The Gen Z Revolt Sweeping South Asia

OSLO, Norway — Generational discontent carries within it the seeds of the future. While its eruptions herald change, the changes it brings can take many forms.

The cultural consequences of the youth revolt that shook the West in the 1960s only became apparent decades later as the long march of its values coursed through all social norms and institutions. What the wired Gen Z revolt that is today spreading across the “global South” from Bangladesh to Nepal to India and elsewhere will ultimately bring is yet to be fully known. Movements from Kenya to Madagascar, inspired by their South Asian counterparts, are closely following events online and learning best practices.

The common cause of the widespread upheaval is corruption and a lack of accountability among often nominally democratic authorities, cojoining with a howling absence of opportunity for educated youth to find gainful employment and a path toward upward mobility.

As these movements gain momentum, governments have inevitably attempted to cut off the viral storm by shutting down social media and deploying police crackdowns, only further fueling the fury and catapulting a rebellion against specific conditions into a full-blown systemic challenge.

The Monsoon Revolution in Bangladesh in the summer of 2024, led by university students in a nation where half the population is under 30, toppled the repressive government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina after a brutal crackdown on demonstrations against a quota system for government jobs.

Following her ouster, an interim government was formed, led by Nobel Peace laureate and pioneer of micro-credit for the poor, Muhammad Yunus. In July, the first contested election in three decades was held along with a referendum on a proposed constitutional charter. That brought the Bangladeshi Nationalist Party/Jamaat-e-Islami alliance to power and a vote in favor of the charter. With differences now between the ruling coalition and the constitutional charter, the future of reform is uncertain.

In September 2025, the “Gen Z” revolution in Nepal started as a viral campaign against the corruption and nepotism of high-living elites in an impoverished nation where nearly 60% of the population is under 30. After the government tried to curb connectivity by cracking down on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and YouTube, the movement predictably exploded. As in Bangladesh, protests over specific conditions morphed into a comprehensive challenge to the system.

Nepal’s Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli was forced to resign. A brief interim government headed by a former chief justice was formed until new parliamentary elections were held. In those elections, the newly formed Rastriya Swatantra Party won a majority and the 36-year-old popular rapper and former mayor of Kathmandu, Balendra Shah, was named prime minister.

The new government is still struggling to address economic stagnation, high youth unemployment and constitutional reform. Moreover, Gen Z’s governing aspirations face new challenges beyond the limited capacity of their small country.

The most moving presentation at a gathering of Nobel Peace Prize laureates and Gen Z activists I recently attended in Oslo to discuss “democracy on the brink” was from 26-year-old Rakshya Bam, a leader of the Nepalese revolution.

Offering tearful condolences to the many thousands of her fellow citizens swept away in the tsunami-scale flood unleashed by a melting glacier that collapsed at the China-Nepal border, she pleaded for the world to understand that climate change doesn’t stop at national boundaries.

The horrifying tragedy, Bam said, made her realize that the quest for justice in the world Gen Z is growing up in cannot be realized unless the local is linked to the planetary. There can be no talk of justice in any society unless the ongoing climate calamity is addressed. And that is the responsibility not of any one nation or government, but of all civil society, and across all borders.

Gen Z attention has now turned to India. There, the youth movement that coalesced into what became known as the Cockroach Janta Party, which garnered 22 million followers online virtually overnight, started with a protest against the Education Ministry’s cancellation of entry exams for medical schools. With incisive humor, the movement appropriated the “cockroach” name from an insult by India’s chief justice, who said, “There are youngsters like cockroaches, they don’t get any employment, they don’t have any place in a profession.”

Half of India’s population — around 700 million people — are under the age of 30.

As always, a crackdown on demonstrations escalated everything.

In a humiliation for India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who projects the image of a strongman in control, his education minister was forced to resign to quell the unrest.

Modi’s India is unlikely to succumb to the Gen Z upsurge like in the weaker states of Bangladesh and Nepal. Nonetheless, protests over the narrow issue of medical school exams have now taken on the cast of a systemic challenge to a lack of opportunity for young people in the world’s largest country, where the GDP grew 7.8% in 2025. Stay tuned.

