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).”
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.”
