Four factors explain why Gen Z toppled rulers in Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. Is India different?

Three South Asian governments in four years have been dislodged by young people in the street. There was Colombo 2022, Dhaka 2024, Kathmandu 2025. Over the last week in Delhi, a satirical movement that took its name from a judge’s purported insult has drawn thousands of supporters to its protest to press for the resignation of the education minister, who is blamed for mismanaging a key public examination.

Describing this phenomenon as “generational” explains nothing. In Delhi, the movement’s most visible figure is 59-year-old Sonam Wangchuk, who has been on hunger strike since June 28. In Kathmandu, parents had marched with their children.

Age describes who is on the road. It does not explain why the road is full.

Four conditions do. India meets three.

The ladder

The first condition is educated unemployment at scale. India produces five million graduates a year and finds work for 2.8 million. The percentage of graduates among unemployed Indians aged 20 to 29 rose from 46% to 67% between 2017 and 2023.

The de-linking of education and employment reverses the bargain these states have sold for two generations, the one families paid for by selling land and taking on debt.

The Cockroach Janta Party has been demanding Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation over the leak that cancelled May’s NEET-UG medical college exams after 2.27 million candidates had sat it. The The Indian Express counted 48 leaked papers across 16 states in five years, affecting 15 million applicants competing for 120,000 government jobs. Parliament passed a law to eliminate paper leaks in 2024. The 2026 paper leaked anyway.

For a family without money, that exam is the only way into a profession, and the paper keeps being sold to someone else first.

The measure

The second condition is that inequality became something you can watch on a phone screen. Everyone always assumed the children of ministers and industrialists took the college places and the jobs. Those lives are now published.

A young man reads about his rejection from a state university and, a scroll later on the same screen, a politician’s son posts from a ski trip and an industrialist’s daughter announces her place at an American university.

Nepal’s protesters called them nepo kids. The phrase crossed four borders in a year because it does more than insult – it measures the distance. The Cockroach Janta Party manifesto lists the favours the system does for its own: the government jobs waiting for judges when they retire, the legislators who defect without penalty, the broadcast licences held by two families.

The channel

The third condition is when normal remedies stop working. Complaints go nowhere. Courts delay decisions. Representatives ignore voters. Protests are suppressed. Elections change nothing. When institutions fail the people who elected them, the street is all that remains.

Sri Lanka had postponed its elections. Bangladesh had run a boycotted one. Nepal’s parties had become interchangeable enough that swapping them changed nothing.

India looks secure on this condition, for now. Its elections still remove governments, and the Bharatiya Janata Party lost its single-party majority two years ago.

The ground is narrowing, though.

India’s Opposition politicians face pressure from government agencies such as the Enforcement Directorate – though these cases seem to disappear into oblivion if these politicians join the ruling party. The special intensive revision of the electoral rolls underway since last year has drawn accusations that it is removing voters who are unlikely to support the ruling party.

On the street, the tolerance for dissent is waning. The Cockroach Janta Party’s account on X was blocked within five days, reportedly on an intelligence input citing threats to sovereignty. The movement’s sit-in in Delhi was ruled illegal and it was refused permission for a march on Parliament on Monday.

When the march went ahead, internet shutdowns were imposed. Scores of participants were injured in police action. Education Minister Pradhan calls the movement a B-team of terrorists trying to divide the country.

The insult

The fourth condition is that the state humiliates the people it has already failed, and the insult is never proportionate to what it sets off. Nepal banned 26 social media platforms on September 4 and lost its government within five days. Bangladesh’s uprising began with a court ruling on job quotas. India’s began with one word.

In each case the state confirmed what the young had already suspected it thought of them. That is what brought them out.

The hinge

Governments do not fall because a crowd gets large enough. They fall when the security forces decide not to act against it.

In Dhaka, on the night of August 4, 2024, the army chief and his generals resolved not to fire on civilians, and Sheikh Hasina was gone the next afternoon. In Kathmandu the army declined to defend Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli. In Colombo the security establishment would not defend the president’s House, and Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country.

Political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s research is plain: whether the security forces refuse an order is the single largest factor in the success of a nonviolent campaign.

This is where India differs most sharply from the other three. Its army has never taken power and shows no sign of wanting to. Whatever happens will have to be settled by politicians.

That may be less reassuring than it sounds. Indian politicians from the ruling BJP have faced a decision at every stage of this and got it wrong at every time. Blocking the Cockroach Janta Party social media account turned a joke into a cause. Ruling the sit-in illegal filled it. Dragging a 59-year-old off a hunger strike into an ambulance, in daylight and on camera, produced the largest crowds the movement has seen.

Every escalation was the state’s own choice, and every one brought out more people than the day before.

Monday’s footage showed students beaten with batons in the capital and a police force denying it while the video ran. That footage outlives the movement.

At least two of the countries where these movements won have little to show for it. Balen Shah, the rapper carried into office on Nepal’s Gen Z vote, became prime minister in March. On July 9, the municipal police wheel-clamped the motorcycle of Ganesh Nepali, a 25-year-old app driver. He set himself alight in the street and died the next day. His family refused to bury him until the state declared him a martyr.

The generation that removed a prime minister in September was back in July demanding the resignation of the one it installed.

Bangladesh answered its own uprising by barring a party from elections. Toppling a government is the part these movements are good at. What comes after is not.

The name

On Monday, the protests stopped being a Delhi story, with detentions in Mumbai, crowds in Bengaluru and a vigil in Goa calling for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to resign. The chant changed as well. For two months this was about one minister and a leaked paper. On Monday it was Pradhan out and Modi with him.

India’s cockroaches have no owner. There is nobody whose agreement would end this, nobody who can be bought and no arrest that makes the paper un-leak. A movement built on a grievance can be conceded to or refused. It cannot be shut down.

The four conditions explain why this movement exists. What happens next is a much smaller question, and it has a name. Pradhan can resign or stay. Nothing being asked for is beyond the government’s power to give.

Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal each reached a point where a leader could have conceded something small but chose to clear the street instead. Each time the small thing stopped being enough and by then the demand was for the government itself.

On Monday, in Delhi, it stopped being only about Pradhan.

Dan Qayyum is a writer, media strategist, and long-standing advisor to government institutions and media organisations across the region. His work explores the intersections of geopolitics, military doctrine, and regional transformation. His upcoming book, The Other Side of Endurance, examines his own journey through crisis, resilience, and reinvention.