It took just under 48 hours for Nepal’s government to be razed to the ground, the flame-eaten parliament building, a literal manifestation of a generation’s burning resentment with the establishment, echoing scenes in Bangladesh last year and Sri Lanka in 2022.
Nepal is the third South Asian country in four years to see its youth lead a protest movement collapsing the government, and experts such as DB Subedi, lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Queensland, are pointing to broader trends in a region plagued by socio-economic inequality.
“I think the political culture is being is being shifted or needs to be shifted,” he says.
“The old guard, a more hierarchical, clientelist kind of politics we have seen since the countries in South Asia gained independence – that old system fails to address the aspirations of young people. The region needs a massive and more constructive political change.”
The spark that lit the fuse
Though many of these incidents escalated quickly over a short time, the underlying conditions giving rise to them have been simmering away for some time.
All three movements were borne of young people’s frustration with socioeconomic disparities long ignored by a corrupt political elite: experiencing both COVID-19 and the 2008-09 recession and unable to connect with their leaders, a generation mobilised to wrestle back control of their futures.
Dr Subedi says the transition from individual resentment to collective action requires an inciting incident. Economic hardship gave rise to the ‘Aragalaya’ movement in Sri Lanka in 2022, where youth demanded the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, forcing him to flee. In Bangladesh last year, frustration over civil service quotas led students to topple Sheikh Hasina’s regime, and now, a social media ban has mobilised youth against Nepal’s government.
Each instance saw a new mode of activism – a decentralised, leaderless movement organised online, where youth united under hashtags such as #GoHomeGota, or #nepobabies.
“Until recently, our understanding of younger generations, how they use and how they engage with social media was a bit different…in the past, we would only see social media platform for younger generations as a site of networking and entertainment. But what we see here is it’s also increasingly become a site of political participation and contestation,” he says.
Dr Subedi says there is evidence of each movement’s tech savvy generation watching and learning from each other.
“Obviously when a protest movement happens in one part of the world, it does have repercussions and domino effects. We have this seen this in the case of Arab Spring some 15 years before,” he says.
“Likewise, with this protest movement which initially started in Sri Lanka and then in Bangladesh and Nepal, there is sort of a domino effect and young people are watching these things happening and learning from each other.”
However, Dr Subedi is hesitant to describe the three protests as directly correlated.
“Because of hyper globalisation and in the age of digital dominance, everything is very easily connected and can be easily accessed,” he explains. “But despite a common pattern, these kinds of movements are directed against particular times and social political issues…I’m not 100% sure to what extent we can define that as a solidarity, but there is definitely a fraternity or some kind of connection.”
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The decline of democracy?
But perhaps the most worrying lesson from the three uprisings lies in the weakening of democracy, which could spark wider regional patterns of protest.
“There’s a gradual decline in the democracy practices in South Asia; I’m saying this based on different democracy indicators and data on different South Asian countries,” Dr Subedi says.
“Looking at the example of Nepal, even Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, the governments which were in place at the time these protest movements erupted either failed to handle it properly or in the eyes of the people these governments were already delegitimised.”
So might we see a similar movement in India or Pakistan?
“Unfortunately, I can’t make that prediction. But what I can say is that India, Pakistan and other countries in the region do have the structural vulnerabilities which can work as a motivational factor for young people to come to this kind of anti-government protest,” Dr Subedi says. Gen Z protests
“[Anti-government protests] have happened even in India but at a different scale and not necessarily led by Gen Z – the example we have seen very recently is the farmers protest.”
He says it’s difficult to measure the influence of these three movements on India and Pakistan, given how vast and varied the two nations are.
“At the end of the day, how far these protest movements go and what kind of political outcomes or political consequences they produce depends on how the authorities actually respond to that protest movement and how they engage with the protesters,” he says.
But in any case, across the region, Dr Subedi warns effective conflict management infrastructure is vital for protecting democracy. Gen Z protests
“A good democracy, among other things, has conflict management mechanisms in it between state and society, but also between social groups and democracy actually fosters that kind of peaceful resolutions.”
“The democracies in South Asia must develop that kind of mechanism to foster this conflict peacefully. Otherwise, it will get worse.”
