Asia has seen a surge of “Gen Z protests,” led by a
generation tired of accepting the status quo and
increasingly using social media to drive change in deeply
entrenched political systems. In India, protests over the
education system helped force the education minister’s
resignation in 2026. Protests in Bangladesh and Nepal in
2024 and 2025, respectively, led to government changes.
These protests have helped expose fractured political
structures in these countries.
Governments in several
South and Southeast Asian countries have done little to
address the economic
distress and corruption plaguing them. The Gen Z
citizens, who are facing the brunt of these crumbling
systems, are increasingly demanding accountability and
justice, using social media to fight back, organize,
document events, and press their demands. Despite efforts to
suppress them, these protests have brought political change.
Whether these movements can sustain solidarity and organize
beyond immediate demands to pursue lasting reforms remains
to be seen.
India
In India, the Bharatiya
Janata Party-led government has been in power for more than
12 years, having first been elected in 2014. Press freedom
and other democratic safeguards have come under pressure
during its tenure; Sweden’s V-Dem Institute has classified
India as an “electoral
autocracy.” As stated by an August 2026 Time report,
“Modi has consolidated his grip on all manner of national
institutions in recent years: from the
media, where pliant owners have repeatedly bent the knee
to the administration, to election
authorities, which in a recent state poll erased
millions of names from voter rolls in a move widely seen
as benefiting Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP).”
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India has been facing increasing unemployment
among its educated youth, even though the government has
consistently maintained these claims
to be false. The country’s youth have also been
contending with an education system marked by repeated paper
leaks. In May 2026, the National Eligibility cum Entrance
Test for undergraduate medical admissions was canceled
over paper-leak allegations, fueling anger over the
examination system.
Meanwhile, during the same month,
the Supreme Court Chief Justice’s comparison
of unemployed youth to “parasites” and
“cockroaches” led to the formation of the Cockroach
Janta Party (CJP) by Abhijeet
Dipke, an Indian student from Boston University who
graduated in 2025 with a master’s in public relations. The
CJP’s Instagram account amassed 20 million followers
within days, according
to Time. Dipke eventually returned to India on June
6. Anger over the government’s mismanagement of the
education system soon moved from social media to the streets
as thousands of Gen Z showed up at Jantar Mantar, a popular
protest site in India’s capital, New Delhi, with their
main demand being the resignation of Education Minister
Dharmendra Pradhan.
As the protest gained momentum and
spread, authorities
resorted to force against demonstrators. Young
protesters used social media to document events on the
ground and responded with “humor
and grit.” For them, the protest wasn’t about any
political party but rather about ensuring accountability for
a broken education
system. They finally succeeded in forcing Pradhan
to resign on July 25, 2026.
“In the end, the young
cockroaches proved so resilient because Modi’s regime of
control had no punishment or humiliation to threaten them
with beyond what the system already inflicts on them every
day. These young men and women had reached a point where
they felt they had no voice in the existing order—and
nothing left to lose,” explains
the Time report. Allegations of links to foreign
funding were also made against the movement, but the
Ministry of External Affairs said it had “no
information” to confirm these allegations.
In
July 2026, after the protest ended, the government introduced
a bill to amend the public examinations law, and Modi
announced an examination reform task force. Whether these
actions succeed in reforming the education system and
whether the CJP can keep pushing for their proper
implementation remains to be seen.
The CJP announced
another campaign in September 2026 demanding chief election
commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation over alleged
manipulation of voter rolls. Street protests followed in
October, with opposition parties and civil society groups
participating. The Election Commission denies
the allegations. These protests will test the CJP’s
ability to sustain pressure and the authorities’ response
to demands for electoral reform.
The CJP has already
split
internally, resulting in the formation of the Cockroach
Janta Party—Democratic.
Nepal
In September
2025, Gen Z protests erupted in Nepal after the government
banned social media platforms that had not met its
registration requirements, according to a Harvard T.H. Chan
School of Public Health article.
