Youth Movements Are Rewriting South Asia’s Political Future
By
Bala Raju Nikku
The Gen Z uprising became formidable force in toppling regimes in Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in the recent years. Many are asking is India the next in order, given the current youth mobilisation through cockroach Janata party. The Indian Gen Z are now demanding for justice and up against the current BJP establishment, questioning its unaccountability to ensure a fair education system and failure to reduce unemployment in India but misleading the youth in the name of mandir and monuments.
Right now, Delhi became the epicentre for India’s youth taking streets and peaceful protests confronting a political system that no longer answers the crises shaping their lives. What are these processes telling us about the Indian democracy?
Democratic elections, parties, and smooth transition of power and parliamentary rituals, once celebrated as the engines of the world’s largest democracy now feel like relics of an earlier era. For sure the political toolkit handed down by previous generations to the present Indian youth, has become inadequate for addressing unemployment, caste violence, ecological collapse, and democratic erosion. Their uprisings are not impulsive outbursts but a generational indictment of a development model that has exhausted its moral legitimacy. And this disillusionment is not uniquely Indian.
Across South Asia from Nepal’s constitutional struggles to Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya and Bangladesh’s student uprisings, South Asia’s young people are rejecting political systems that no longer deliver dignity and justice. India’s youth are part of a regional democratic reimagining that refuses to be disciplined by the limits of old political machinery. How are these changes have come?
If we look at Indian independence struggles and the post independent grassroots democracy in India has always advanced through friction between state power and citizen action. Yet over the last four decades, successive governments have steadily narrowed civic space to personality cults and political party monopoly.
The non‑party political process and citizen-led activism outside electoral politics was once central to India’s democratic vitality. Movements around forests, dams, displacement, caste violence, and labour rights forced accountability and reshaped Indian development debates. But beginning in the post-Emergency era, governments across party lines began treating civil society as a threat. The Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) became a bipartisan instrument of control, while NGOs were absorbed into donor-driven service delivery, turning activism into project management.
Similarly, Rights-based movements were dismissed as “anti-development,” as if justice and growth were mutually exclusive. Similar patterns unfolded in Nepal, where monarchical regimes led by Rana prime ministers and post-conflict governments increasingly regulated NGOs and student unions, and in Bangladesh, where civil society organisations faced surveillance and shrinking space. Pakistan’s military rule, India’s civic suffocation as examples is part of a broader South Asian trend capturing civic action though States tightening control as development becomes securitised.
Many NGOs are closed or forced to coopt with the State as The Modi government intensified this erosion through a new architecture of control. FCRA weaponisation led to mass license cancellations, disproportionately affecting organisations working on human rights, minority rights, environmental regulation, and democratic freedoms.
Narrative warfare reframed dissent as treason. Overnight activists became “anti-national,” students “urban Naxals,” and civil society a security threat for the Hindutva led India.
Digital policing tightened, increased surveillance systems, troll armies, algorithmic targeting created a climate where dissent is crushed, silenced and protestors were punished not only by the State but by digitally mobilised mobs. Similar trends are also mirroring Bangladesh’s digital repression under the Digital Security Act and Sri Lanka’s surveillance of activists during the economic crisis.
The good news is that citizen and youth movements have not disappeared, but they have mutated and took different shapes. Local struggles against land grabs, caste atrocities, and ecological destruction continue with remarkable tenacity. Intersectional politics led by Dalit, Adivasi, feminist, queer, and minority groups refuses to separate development from dignity. And with NGOs constrained, decentralised, digitally networked activism has become the new repertoire of contention echoing Nepal’s youth-led climate protests and Sri Lanka’s leaderless Aragalaya movement and now India’s cockroach Janata party led youth activism, supported by other sections of the society to some extent.
If the current Jantar Mantar struggle is India’s moment of Gen Z’s democratic rebellion, it marks a profound shift in India’s political landscape. The anti CAA protests of December 2019 have transformed streets and campuses into civic classrooms, where students read the Preamble, invoked Ambedkar, and reclaimed dissent as patriotic. The 2020 Farmers’ movement demonstrated that mass mobilisation can still bend the mighty Modi’s State power, even under a centralised regime. Campus uprisings from JNU and HCU to TISS challenged fee hikes, caste discrimination, surveillance, and ideological interference. Post‑2023 and 2024 the current youth protests around unemployment, exam paper leaks, violence against minorities, and attacks on campus autonomy reveal a generation unwilling to accept precarity as destiny. Their political grammar includes rights, climate justice, digital freedom and does not fit neatly into India’s old left-right binaries. And they resonate with regional youth politics: Nepal’s students defending secularism and federalism, Sri Lanka’s youth demanding accountability for economic collapse, and Bangladesh’s students mobilising against authoritarianism and corruption.
For sure, across South Asia, young people are asserting that democracy must be lived, not merely performed. These youth movements expose the limits of India’s political toolkit. Mere elections based on social engineering cannot resolve caste hierarchies. GDP growth cannot compensate for ecological collapse. Majoritarian nationalism built on Hindutva cannot produce social cohesion. Digital surveillance cannot manufacture legitimacy.
If India’s development model is corporate led, extractive, exclusionary, and obsessed with infrastructural spectacle very soon it will become politically obsolete. Gen Z Youth-led protests reveal a development trajectory that is not linear but contested. They insist that development is a site of conflict, democracy is developmental, and justice is non-negotiable.
States can suppress these movements, that may delay developmental change, but the old political tool kit cannot prevent anymore the emergence of new political subjectivities.
India’s youths are not asking for a better political toolkit, but they are building a new one that is based on justice and dignity. Their protests are diagnoses of a development model that has reached its moral limits.
The question is not whether the Indian State will allow this youth politics to flourish. The question is whether India and South Asia can afford a development trajectory without it!
About the Author:
Dr. Bala Nikku hails from Budithi village, Srikakulam district, Andhra Pradesh. He is one of the founding members of Nepal school of social work in 2005. Dr. Nikku is currently serving as the Associate Professor of Social Work with Thompson Rivers University, British Columbia, Canada. Email: bnikku@tru.ca