Nineteen people were dead. Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli had resigned. On the city’s streets, groups of young protesters were no longer just fighting the government, they were fighting to protect their own movement from chaos, hijack, and misinformation.
Amid the commotion stood a reporter from TV9 Bharatvarsh, microphone in hand, surrounded by a camera crew and confusion.
“Godi media!” shouted a group of Nepali youths as they advanced toward him. “We are not your enemies,” the reporter pleaded. “We are your brothers.”
“Brothers?” one of them shot back. “You should have shown that in Lipulekh.”
The remark referred to a 2020 border dispute, when India inaugurated a road through the Lipulekh–Kalapani region, a territory Nepal claims as its own.
In that moment — between a camera crew claiming neutrality and citizens rejecting it — years of resentment came alive on the streets of Kathmandu.
Distrust, Years In Making
The hostility toward Indian journalists didn’t begin this year. It started a decade ago, under the rubble of the 2015 earthquake.
As aftershocks killed thousands, Indian TV cameras zoomed in on Operation Maitri — New Delhi’s relief mission — as if it were a cinematic rescue operation. Reporters thrust microphones into the faces of grieving families, asking them how they “felt” about the Indian army’s help.
The coverage felt less like journalism and more like a publicity reel.
Soon, the hashtag #GoHomeIndianMedia trended across Nepal, with over 1.7 lakh tweets. “Our Dharahara has fallen, not our dignity,” read one viral post.
Independent Nepali journalist Rohej Khatiwada recalled that moment to Decode. “The distrust toward certain Indian channels, the same ones called ‘Godi media’ in India, began in 2015. They treated Nepal like a live reality show. Reporters were insensitive, and coverage of India’s aid was sensationalised. The outrage was organic. It wasn’t anti-India, it was anti-arrogance.”
Back then, Kathmandu-based YouTube channel, GwarMari Productions, released a parody skit titled Go Home Indian Media.
Later that year, Nepal adopted a new constitution — its first since the end of the monarchy. The document formally declared Nepal a secular, federal democratic republic, ending its status as the world’s only Hindu kingdom. India objected to Nepal’s new constitution and also pressured Nepal to make seven amendments to it.
The coverage mirrored the language of India’s domestic politics. "Viewing Nepal only through a Hindu-monarchy lens is a recipe for misreporting. It also erases the genuine aspirations of Nepali citizens. It also alienates Nepali audiences, who expect our stories to be told with the nuance they deserve" said misinformation researcher and Editor of Nepal Check Deepak Adhikari.
Meanwhile, Nepali youth, through a Facebook page Confession of Nepali Teenagers, wrote an open letter to the Indian government and media, requesting respect for Nepal’s sovereignty.
At the same time, India unofficially backed a blockade at the border, which worsened shortages of fuel and medicines in Nepal. For many Nepalis, it felt like punishment for asserting independence. The resentment extended naturally toward Indian media, which appeared to justify or ignore the blockade altogether.
“That was the turning point” said journalist Khatiwada. “People saw the Indian state and Indian media speaking the same language, both unwilling to respect Nepal’s sovereignty.”
In 2020 Amid rising tensions over the border issue, some news channels aired highly irresponsible reports in their coverage, disregarding Nepal’s sovereignty. The situation escalated to the point that Nepal banned all Indian news channels except Doordarshan, a ban that was lifted after a few days.
The feeling lingered. Five years later, when Indian TV once again misrepresented the Gen-Z protests, those old wounds reopened instantly.
The Cycle Repeats, With Misinformation
As with every piece of news that plays out on social media and WhatsApp forwards, the coverage of Nepal’s protests by the Indian media was filled with misinformation. The cycle of Nepal’s mistrust with Indian media, once again, came to the spotlight.
On AajTak, an anchor claimed the protests happened because Nepal’s government banned social media. “If social media wasn’t blocked, there would be no protests,” she said.
On Times Now, another anchor echoed the same theory — that Nepali youth were “addicted to the Internet” and “losing control.”
But Nepal’s protestors kept insisting that the neighbouring journalists got it completely wrong. “Our protest wasn’t only against social media bans,” Yujan Rajbhandari, a youth leader of the anti-corruption movement, told Decode. “Social media was only a trigger point. We were demanding fairness, good governance, and equality.”
Nepal’s youth then coordinated the protest through and on social media. It started with memes of #NepoKids and went on to turn Discord into a Parliament. On Instagram, an account called Gen.Z Nepal posted the protest agenda on September 7, which explicitly stated that no political party, interest group, or individual should hijack the protest.
“Our fight is not against any party, but against the system. Corruption has become a cancer in the system. This protest is for fairness, justice, democracy, and equality. Anyone attempting to hijack it will be openly exposed,” the post read.
Despite that, Indian news channels framed the movement in bizarre ways. News18 and IBC24 claimed that former Prime Minister Oli had left behind a secret resignation letter, blaming his ouster on opposition to Lord Ram’s birthplace in Ayodhya. No such letter existed.
NDTV and Times Now Navbharat shared old footage of the Pashupatinath Temple, claiming that Gen-Z protesters attacked it. BOOM fact-checked this video and found that it was from March 2025, during the Basleshwar Jatra Festival.
News18 framed the Gen-Z protest in Nepal with a “Hindu nation” angle. Other television channels suggested that businessman Durga Parsai played a central role in the protest— a claim publicly denied by the protestors.
Fact-checkers in both Nepal and India debunked the claims. But by then, the damage was done. The misinformation had spread across YouTube and WhatsApp, feeding into old suspicions of Indian bias.
