OPINION - When the streets rose: Civic revolt and political transformation in South Asia

2026-01-26 - 17:03

In September 2025, Nepal witnessed a stunning political upheaval that few had foreseen. What began as protests against a sudden government ban on social media platforms quickly spiraled into a nationwide uprising. Within days, security forces opened fire on student demonstrators, killing dozens and provoking widespread outrage. By September 9, the streets of Kathmandu were flooded with citizens, resulting in the resignation of Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli. His fall marked the collapse of yet another South Asian government within three years. Nepal’s upheaval followed a pattern that had already shaken the region. In 2022, Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya movement forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa from power after months of protests over economic collapse and corruption. Two years later, in 2024, Bangladesh erupted in a student-led movement that began with calls for reforming the public-sector job quota and ended with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fleeing the country. Across these cases, what began as specific grievances: rising prices, job quotas, or digital restrictions—transformed into mass movements that overturned deeply entrenched regimes. This article examines the striking commonalities among these three uprisings and the social forces that made them possible. Despite differing national contexts, all three shared crucial characteristics: spontaneous mobilization, non-partisan leadership, youth-driven organization, and the decisive use of digital networks. Together, they reveal more than parallel moments of unrest. They signal an emerging pattern in South Asian politics. By analyzing these movements, this article seeks to understand what they collectively tell us about the changing relationship between state and society in South Asia today. Structural Decay Beneath the Sparks In Sri Lanka, daily life had collapsed under power cuts, fuel queues, and runaway inflation. In Bangladesh, a court decision reinstating a jobs quota for the descendants of war veterans ignited anger among students, and the government’s brutal crackdown fanned it into a national revolt. In Nepal, a sudden ban on twenty-six social media platforms triggered demonstrations that rapidly spread across cities. These were not isolated grievances but symptoms of deeper structural decay that had accumulated for years. All three states had been hollowed out by the same pattern of unchecked power, captured institutions, and corruption. In Bangladesh, three consecutive controversial elections after 2009 effectively stripped citizens of genuine voting rights. In Nepal, eight fragile coalition governments in a decade turned governance into an endless cycle of bargaining and fragmentation. In Sri Lanka, a super-charged executive presidency consolidated power within the Rajapaksa family, transforming the state into a dynastic enterprise. Corruption became the defining feature of this captured politics. In Bangladesh, financial scandals drained billions while ordinary people faced higher taxes, price hikes, and routine bribery for basic services. In Sri Lanka, the Rajapaksas poured foreign loans into vanity projects that generated little economic return but enriched the political elite. Even as reserves evaporated, officials delayed IMF talks to protect family-linked interests. In Nepal, politics itself became transactional: coalition partners traded ministries for kickbacks, profited from gold-smuggling networks, and diverted donor aid into inflated contracts. Thus, the moral legitimacy of the state significantly collapsed. Inequality magnified this collapse of trust. In Bangladesh, more than half of government jobs were reserved for a small segment of the population, entrenching perceptions of systemic unfairness. In Nepal, the hashtag #NepoKids captured the anger of ordinary citizens watching the children of politicians flaunting luxury cars and vacations on social media while most struggled with inflation and unemployment. In Sri Lanka, the ruling family’s opulence amid food and fuel shortages symbolized a state detached from its people. These visible disparities transformed policy grievances into moral outrage. The Anatomy of Regime Collapse: Non-Partisanship, Youth, and Social Media When that outrage finally spilled onto the streets, it did not follow traditional political channels. The uprisings in all three countries were non-partisan, spontaneous, and decentralized in leadership—yet powerful enough to topple entrenched regimes. In Bangladesh, students protesting the quota system refused any political affiliation, transforming a narrow policy debate into a nationwide movement. In Sri Lanka, the protest at Galle Face Green deliberately excluded formal party banners in order to keep the struggle independent of party control. And in Nepal, participants described their revolt as against the peak corruption that these ministers have done for the past two decades, framing it as a generational stand against a corrupt political class rather than a fight for the ruling party. This deliberate rejection of partisanship was based on both strategic and moral considerations. After years of witnessing partisan collusion, citizens no longer trusted any political party to represent their interests. They had seen power rotate among familiar faces while governance deteriorated. Thus, this non-partisan nature ensured the participation of all strata, regardless of ideological differences. But more importantly, by avoiding partisan affiliations, protesters denied regimes the chance to discredit them as opposition conspiracies. Governments in these countries would regularly label opposition as ‘anti-state’ to justify their crackdown. A non-partisan identity blunted that tool of