Gen Z saw this move to ban social media as an attempt
to trample their freedom of expression, while the
politicians were hoping to use their traditional tactics to
also stop hashtags like #NepoKids or #YouthAgainstCorruption
targeted against their children and the privileged life they
led, in sharp contrast to the hardships being faced by
ordinary youths daily. The government further shut
down the internet, thinking that would muzzle the
protests. However, they drastically underestimated the
youth’s power and frustration.
While the ban
triggered the protests, several larger unresolved issues had
been simmering for years, including unemployment,
corruption, and nepotism, which strengthened the agitation.
“In a country where 56 percent of the population is below
the age of thirty, a geriatric leadership whose average age
was seventy was woefully out of touch. In the last decade,
internet connectivity had rapidly expanded to cover more
than half the population. Young Nepalis were online—on
Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Discord—but offline, they saw
none of the better future promised by the 2006 revolution
against the monarchy. Instead, they saw widening inequality
and corruption, and on their social media feeds, they saw
the children of elites flaunting their privilege,” writes
author Amish Raj Mulmi for the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace.
The protesters demanded Prime
Minister K.P. Sharma Oli’s resignation. He finally heeded
their demands on September 9, 2025.
Since democracy
was restored in Nepal in 1990, the country has seen
political churn, having witnessed “twenty-seven prime
ministers, each averaging barely a year in office,” according
to Mulmi. The government collapsed after the protests,
leading to an interim government, with elections eventually
taking place in March 2026. Balendra Shah’s Rastriya
Swatantra Party won the election, and Shah became the prime
minister.
While the Gen Z movement has succeeded in
changing the political system, the government’s
inexperience is a critical roadblock as it tries to fix a
dysfunctional system. It remains to be seen whether it can
use the popular mandate to ensure stability. Deadly floods
in August 2026 gave Shah’s government an early
test of its ability to respond to a national crisis.
“While early moves such as arresting former leaders and
launching an ambitious reform agenda signal change, the
government faces risks of internal fragmentation,
personality-driven politics and bureaucratic resistance. Its
success will depend on delivering economic opportunities,
maintaining public trust, and translating its populist
momentum into stable, rules-based governance,” writes
Anil Sigdel, a lecturer at the University of Vienna,
Austria, in a May 2026 article.
The Gen Z revolts in
Nepal reflect the dilemma faced by 21st-century democracy,
according
to the journal Society. “On the one hand, it
exposes the exhaustion of a political order sustained by
elite capture, corruption, and exclusion. On the other, it
demonstrates the enduring vitality of democratic ideals, the
capacity of ordinary citizens, and especially the young, to
demand accountability, dignity, and change. The uprising of
2025 was not only a fleeting eruption of anger; it was also
a generational awakening with decades of unfulfilled
promises.” Mulmi argues
that earlier generations in Nepal toppled governments
without leading to lasting change. Whether the Gen Z
movement will result in such reforms remains
unclear.
Bangladesh
Bangladesh saw an uprising
primarily led by student protesters in 2024, which was also
called the July Uprising. The initial protests followed the
court’s reinstatement of the quota system. “The protests
began in early July as peaceful demands from university
students to abolish quotas in civil service jobs—a third
of these are reserved for relatives of veterans from
Bangladesh’s war for independence from Pakistan in
1971,” according
to the BBC. But the protests soon grew into a broader
anti-government movement over unemployment and corruption,
turning violent amid police crackdowns and clashes between
demonstrators and student groups supporting Sheikh
Hasina’s government. This was followed by curfews,
shutting down the internet, and mass
arrests.
Eventually, the government had to cave
in, and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled to
India on August 5, 2024, after ruling the country for 15
years. The “weeks of bloody protests and brutal action by
government forces killed nearly 1,400 people and wounded
more than 20,000, according to the country’s International
Criminal Tribunal (ICT),” stated
Al Jazeera.
