‘One standard for home, another abroad’: Brahma Chellaney criticises Western media over Nepal protest coverage

Nepal is the latest victim of a romanticised Western media script of a student-led “revolution” topping corrupt, inefficient governments in developing countries – the previous one being Bangladesh and how a revolution led to the ouster of Sheikh Hasina, wrote geostrategist and author Brahma Chellaney.

In a column for The Hill, Chellaney said Indonesia’s weeks-long unrest might also be packaged as another ‘people’s revolution’ if the government falls. Such oversimplified narratives conceal the real factors which often include “power struggles, economic stress and cynical opportunism”, while “condoning violence, including the torching of state institutions”.

Chellaney said such acts would have attracted long prison terms in the West but have been “framed in terms of democratic romance” for Western audiences.

This is not the first time Western analysts have mistaken mob rule for popular empowerment, he said. The winners in such turmoil are not the people but men in uniform.

“The West’s romanticization of uprisings in fragile states is dangerous. By valorising mob violence as a form of democratic ferment, it lends legitimacy to movements that destroy institutions rather than strengthen them. It blinds outsiders to the fact that the real victors are often military generals, not citizens. And it reduces the genuine struggle for accountable governance to a spectacle for foreign consumption,” said Chellaney in the piece.

Western media applies one standard at home and another abroad. When a mob stormed US Capitol in 2021, it was rightly condemned as lawlessness, but when rioters lynched police in Nepal, it was hailed as “people’s revolution”, said Chellaney.

Such double standards dignify disorder elsewhere that would never have been tolerated at home, said the geostrategist.

“Nepal’s tragedy should serve as a cautionary tale. Democracy cannot be built on ashes and lynchings. It rests on institutions, legality and order — the very foundations mobs destroyed and the military has now sought to restore. To mistake chaos for change is to invite more instability, not less,” he said.