repression. Even when opposition activists joined, they did so as individual citizens rather than representatives, creating an unusual alliance between ordinary people and silent political dissidents. The youth were at the heart of this new civic politics. Generation Z, often dismissed as apolitical or self-absorbed, emerged as the engine of rebellion. Having grown up amid corruption, unemployment, and rising living costs, they viewed their futures as stolen. A Nepali student at Georgetown University, who closely followed the September uprising, reflected that what began as “a protest against corruption and the social media ban” quickly became a generational reckoning. “Gen Z felt alienated from the government’s slow, bureaucratic politics,” he explained. “When the prime minister mocked young protesters as being used by others, it only deepened their anger.” His observation captures how a digitally empowered generation—long dismissed as disengaged—channeled its frustration into defiance. Yet unlike previous generations, this cohort had something unprecedented: constant exposure to the wider world through the internet. This provided them a window into welfare-oriented, merit-based societies where governments were accountable, and citizens’ rights were valued. The contrast between those realities and their own broken systems created both awareness and anger. Having mastered the digital sphere more deeply than older generations, Gen Z felt this contrast most acutely—and it propelled them to the forefront of the uprisings. Another indispensable player in this transformation was social media. It dismantled the state’s monopoly over information and redefined the balance of power between citizens and the state. Before the rise of social media, regimes could easily censor or manipulate mainstream outlets and punish those that refused to comply. In Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka alike, governments routinely shut down critical newspapers and television channels or intimidated independent journalists, ensuring that traditional media echoed official narratives. Social media ended that monopoly: anyone could now report, record, and expose the truth. This was key to the buildup of deep resentment over the years in these countries. Most crucially, social media made state violence impossible to conceal. When governments unleashed brutal crackdowns, videos captured on phones spread instantly, drawing even more people into the streets. During Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya, live streams broadcast scenes of repression across the world within minutes. Attempts to restrict access proved futile. In Nepal, when platforms were banned, Gen Z simply switched to VPNs; in Bangladesh, once the connection was restored after an internet blackout, social media was flooded with footage of massacres that shattered the regime’s remaining legitimacy. Across all three uprisings, social media decisively weakened authoritarian resilience. Its power lies in its endurance. Blocking platforms is ineffective, and full internet shutdowns are unsustainable in today’s interconnected world, where nearly every aspect of life depends on connectivity. And when the networks return, so does the truth—louder, sharper, and impossible to contain. The Breaking Point However, it was the governments’ own miscalculations that ultimately sealed their fate. Each could have survived through modest reform, but chose confrontation instead. In Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina could have defused tensions by accepting quota reform as she had in 2018; instead, she branded students as ‘traitors’ and unleashed lethal force that killed hundreds, transforming a policy protest into a revolution. In Sri Lanka, the Rajapaksas dismissed months of warnings as exaggeration, while ruling party loyalists attacked protesters who were denounced as “militants.” In Nepal, K. P. Sharma Oli justified the social-media ban as a “national-security” measure, but the ensuing police gunfire that killed dozens of protesters turned public anger into revolt. Ironically, when things finally spun out of control, each regime conceded to the very demands that had sparked the unrest—but by then the street had already moved beyond reform to revolution. A Light in the Shadows One quiet but important feature of these upheavals was the restraint shown by the militaries. Armies in the global south often exploited civilian crises to seize power. Yet in these uprisings, the armed forces largely stayed within constitutional limits. In Bangladesh, the army refused to suppress demonstrators and instead facilitated Sheikh Hasina’s departure and the transfer of power to an interim government led by Muhammad Yunus. In Sri Lanka, the military restored order but refrained from a political takeover. In Nepal, the army facilitated the appointment of a former Chief Justice as interim prime minister under constitutional procedures. This shift, though understated, marks a significant departure from the region’s past. Taken together, these uprisings reveal a profound transformation in South Asia’s political landscape. They expose the exhaustion of old structures built on patronage, dynasty, and partisan polarization and introduce a new form of civic uprising—youth-driven, digitally connected, morally anchored, and non-partisan. These movements did not seek to replace one ruling class with another; they demanded a redefinition of accountability itself. The road ahead remains uncertain: Sri Lanka continues its economic recovery, Bangladesh’s interim government faces the challenge of institutional reform, and Nepal’s fragile democracy is still negotiating stability. Yet one truth has been established. The consent of the governed, once assumed to be passive and durable, can now dissolve overnight. Author: Ishfak Farhan Siyam Researcher at International Institute of Law and Diplomacy