Ashika Tamang: Between TikTok and the parliament

A few days ago, a video of Ashika Tamang, the newly elected MP from Dhading-1 from the ruling Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) went viral. In the video she's holding the Constitution of Nepal, dancing to a Hindi song, TikTok style. When journalists asked her about it after a parliamentary session, she said it was AI generated. Technical analysis confirmed it was real. The internet split in two.

Some defended her, not because they agreed with everything, but because they saw no harm to it. To them, it was simply Ashika Didi being Ashika Didi. The other side, however, was triggered. “The constitution is not a prop.” “You're a lawmaker now, not a content creator.” “The office demands a certain gravity.”

Both sides have a point. But both sides blindsided the inner layers of this fiasco. Why does the same behavior that made someone electable become unacceptable the moment they're elected?

I've been sitting with this question for a few days. It doesn’t have a clean answer, so understanding this requires an observation from a certain lens. I’ve chosen three.

What Dhading actually voted for

Ashika won with 39,128 votes. She didn’t just win, she crushed it. With this, she tripled RSP's previous vote tally in the district. This was not an accident or a fluke. The people of Dhading made a deliberate, conscious choice.

Ashika built her public profile by doing things no conventional politician would do. She filmed street vendors overcharging customers, confronted government officials on cameras, and tore up a municipal receipt at the Sangha suspension bridge to protest a fee she thought was unjust. Her entire political identity rested on a single proposition: I will not perform the polite fictions of Nepali public life.

39,128 people said yes, that's what we want.

So, what changed? She didn’t. The stage did.

The first lens: The changed stage

The sociologist Erving Goffman spent his career studying something most of us do without thinking. We adjust our behavior based on where we are and who's watching. He called it the difference between front stage and backstage. A doctor who cracks harmless dad-jokes with colleagues in the break room is the same doctor who speaks with careful compassion to the patient's family. Neither version is fake. Both are real. But knowing which version belongs where is what Goffman called social competence.

Ashika's entire rise was built on collapsing this distance. She showed the raw, unpolished, confrontational version of herself that politicians normally keep locked behind press conferences and prepared statements. The public loved it because it felt like the truth. Her authenticity wasn’t just personal style.

Here's the problem. When she won Dhading-1, she didn’t just change jobs. She changed stages. Parliament is not TikTok. The audience is no longer her followers. It's constituents, fellow lawmakers, constitutional institutions, the national public. Each of these audiences carries different expectations. And those expectations are not arbitrary. They exist because institutions need what Goffman calls dramatic realisation. A judge wears a robe not because fabric delivers justice but because the robe dramatises the authority of the court. Without that dramatisation, the institution loses its symbolic weight. When a lawmaker treats the constitution as a dance prop, what people feel, even the ones who voted for her, is that something institutional has been made lighter than it should be.

And this is the cruel part. The very thing that got Ashika elected, her refusal to follow the conventional show business for politician image, is now the thing undermining her. The skills that make someone a successful outsider are precisely the skills that make them a struggling insider. She has no script for the front stage of power because her whole stance is based on refusing scripts.

The second lens: The switch nobody teaches

In 1919, Max Weber stood in front of a room full of idealistic German students and told them something they didn't want to hear. Wanting to change the world is not enough. You have to understand what power does to the person who holds it.

Weber drew a line between two moral orientations. The ethic of conviction says: I act according to my beliefs, and if the consequences are bad, that's the world's problem, not mine. The ethic of responsibility says: I own the consequences of my actions, and my job is to think about what happens downstream when I exercise power.

Activists operate under the ethic of conviction. They have to. An activist who constantly worries about institutional consequences and diplomatic fallout and procedural norms will never actually challenge anything. Ashika's entire career before Parliament was pure conviction. She saw wrongdoing, she confronted it, she didn't care about the fallout. That's what made her effective. That's what made her popular.

But if we look at Weber's central argument, it is somewhat uncomfortable. The ethic of conviction is necessary for movements. It becomes dangerous in governance. A lawmaker who operates purely on conviction, acting without weighing institutional consequences, isn't courageous, it is a sign of being immature and irresponsible. Not because their beliefs are wrong but because they now hold power, and power without responsibility is just a different flavor of the recklessness they were elected to replace.

Think about it practically. Under conviction ethics, nothing is wrong with the TikTok video. She's being herself. Refusing to be intimidated by institutional stuffiness. Fine. But under responsibility ethics, the questions multiply. How does it affect Parliament's credibility at a time when public trust in the institution is already at the floor?

The public intuitively demands this switch from conviction to responsibility even when they can't name it. They voted for the activist. But the moment the activist has a seat, they want the rebel to start thinking like a politician. This isn't hypocrisy. It's a legitimate expectation that power changes the rules. A brilliant medical student can challenge professors and question protocols all day. But when they're the one holding the scalpel, we all want them following the protocol. The stakes changed. The operating room is not the classroom.

The third lens: Why the constitution specifically

If Ashika had danced in the parliamentary corridor without anything in her hands, this would have been a controversy. Some memes, some tweets, move on. But the constitution in her hand transformed the act from a question of personal style into a question of national symbolism. That's the difference.

Scholar Michael Billig argues that nationalism is not mainly sustained by grand events like wars and independence days and revolutionary speeches. It's sustained by small, quiet, everyday acts. The flag outside a government building that nobody notices. The national anthem everyone stands for without thinking about it. The constitution sitting on a shelf that nobody reads but everyone knows is there. These symbols work precisely because they're treated as sacred by default. Nobody actively worships them. But the moment someone treats them casually, the spell breaks. People suddenly become conscious of something they took for granted, and the reaction is disproportionate to the act itself.

The selective outrage problem

Now let me cut the other way, because intellectual honesty demands it.

Many of the loudest voices demanding Ashika respect the constitution belong to people whose own constitutional record is, to put it diplomatically, unimpressive. Nepal's political establishment has spent years violating constitutional provisions. Missing deadlines. Manipulating appointments. Sabotaging the federal structure. Interfering with the judiciary. All while wearing dhaka topis and speaking in measured tones and invoking the constitution in every other sentence. Their reverence for the document appears when it's useful against someone they want to discipline. It disappears when their own actions are under scrutiny.

If the constitution is the benchmark, it needs universal application. The politician who dances with the constitution and the politician who violates its provisions while quoting it are both disrespecting it, just in different registers. One is careless with the symbol. The other is careless with the substance. I'd argue the second is worse.

If Nepal is going to keep sending digital first personalities to Parliament, and the election results suggest it will, then someone needs to build a bridge. Political parties. Civil society. Media. Senior lawmakers. Someone needs to take responsibility for the fact that winning an election and governing effectively requires fundamentally different skill sets, and that gap isn’t going to close on its own.

The Ashika Tamang controversy will fade. Another one will replace it. But the underlying tension will keep producing these moments until Nepal's political culture confronts it honestly.

That confrontation requires something from everyone.

It requires the old political class to stop weaponising decorum as a gatekeeping tool while violating the substance behind it. Your constitutional sentiments means nothing if it only shows up when you need to discipline someone.

It requires new entrants like Ashika to understand that the office is bigger than the person who holds it. You can be authentic without being careless. You can be unconventional without treating national symbols as content.

The real test isn’t whether Ashika danced with the constitution. The real test is whether Nepal is ready for the kind of politics it voted for, and whether it's willing to build the institutions that make that politics sustainable.