The protests also prompted
allegations of involvement by the United States, China, and
Pakistan. BBC Monitoring documented
these claims and the responses to them without establishing
foreign involvement. In a commentary published by New
Eastern Outlook, Brian Berletic argued that the uprising
reflected a US-backed effort at regime
change.
Meanwhile, an interim government led by Nobel
Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus took power in Bangladesh
after the protests. In October 2025, Yunus’s interim
government introduced the nonbinding July
National Charter that several major parties signed;
Hasina’s banned Awami League was excluded from the
process. The signing of the charter was met with protests as
agitators “wanted the document to include more provisions
for the activists who helped oust the previous
government,” according
to PBS.
While the Yunus-led interim government
received support initially, “the enthusiasm and aspiration
for transformative change appears to have faded. Instead,
the country now faces uncertainty, political fragmentation
and instability,” states
the Institute of South Asian Studies, adding that the
initial uprising “laid bare the flaws of the existing
political and socio-economic order by casting them in moral
terms and promoting a collective stake in democracy. Through
their expression of dissent, protesters sought to
demonstrate that democracy is not a singular or monolithic
entity confined to those in power.”
Eventually,
Tarique Rahman was sworn in as Bangladesh’s new prime
minister in February 2026. He is already facing pressure to
implement the promised changes as people took to the streets
in September 2026 amid rising
living costs and energy prices. Whether his government
can deliver economic reforms remains an open
question.
Can the Gen Z Protests Lead to Long-Term
Changes?
In Nepal, the protests paved the way for new
political actors to lead the country; in Bangladesh, the long-established
Bangladesh Nationalist Party came to power, showing how
similar protests can have different political outcomes.
Political scientist Arijit Mazumdar contrasts
how the two countries’ electoral systems absorbed the
protests: “In Bangladesh, elections continued to exist,
but confidence in electoral competition had weakened and
established parties retained overwhelming organizational
advantages. In Nepal, despite significant political
instability and extra-constitutional developments, elections
remained the broadly accepted mechanism through which
political conflict was ultimately resolved. These
differences shaped whether protest energy produced rupture
without substantial electoral renewal or was absorbed into
party competition.”
Youth-led protests have
also
taken place in Indonesia and Madagascar, as well as in
other parts of Africa. These protests have showcased
the courage and determination of young people. Whether their
demands lead to lasting change also depends on political
organization and the institutions that carry out reforms.
“[G]overning a state requires skills that no revolution
alone can teach. … At the same time, examples like
Thailand and Sri Lanka demonstrate that youth-led political
transformation is not impossible. What distinguishes
relatively successful cases is not merely public enthusiasm
but organizational continuity. Political movements gradually
evolved into structured parties, built alliances with civil
society and engaged existing institutions rather than
relying exclusively on street mobilization. Sustainable
reform required more than revolutionary legitimacy,” writes
H.M. Nazmul Alam for Scroll.
The youth protests
in Sri Lanka in 2022, known as the Aragalaya
(struggle), resulted from a major political and economic
crisis. The protests helped force Sri Lankan President
Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s resignation
in July 2022; the National People’s Power (NPP), led
by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, formed a government
in 2024. Under his rule, some positive economic changes have
taken place, but promises of a “system change” take time
and vision.
Social media has helped young
protesters bypass traditional media gatekeepers, amplify
their grievances, and build solidarity. But visibility and a
change of leaders do not, on their own, remake political
institutions. The different outcomes in India, Nepal, and
Bangladesh show why the real test of these movements extends
beyond the protests. As the article in the journal
Society points
out, “[without] institutional pathways to translate
protests into policy, such uprisings risk being co-opted by
populist leaders or dissipating into
chaos.”
Author Bio: Ruhi Bhasin is
a senior journalist and features editor with the Independent
Media Institute. She previously worked for The Times of
India and The Indian Express, where she covered
politics, law, and social issues.
This article was
produced by Economy
for All, a project of the Independent Media
Institute.
