deepened the crisis of legitimacy it already faced. What began as protests against corruption and unemployment soon evolved into a broader rejection of the existing political order, laying the foundations for a shift that would reshape Nepal’s contemporary history.

Public response to these tragedies exposed stark inequalities in how lives are valued. The killing of Rajyalaxmi Chitrakar (wife of former Prime Minister Jhalanath Khanal) whose house was set ablaze during the protests drew far more sympathy than the death of 59 protestors in a total toll of 72, raising a haunting question: whose life matters more, the powerful mourned as national tragedy or the young reduced to statistics? The politics of mourning, in the end, was inseparable from the politics of power.

Digital Authoritarianism

The banning of 26 social media platforms on 4 September 2025 on grounds of not registering with the government was dictatorial to say the least — an attempt to silence dissent that exposed the Oli government’s authoritarian instincts more than it suppressed the movement. The decision backfired spectacularly, forcing the government to lift the ban within days. Thereafter, social media became the state’s biggest liability, as young people continued voicing outrage against nepotism and élite privilege: while ‘nepo babies’ and ‘nepo kids’ lived luxurious lives abroad, 1 in 5 Nepalis remained unemployed. For protesting youth, this was deeply personal — anger born of betrayal by leaders who offered nothing but broken promises.

Social media proved indispensable to the protesters’ solidarity and momentum. Hashtags like  #NepoBabies and #NepoKids across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok helped mobilise the youth and pressurise the government, catalysing a breakdown of authority within 36 to 48 hours. The reliance on digital solidarity also underscored Gen Z’s bold defiance, in contrast to older generations’ more cautious approach to speech.

A Leaderless Movement

A striking aspect of these protests was their leaderless, lateral nature. Unlike conventional dissent led by Opposition political parties, this movement was spearheaded by no single party or figure; instead, it was a mobilisation of citizens themselves, whose collective aspiration to question, resist and dismantle an authoritarian, corrupt regime had suddenly become reality. This horizontal, decentralised structure made the protests harder to dismiss as they couldn’t be neatly attributed to an opposition bloc’s motives but were rooted in widespread discontent among the people.

Nor were the protests limited to corruption, class inequality and unemployment alone. They intersected with environmental safeguards and broader concerns about social justice, making them more inclusive and multidimensional: a cross-over that gave the protests wider resonance, letting them expand beyond a single grievance into a generational statement about the country’s future.

Aesthetics and Resonance of Protest

The symbolic use of language, memes, music, art, and hashtags gave the protests a distinct character. To older generations, such cultural tools might seem trivial yet they became vehicles for systemic change and global recognition. Visual identity mattered too: slogans were not just chanted but enacted through civic responsibility, with young protestors cleaning streets, clearing debris and repainting walls — a fusion of civic action and creative expression that lent the movement its unique identity. Hip hop, protest songs and artistic interventions connected with diverse audiences, amplifying the message across Nepal and beyond. Art is political and found its truest expression here as the youth-against-corruption movement voiced itself through murals and music. Every wall carried a memory; every mural became dissent — resistance not merely as defiance but as a culture meant to endure.

This spirit resonated with other youth-led movements across South Asia and the world. Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya protests in 2022 similarly questioned dynastic élites amid economic crisis; though Nepal is not under dynastic rule, outrage against political élites’ lavish lifestyles fuelled comparable anger. Globally, echoes can be seen in the Global Sumud Flotilla movement against the genocide in Palestine, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, and Fridays for Future — all sharing a grammar of resistance rooted in the right to question, reject and repel high-handed state intimidation.

Media Narratives and State Repression

Media narratives also shaped how these protests were understood. Much of the Nepali press followed trends set in neighbouring India, framing the protests as chaotic, exclusionary and disruptive — reinforcing government propaganda and undermining the movement’s legitimacy. The sympathy extended to politicians’ families, against the dismissal of young protestors’ deaths, exposing deep social biases, while reports of batons, tear gas and mass detentions echoed repressive tactics seen globally against youth uprisings.

Protestors were also routinely dismissed as ‘misled’ or ‘ungrateful’:  a delegitimising tactic that only deepened the disillusionment driving the movement, mirroring how global élites undermine youth-led dissent by branding it reckless or irrelevant. In truth, the protests signalled collapsing trust in institutions and governance: not simply a cycle of unrest but a profound political rupture.

The machinery of repression did more than widen the distance between the regime and the generation it sought to govern through the same corrupt, outdated and arbitrary methods, hastening its own irrelevance. In refusing to remain mere recipients of decisions and orders imposed from above, Nepal’s youth transformed themselves into political actors, asserting their place as authors of the country’s future.

The example of Nepal is nothing short of the streets becoming a democratic institution when institutions refuse to listen, the last democratic space of hope for the people.

The Movement Must Not become the Establishment

Elections are not endings but beginnings of what people choose to bring to power, and equally, what they choose to bring down. Balendra Shah becoming Prime Minister marks the start of a new political responsibility, of converting the aspirations of the Gen Z protest movement into the task of governing for the people of Nepal.

Every movement that enters power risks becoming the very order it once resisted. Accountability alone can hold that possibility at bay. The greatest lesson from Nepal’s Gen Z uprising is that memory remains democracy’s most vigilant instrument: silence can no longer be mistaken for consent. What began as dissent against a ban on social media unfolded into a wider reckoning with corruption, unemployment, political unaccountability, and economic injustice.

The streets are still watching. They did not merely mandate a new government; they produced a generation that now knows its own political power — and is unlikely to surrender it again.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science on 6 July 2026.’

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

Banner image © Sunil Chandra Sharma, 2025, Unsplash.

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The post Young, Disillusioned, Defiant: The New Face of Nepali Politics first appeared on South Asia @ LSE.