Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka: How Gen Z is forcing regime change in South Asia

Nepal has become the latest South Asian country to see its government ousted by a revolution. On September 9, Nepal’s Prime Minister, K. P. Sharma Oli, resigned and went into hiding.

His government fell, parliament was dissolved and Nepal's former Chief Justice, Sushila Karki, became interim PM. Nepal is the third South Asian nation to see regime change in the last four years.

On July 13, 2022, Sri Lanka’s President, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, fled his country. He resigned the following day whilst in exile.

On August 5, 2024, Bangladesh’s Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, resigned and fled her country. In all three cases, the resignations were the result of mass protests, that rocked the South Asian nations to their very foundations.

Sri Lanka 2022 Revolution

In Sri Lanka, the protests were sparked by gross economic mismanagement. Here’s a timeline of events.

• 2005. Mahinda Rajapaksa was elected President of Sri Lanka.

• 2007. Sri Lanka offered its first international sovereign bond, starting on the journey to take on unsustainable debt.

• 2015. Mahinda Rajapaksa was voted out. His successor tried to bring the economy back on track. Unpopular IMF-backed reforms such as tax hikes were implemented.

• 2019. Mahinda’s brother, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, won the Presidential election. Mahinda was appointed Prime Minister. All the previous administration’s reforms were undone.

• 2020. COVID-19 pandemic swept Sri Lanka. Borders were shut. The tourism industry was decimated. A major source of foreign exchange dried up.

• 2021. Gotabaya Rajapaksa mandated organic farming. Chemical fertilisers were banned. Sri Lanka’s tea industry was decimated. Another source of foreign exchange was gone. Meanwhile, foreign debt rose to 101% of Sri Lanka’s GDP. Colombo declared an economic emergency.

By 2022, there was a food, electricity and fuel shortage in Sri Lanka. Inflation hit 17.5% by February 2022 and rose to 21.5% the next month. Meanwhile, Sri Lanka had a mountain of debt, and not enough foreign exchange reserves to pay it off. So, it officially defaulted on its foreign debt in April 2022.

Protests had already started by then. Sri Lankans all over the country began demonstrating peacefully. They called it the “Aragalaya”, meaning the struggle. The protesters created encampments in Colombo. They demanded the resignation of the Rajapaksas.

The Rajapaksas hit back with violence. Both by the state security forces, and by Rajapaksa loyalists. Things came to a head on May 9, 2022, when Rajapaksa supporters were sent on a rampage against the protesters. It was called Black Monday.

That was the breaking point. After that, the protesters retaliated. They burnt down several properties, linked to the Rajapaksas or politicians in their party. The public anger forced Mahinda Rajapaksa to resign as Prime Minister that day.

The Sri Lankan military was deployed after Black Monday. Ranil Wickremesinghe replaced Mahinda Rajapaksa as Prime Minister, bringing a brief lull in the chaos and violence.

However, on July 9, exactly two months after Black Monday, protesters stormed the Presidential palace and set the Prime Minister’s residence on fire.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa went into hiding after the Presidential palace was breached. On July 13, he fled Sri Lanka and went to the Maldives. He officially resigned on July 14.

Bangladesh 2024 Revolution

The revolution in Bangladesh was also sparked by economic anxieties. It began with a protest against job reservations, and morphed into something much bigger.

• 2008. Sheikh Hasina’s party, the Awami League, won the general election in a landslide.

• 2009. Sheikh Hasina began her second term as Prime Minister of Bangladesh.

• 2010. Bangladesh’s government job reservation, or quota system, was changed. Reservations were extended to the grandchildren of freedom fighters.

• 2011. Bangladesh’s system of holding elections under an independent, interim, caretaker government was deemed illegal. Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League were essentially given the power to oversee elections.

• 2014. Opposition parties boycotted that year’s general election. The Awami League won the election with another landslide because of the boycott.

• 2018. Mass student protests took place against Bangladesh's quota system. Sheikh Hasina was forced to scrap the entire quota system. Sheikh Hasina won the 2018 general election in another landslide. There were allegations of widespread rigging.

2024 saw another election boycotted by opposition parties, and another landslide for Sheikh Hasina. In June that year, Bangladesh’s High Court ordered the return of job quotas.

Before they were scrapped in 2018, quotas made up a majority of Bangladesh’s civil service jobs. There was a 10% quota for women, 10% for people from Bangladesh’s underdeveloped districts, 5% for ethnic minorities, 1% for people with disabilities, and a 30% for freedom fighters and their descendants. Together, the quotas took up 56% of all government jobs, leaving just 44% open to the public.

There was widespread opposition to the quota system from Bangladeshi students, because they felt that even after years of studying, government jobs were out of reach.

The 30% quota for freedom fighters was especially unpopular. Sheikh Hasina’s party, the Awami League, had led Bangladesh’s independence struggle in 1971. Thus, most people benefitting from the freedom fighter quota were Awami League members and their descendants. So, the freedom fighter quota was seen as a way for Sheikh Hasina to reward her loyalists.

Bangladesh’s High Court ordered the reinstatement of the quota system on June 5, 2024. Students began protesting at their colleges immediately. The protests were peaceful. The student protests intensified in July, with hundreds taking to the streets every day to block major roads all over the country.