As Shashi Tharoor, a celebrated author, opposition member of the Indian Parliament and former under-secretary-general of the United Nations, put it: “Gen Z is transforming South Asia. Facing diminished economic prospects, many young people see not flawed institutions in need of gradual reform, but predatory systems robbing them of their future. Across South Asia, this sense has animated powerful protest movements, some of which could shape their countries’ political trajectories for decades to come.”

The common element of these Gen Z movements was encapsulated at the Oslo conference by María Corina Machado, who was awarded the Peace Prize in 2025 for her role leading the democratic opposition to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. When society reaches a threshold where conditions have become so dire that more people than not lose the fear of calling things by their name, the aura of authority crumbles, she said. When the reality of people’s lives is so far from the official line, false narratives no longer hold sway.

Following the capture of Maduro by the U.S. military, the installation of an interim government by the Trump administration and the announcement that the U.S. will control 65% of Venezuela’s oil production, Machado insisted that it is now time to open the democratic path and “set an electoral timeline.”

At the Oslo meeting, former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, offered some sober advice about the difficult challenges that remain for the long term after signal political victories.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2016 for concluding a peace accord with the Marxist FARC rebels that had gone on for nearly half a century and cost 220,000 lives, with up to 6 million people displaced. Santos was considered a “hawk” as defense minister due to his sometimes-brutal campaigns against the guerrillas. As president, he realized there would never be a military solution to the conflict; it could only be resolved through negotiation and compromise.

Ten years on from that agreement, the peace has generally held as the former guerrillas laid down their arms and participated as a legitimate party in democratic elections. There have also been painful truth and reconciliation processes to hold perpetrators accountable to their victims.

Where the agreement has so far failed is in addressing the root cause of the FARC rebellion in the first place — the poverty and lack of opportunity in those zones of the country where they came to dominate. What has happened instead is that, while the FARC infrastructure was dismantled, the state never stepped in with its own institutions; that void is now filled by the dark civil society of drug and criminal gangs.

Santos’ message to Gen Z: In the wake of any change to the old political system, new institutions that enforce the rule of law, guarantee civic participation and promote economic development must fill the void. Otherwise, it will be back, sooner or later, to square one.

One other thought comes to mind with respect to the social media-driven Gen Z rebellions and revolutions. The connectivity that unites can also divide and disable real transformation.

The internet activist Wael Ghonim was a prominent figure in the so-called Arab Spring’s “Facebook revolution” in Egypt in 2011 that forced President Hosni Mubarak from power. In those early hopeful moments, Ghonim felt the power of connectivity to “speak truth to power.” Yet, when the viral movement shifted from mobilizing angry opposition to constructing a new society, fake news, hate speech, factions and trolls splintered that unity, leaving a vacuum filled by the most organized force left: the Muslim Brotherhood. Their election to power was later overturned by a military coup.

What happened, as Ghonim later put it, is that social media’s participatory capacity to “speak truth to power” transmuted into the opposite challenge: “speaking truth to social media.”

Democratic Backsliding

The dynamics that have mired many nations of the global South in corruption, kleptocracy and autocracy are the same ones that are bringing those conditions to the United States.

Speaking from her own experience in the Philippines, Maria Ressa sees the deterioration of free expression as the first move in a downward spiral leading to the demise of democracy.

Awarded the Peace Prize in 2021, the defiant journalist has a straightforward formulation: “When truth is stifled, there can be no trust. Without trust there can be no democracy.” So the front-line issue, in both the mature democracies of the U.S. and Europe as well as the global South or Russia, is the battle for the governing narrative.

She breaks the spiral down into three steps:

“First, an administration wages narrative warfare by using governance as a content engine, deliberately fueling conflict to break down a fact-based reality;

“Second, as the shared reality breaks down, democratic institutions that provide checks and balances — like the press and the courts — are systematically delegitimized and dismantled, allowing for the consolidation of executive power;

“Third, with accountability institutions neutralized, the system descends into kleptocracy where state resources are systematically captured and looted to enrich a ruling elite, finance the continuation of the narrative war,” and sustain their grip on power.

While the Gen Z movements are unraveling this spiral in the global South, the mature democracies in the advanced world are just entering it. Indeed, they are on the brink.

The post appeared first on NOEMA.