Fighting Back With Facts
Inside private chat groups, a small team of Nepali tech students was trying to control the flood of misinformation. Sambidhan Parsai, a computer science student at Tribhuvan University, said his six-member cyber team worked to protect protest-related pages from takedowns and coordinated efforts to report false content.
“We set up VPN servers to defend our agenda online and protect social media accounts,” he told Decode.
Narrowing the details, Parsai said that they had two or three active servers with around 1,500 bots each for mass reporting of fake news. “We flagged several websites to stop global misinformation and actively debunked fake news through our social media platforms.”
The student said that many Indian media channels were running their own “scripted narratives” while manipulating videos and images without any verification. “Some of us even reached out to these media channels with accurate information, but they didn’t want to listen. They had already decided the story they wanted to tell.”
Meanwhile, Indian anchors continued to claim that Nepal’s Gen Z protests was a “foreign-funded conspiracy.”
Scenes from Nepal Protest (Image Credit: Yujan Rajbhandari)
Inside Kathmandu’s newsrooms, patience ran thin. “Indian media frequently becomes a key vector for misinformation,” said Deepak Adhikari, editor, Nepal Check.
“Beyond ideological bias, the structural pressures of India’s hyper-competitive, round-the-clock news ecosystem are clearly at play. With television channels battling for TRP, reports are packaged for maximum drama rather than accuracy. Considering the wide reach of Indian television, including among Nepalis at home and in India, that distortion has real consequences,” he added.
On X, author and journalist Shiwani Neupane, wrote, “Indian media needs to stop spinning GenZ’s protest as a protest to bring back monarchy or a Hindu nation.” The anger towards Indian media’s manipulated framing of the protests was palpable on Nepali journalists’ social media feeds. “You did it in 2015, you’re doing it again. Stop deceiving the billion people in our neighbourhood nation,” she posted.
Slok Gyawali, a podcaster quote tweeted ANI’s Smita Prakash and wrote, “Trust the Indian media to get the fundamentals wrong.”
Why Indian Media Gets Nepal Wrong
The problem, say experts, runs deeper than a few bad broadcasts.
“India’s mainstream media is biased. Nepal’s news is presented according to Indian state intentions, often based on assumptions, lacking facts and reality. During the earthquake, coverage highlighted India’s aid sensationally, ignoring Nepal’s sovereignty. Everything happening in Nepal is viewed from India’s potential interests. Nepalese politics is filtered through the prism of Indian power,” said veteran journalist Kanak Mani Dixit, founder of Himal Southasian magazine.
On the rise of Hindu nationalist narratives around the Gen-Z protests, Dixit told Decode that this wasn’t accidental. “This is the agenda of the current powers. They want a Hindu nation in India and Nepal. Media highlights these issues instead of reporting ground realities and attempting to verify facts.”
Anand Swaroop Verma, a veteran Indian journalist who has covered Nepal, said Indian media’s coverage of the country has often crossed the line from biased to “downright absurd and trashy.” He recalled how, during the India–Nepal border dispute, Zee Media aired what he described as a “disgraceful, low-grade” report targeting Nepal’s Prime Minister K.P. Oli and Chinese Ambassador Hou Yanqi. Around the same time, ABP News ran a segment on actor Manisha Koirala, a Nepali citizen and Indian film star, claiming she “eats from India but sings praises of China.”
“Journalists, at the very least, should not treat neighboring countries like Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, or the Maldives as their own estates,” Verma said, calling it a reflection of India’s “big-country arrogance.” He added that since 2014, this attitude has increasingly merged with Hindutva ideology. Nepal’s decision to adopt a secular constitution, he noted, had unsettled Hindu nationalist groups in India — and that anxiety, he said, is now being projected onto Nepal.
“During the recent Gen-Z protests, several Indian TV anchors portrayed Nepal as a Hindu nation,” Verma told Decode.
That sentiment is echoed by Atul Chaurasiya of Newslaundry, who said irresponsible coverage by Indian mainstream media has deepened mistrust. “Assaulting journalists is unacceptable,” he told Decode, referring to incidents in which Indian reporters were attacked in Kathmandu. “But Nepalis are angry over repeated misreporting. It harms India–Nepal relations and makes Indian media look unreliable internationally.”
Gazala Faridi, Assistant Professor at Southfield College, Darjeeling, who has worked extensively on the interface between Indian media and diplomacy, pointed out that the Indian newsrooms have often confused local movements and geographies. She cited one recent example where a channel described the Nepal protests as “Gorkhaland Mein Takhtapalat”. “They failed to research properly,” she said. “Gorkhaland is an internal demand within India, not Nepal. By conflating the two, they created unnecessary confusion.”
Faridi believes media can amplify diplomatic tensions but rarely sets policy. “The media does play a role in diplomacy, but its influence is largely secondary,” she said. “If a government has a clear stance, negative or positive coverage is unlikely to alter it. What media can do, however, is prompt faster responses to human interest concerns — both domestically and internationally.”
As the protests quietened in Kathmandu, computer science student Parsai, who hasn’t taken a break from taking down misinformation, spotted yet another new narrative on Indian media channels. The morning after Sushila Karki was proposed for the post of interim Prime Minister, through a poll on Discord, Parsai saw Indian TV anchors claim that Nepalese protesters were demanding Narendra Modi as their Prime Minister. He knew his work was far from over.
“It was utterly absurd and laughable,” he said. “From Sudan Gurung to Balen Shah and Rabi Lamichhane, the narrative had somehow drifted all the way to Narendra Modi. It was time to get back to work and stop the misinformation being spread by the media.”