The Anatomy of the Muffle

Watching the government move against student unions at Tribhuvan University—tearing down flags, padlocking offices, and treating campus politics like physical garbage to be hauled away under the Balendra Shah administration's 100-day agenda—felt uncomfortably familiar. But the quads are only the starting point. With executive ordinances dismantling party-affiliated trade unions for schoolteachers and civil servants, and plainclothes police now walking into newsrooms at Naya Patrika and Nepal Press without warrants, the pattern is obvious.

When an administrative sweep moves this quickly against the quad, the staff room, and the press, my mind goes straight to what I call my "Virtual Library." These are books I didn’t just read for an exam; I lived through their parallels during my student activist days in Banaras in the 1970s, carried them through my doctorate at Boston University, and watched their lessons play out over decades of Nepali politics.

We are watching a young administration try to reinvent a broken wheel that my generation spent decades dismantling. Pulling these books down today is not an academic vanity; it is looking at the warning signs before the car goes off the edge.

Look at where we stand legally. The Supreme Court has issued interim orders staying the ordinances that strip elected representation from the university senate and dissolve trade unions. Yet the apparatus marches forward regardless. The TU Registrar’s Office continues handing down ultimatums to constituent campuses, acting as if the matter isn’t sub judice. This is Animal Farm in broad daylight: the commandments on the barn wall are being quietly painted over at night while the public sleeps.

George Orwell would recognize the rest of it, too. In 1984, Big Brother had to hang heavy telescreens on every plaster wall. Today, our young people carry their own surveillance in their pockets. The state knows that the more students and activists post on Discord, TikTok, or Facebook, the easier it is to map their thoughts. Pair that with vague legal warnings against "harming reputations" or posting with "malicious intent," and you get the Digital Muffle. It is the quiet, paralyzing fear among Gen Z, young reporters, and schoolteachers that having an opinion online will get you flagged by the Cyber Bureau and quietly ruin your career before it starts.

The trap is circular, straight out of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Refuse the National ID (Rastriya Parichayapatra) linked to your Nagarikata, and you become a non-entity: no passport, no job, no university admission abroad. But sign up under the state's current surveillance appetite, and you hand the bureaucracy an off-switch. Your civil existence becomes a switch on a central server that can be flipped the moment your political expression steps out of line.

Then comes the endless corridor of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. You are never given an outright refusal; you are simply told to wait. You bounce between portals, your file stays "under review," or an editor gets an unannounced visit from plainclothes police demanding a reporter without an arrest warrant. An interim court order is supposed to be a shield, but in practice, it leaves citizens dangling in administrative purgatory while the state quietly changes the locks.

The government doesn't need to read my library to see where this goes; they only need to look at Kathmandu University. KU tried to clean up campus life by replacing open student politics with a sterile, indirect Class Representative system under an administrative Student Welfare Council. It didn't bring peace; it brought an immediate student revolt. Young people know when they are being managed instead of heard. When you ban organic representation rather than reforming it, you don't get order—you get an explosion waiting for a match.

Now think about what this means for the classroom. By failing to separate corrupt, partisan patronage from genuine political education, these sweeping bans risk paralyzing our entire education system. If teachers are terrified that discussing power or governance will get them flagged in an administrative database, what happens to the lecture hall? Do we shut down the law faculties because law is political? Do we abolish political science? Do we ban Model UN and student debates out of bureaucratic panic?

You cannot teach critical thinking in a sterile room. And when plainclothes police enter Naya Patrika to intimidate journalists over investigative reporting, who is left to hold up the mirror? Banning unions and muzzling reporters doesn't clean the republic; it guts it. It turns vibrant minds into quiet, compliant ciphers.

This kind of control doesn't arrive carrying a whip; it arrives carrying a spreadsheet. This is the "banality of evil" Hannah Arendt wrote about: harm done not by ideologues, but by ordinary functionaries "just following directives" and checking boxes on a screen. When the executive branch tries to replace elected student bodies, teacher associations, and independent newsrooms with sterile, government-sanctioned bodies, it relies entirely on people who refuse to look past their own memos. Blindly following an unjust directive isn't efficiency; it is moral cowardice.

This quiet purge is an insult to our history. Nepal’s democracy was not handed down by benevolent administrators. It was paid for in prison cells and exile by BP Koirala, Ganeshman Singh, and Krishna Prasad Bhattarai. They did not spend decades fighting an authoritarian Panchayat so that our grandchildren would accept a digital muzzle dressed up as civic reform.

Aristotle knew that a healthy society needs the friction of debate. It needs the student union, the teacher's voice, the free press, and the uninhibited lecture hall. Staying silent because you are afraid of a database is a failure of nerves. If we accept this muffle, we end up in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land—a hollow society of hollow people, walking through clean streets with nothing left inside.

Reforming the mess in our universities and unions is necessary work. Shutting them down entirely is historical blindness. The Supreme Court's clock is ticking. For me, looking at this through eighteen years of exile, past denials, and a lifetime spent with words, the choice is simple. We have to speak up while our voices still belong to us—because once the muffle is tied tight, it is too late to complain about the silence.

The author is an educator. She has written several children’s books. She has written for children and on parenting issues for Republica for the past 12 years