On July 14, Sheikh Hasina made a major mistake when she compared the protesting students to “Razakars”; traitors who had collaborated with Pakistani forces during Bangladesh’s independence struggle. This infuriated the student protesters.

The Awami League latched on to the Razakar slur, using it as a pretext to attack the protesters. Members of the party’s youth wing, the Chhatra League, began attacking student protesters.

Sheikh Hasina ordered a crackdown. Bangladeshi security forces joined the attacks on student protesters. Over 1,500 people were killed, and tens of thousands were injured. It was a breaking point. The protests stopped being about quota reform. After the mass killings, there was just one demand; Sheikh Hasina’s ouster. She resigned and fled Bangladesh on August 5. Just after she departed, protesters stormed the Prime Minister’s official residence.

Nepal 2025 Revolution

Nepal had been facing decades of political instability before the revolution. The Prime Minister who just got ousted, K.P. Sharma Oli, it was his fourth premiership in the last 10 years.

Before Oli's latest term, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, also known as Prachanda, was Prime Minister. It was his third stint.

Before Prachanda, it was Sher Bahadur Deuba. Deuba was on his fifth Prime Ministerial term. After having replaced Oli.

The same people had been forming governments over and over again, with no one lasting an entire term. The last time one of Nepal’s Prime Ministers completed even four years in power was all the way back in 1983. Since then, Prime Ministers on average lasted for 1 to 2 years.

Nepal's instability did not make for a great economic situation. Nepal became the poorest South Asian nation, barring Afghanistan. In 2024, it had the lowest per capita income in South Asia.

The GDP per capita was just $1,389 per year, which is less than 60% of Bangladesh’s ($2,622) and less than a third of Sri Lanka’s ($4,325).

A third of Nepal’s GDP came in the form of remittances, from Nepali citizens who moved abroad for jobs. Within the country, youth unemployment was over 20%, meaning jobs were scarce.

Thus, public anger in Nepal was high, and all it needed was a spark. That came in the form of a social media ban.

On September 4, Nepal’s government banned 26 social media platforms, including WhatsApp, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn and Twitter or X. The platforms were banned for failing to register with the government.

The ban caused an uproar among Nepal’s youth. A lot of people depended on social media for their livelihoods. The timing of the ban also coincided with a social media trend taking hold of Nepal.

#NepoKids had been trending in the country. People had been sharing photos and videos which showed the stark disparity between ordinary people and the children of politicians.

While ordinary Nepali citizens struggled to make ends meet, political scions wore designer clothes and went on luxury vacations. This contrast was trending in Nepali social media. So, the timing of the social media ban was questioned.

Young people in Nepal, members of Gen Z, organised a mass protest on Monday, September 9. Tens of thousands took to the streets and demonstrated peacefully. But later in the day, people began marching towards the area of Kathmandu which housed parliament.

Some people tried to scale the gates of the parliament complex. Security forces responded with force, and at least 19 people were killed.

Protest organisers say that opportunists had infiltrated the movement to incite chaos. Investigations are still underway over who and what started the clashes.

But the heavy-handed response by the police, which included the use of live ammunition, led to the death of protesters. The police even shot at children who were in their school uniforms.

On September 10, hundreds of thousands took to the streets. They stormed Nepal’s parliament, and other government buildings, burning them down. Politicians’ houses were also set ablaze. Prime Minister Oli resigned and went into hiding.

Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka all saw a similar chain of events.

• Young people began protesting.
• The demonstrations were initially peaceful.
• The state used heavy-handed tactics to suppress dissent.
• The protests turned violent in the face of repression.
• Angry demonstrators stormed public buildings.
• The offending politicians were forced to resign.

The trigger for the protests was different in each country, but the aftermath was the same.

South Asian Spring?

South Asia has now seen three revolutions in a little more than three years. Is this like the 2011 Arab Spring? Is it the Asian or South Asian Spring?

South Asia's recent revolutions had a lot of things in common. Young people in all three countries were anxious about the economy. They felt that their existing political systems were rife with corruption. Eventually, the economic issues and lack of faith in their political systems led to protests.

Economic anxieties were at the heart of all three movements. The state’s default response, the use of force, brought public anger to a boiling point. And the end result was regime change.

The underlying issues aren’t restricted to South Asia. Economic problems and corruption are by no means unique to the region. And young people all over the world are angry.

Just a few days before Nepal, Indonesia found itself in the middle of its own Gen Z protest. Again, it was about perceived corruption by political elites. Indonesia's President, Prabowo Subianto, barely managed to defuse the situation.

The trend of Gen Z protests may have begun in Kenya in 2024. There were protests against their President, William Ruto, and his taxation policies. The Kenyan protests didn’t lead to Ruto’s ouster though, despite chants of “Ruto must go” ringing across the country.

South Asia itself almost saw a fourth revolution, back in 2023. Pakistan rose up to protest what they saw as a rigged election. That demonstration was in support of a politician, Imran Khan.

But Khan was locked up, leaving the protesters without their leader. Pakistan's establishment went on to try people in military courts, and Pakistan’s government survived.

So, there’s nothing to suggest that Gen Z protests are bound to succeed, or that South Asia is especially vulnerable. The only thing for certain is that bad economic policy will eventually come back to haunt governments.

Young people today are better connected than ever before. They can see what’s happening all over the world. And they refuse to suffer in silence. The best thing for governments to do is get their act together and work for the people instead of for themselves.