Every few years, Nepal asks you to believe again. The flags come out of storage, party songs return to the streets, and familiar faces rediscover your neighbourhoods. You have seen the rallies, the bikes, the loudspeakers. You have also seen what follows when the noise dies down. If you feel more tired than excited, you are not alone. The heaviest silence in this country today sits on the shoulders of the young, and that means on you.
You grew up being told that you are the future of Nepal. You also grew up watching governments collapse over cabinet seats rather than ideas. You have seen leaders trade alliances as casually as one trades jackets in winter. You have stood in line at passport offices, not at job fairs. Many of you have parents or siblings abroad, sending money that keeps homes running and leaders boasting. For a lot of you, the passport already feels more powerful than the citizenship card. You are not wrong to feel that way. But that is precisely why your choices now matter more than ever.
Let me say this plainly. The political class survives because you do not turn up. Every time you stay home on election day, someone who knows how to manage a shrinking, loyal vote bank celebrates quietly. The fewer young voters there are, the easier it is to recycle the same names with new slogans. Elections become a game played among those who already know each other. You are kept outside that circle, then blamed for not being involved. It is a neat trick, and it depends completely on your absence.
You know the larger story. Nepal's problem is not just corruption or unemployment. It is what you have been taught, by experience, not to imagine a future here. The hundreds of thousands of labour permits each year are not just numbers; they are your classmates, cousins, and friends. Villages that once sent young people to organise, build, and dream now send them to sweat in desert heat or work double shifts in foreign hospitals. The state proudly counts remittances while quietly admitting it has no idea how to give you a reason to stay. When a country depends on your departure to stay afloat, something fundamental has gone wrong.
Your frustration is justified. You study, you qualify, you hustle, and you still hear that some post has already been "managed." You watch promotions go to the loyal, not the capable. You hear about projects being stalled because tenders were awarded to friends of friends. You learn early that many transfers, postings, and contracts are decided in party offices, not on merit. In such a place, it is natural to think, "Why should I care about any of this?" But understand what happens when you give up. Your anger becomes harmless to those in power. Your absence makes their lives easier.
When you say, "My one vote will not change anything," you are repeating the most useful sentence for those who want you quiet. Of course, your single vote is small. So is everyone's. What changes politics is when millions of "small" choices suddenly point in a direction that the powerful did not plan for. That is what they actually fear. Not your Facebook posts, not your sarcasm on TikTok, but your physical presence at a polling booth.
Look at how you are distracted. Whenever unemployment rises, you are invited to argue about geopolitics. You are told to pick a side in someone else's China versus India debate, while both countries move ahead in technology, manufacturing, sports, and entertainment. You are kept busy defending identities and emotions while jobs remain scarce, exams get postponed, and public services stumble along. Meanwhile, in Kathmandu and other cities, desperate engineering graduates are doing menial jobs to save for language tests, nurses chase agencies instead of hospitals, and creative young people sell their talent to clients abroad who will never learn their names. The region races ahead. You are told to clap for new highways rather than ask who will work on them, who will own the businesses alongside them, and who will shape the policies that decide your future.
Here is a hard truth you already know but rarely hear acknowledged. Nepal cannot prosper by exporting you and importing its self-respect. The leaders who call you "the future" are often the same ones who treat you as a resource to be used and replaced. That will not change because they suddenly feel guilty. It will change only when you show them that ignoring you has a political cost. That cost is measured in votes.
I am not asking you to fall in love with any party or leader. You do not have to. Voting is not about admiration. It is about leverage. When many of you show up, you become a number that no party can afford to ignore. Candidates who never talk about jobs, skills, mental health, migration, or climate suddenly must answer questions on those exact issues because they know you can swing a constituency. They may not transform overnight, but they start calculating differently. That shift begins with you, not with them.
You have seen in other countries what happens when large numbers of young people participate. Policies move, sometimes slowly, sometimes in surprising ways. Budgets shift a little towards education, towards innovation, towards local enterprise. Officials become slightly more careful because they know that the same generation that shares memes can organise votes. That can happen here, too. Nepal is not uniquely doomed. It is simply underused, especially by the very people it needs the most, which is you.
For too long, success in Nepal has been measured by distance. The further you get from home, the more "settled" you are said to be. Parents pray for work permits abroad rather than for opportunities at home. English, Korean, and Japanese are learned less for books and more for visa forms. Social media feeds celebrate departure more than achievement in place. There is nothing wrong with going abroad. Many of you will and should. But this country, with your name on its documents and your people in its streets, still exists. It still takes decisions that affect your family, your land, your inheritance, and your right to come back with your head held high.
That is why I am saying this directly to you. Your destiny will not be written in the manifestos printed this week. It will be written by how many of you decide that you will no longer be spectators. The ballot will not solve everything. It will not magically create a job market or erase corruption. But it is the first test of whether you see yourself as a subject or a citizen. Subjects wait and complain. Citizens turn up and interfere.
The destinies of young Nepalis are not in the hands of some distant leader in Kathmandu. They are in your hands, in your willingness to claim what is already supposed to be yours. When you walk to the polling station, when you stand in that line with your friends, when you press that button or mark that symbol, you are not endorsing perfection. You are sending a message that you exist, that you are counted, and that you will keep being counted in every election that follows.
Elections alone do not turn countries around. People do. If you decide that this time you will not remain silent, that you will show up in numbers too large to be ignored, then the next chapter of Nepal will be written differently. Not only by those on the stage, but by you, in the quiet but powerful act of refusing to disappear one election longer. So go a Vote .
Prof. C K Peela is a geopolitical and security expert on South Asia and the Asia Pacific.
