NEPAL is in the midst of significant political upheaval. Mass protests, overwhelmingly populated by young people, have led to the ouster of the government, after initial retaliation by security forces left behind a large number of casualties. At the time of writing, protest leaders were negotiating with the military for a transitionary government. It will take some time before things settle down.

The form of these events resembles what happened in Bangladesh in July last year. Without equating the essence entirely, there too events involved mass street protest by young people, retaliatory violence, regime ouster, and an eventual settlement through a transitionary government. Sri Lanka experienced something similar in the year earlier.

As Khurram Husain detailed on these pages last week, there are some common material triggers of these mass uprisings/ protests. High inflation and unemployment, macroeconomic tumult, visible corruption of ruling party elites and pervasive resentment towards the political status quo.

These are at play alongside institutional and ideational factors, such as stifling of dissent, repression of political opposition, state heavy-handedness, and as seen in the case of Nepal, internet and social media shutdowns.

As with the Bangladesh and Sri Lanka episodes earlier, the protests in Nepal have generated significant discussion in Pakistan. There are two types of views that I think are worth addressing in a bit of detail.

The first, by no means unique to Pakistan, is that these represent `colour revolutions` of some form, ie, regime change operations but with mass mobilisation providing a veneer of legitimacy. In contexts where nominally left-populist governments are dismissed (as is the case in Nepal), sections of the global left tend to see imperial motivations and interventions at work.

The fact that foreign powers, regional and global, play a part in encouraging and shaping political dissent towards out-of-favour regimes is not tinfoil hat thinking. There is a long history of precisely this form of intervention, which can take the shape of selective financial/ material support to protesting organisations and patronage provided tocertaintypes ofleaders.But to see conspiracy at play in every episode of mass political rebellion is poor analysis. Given the range of material factors, people`s frustration with the status quo is tangible and real. In the absence of functioning institutions that allow this frustration to be resolved through the political process, street protests become a common way to showcase dissent. Younger people are also politicised in a variety of ways, many of which are connected to their digital life-worlds. What they see, consume and share on social media has profound political implications that many are yet to fully comprehend and grapple with.

Additionally, there are always underlying organised elements that sustain protests. Student unions in Bangladesh, smaller leftist parties in Sri Lanka, and now youth groups in Nepal are all reflective of the same phenomenon. A particularevent a valiant individual act of protest, such as in Tunisia, or the banning of YouTube, as in Nepal can act as the trigger for political outpouring, but organised power is what sustains these movements.

A second point worth discussing here is the common tendency in Pakistan to lament the absence of similar mass mobilisation in our own context and to find some fundamental or essential reason usually cowardice or laziness as an explanation for why these are not replicated here.

To this, there are two responses. The first, and the most obvious one, is that Pakistan has a fairly rich history of political protest against authoritarian rule and state excess of various forms. The major events, such as anti-dictatorship struggles, should be familiar to all. Street protests, overwhelmingly by young people, were essential in undermining the power of authoritarian governments, even if their eventual removal camethrough other mechanisms (such as an in-house change in the military). In more recent years, parties, such as the PTI, have led mobilisation on political issues, including on election rigging and unjust incarceration of activists.

Alongside these episodes, there are plenty of other smaller protest movements from ethnonationalist ones in the Baloch and Pakhtun peripheries, to struggles over land rights among tenant farmers in central Punjab, to water and ecological struggles being waged both in the northern areas and along the coastal belt. These too represent traditions of resistance to the status quo.

Where Pal(istan does differ from a number of the other cases is the absence of mass protest on purely economic issues. Loadshedding and electricity prices led to localised protest episodes in 2011 and 2012, but nothing that achieved sustained national scale. Similarly, high inflation and unemployment of the past few years hasn`t elicited street mobilisation, even though it shaped electoral outcomes and impacted government legitimacy.

One explanation for this could be that the perceived cost of protest is too high, given the strength of the security apparatus. But there is another element at play too: the military and civilian establishment remains fully entrenched, not just in the state, but also in society through political tactics, social networks and kinship connections. These networks create a large pool of connections and beneficiaries, which extends well beyond a very narrow ruling elite (otherwise a common problem in many authoritarian societies).

Such shared connections are replicated at nearly every tier of society, not just among the elites. Every household rich or poor ·-. exists as part of a patronage chain that ultimately culminatesinaccessto the state.

If we accept this context, then it`s fair to assume that the incentives to upend the system through mass rebellion are a lot more limited, compared to societies where large sections of the population are completely locked out of state power. Perhaps this, rather than accusations of laziness or cowardice, is a better explanation of why politics takes the shape it does in Pakistan. • The writer teaches politics and sociology at Lums.

X: @umairjav