Emergency era to Nepal agitation: Decoding youth protests and what puts these movements at risk

The scenes in Nepal carried an unmistakable echo, coming as it did on the heels of last year’s student-led uprising in Bangladesh, which resulted in the fall of the Sheikh Hasina government in Dhaka, pushing the former PM to flee the country. In both nations, students and the youth had been at the forefront of resistance. The Bangladesh protests had reportedly started off peacefully, with university students demanding the abolition of quota in civil services. But as it expanded into an anti-government agitation, clashes started.

What drove these youth to protest against the establishment? Were they more prone to co-option and violence? And what role will they play in larger social change in these countries?

The agitations in Nepal and Bangladesh were not the first of their kind.

Rashtriya Janata Dal MP and professor Manoj Jha highlights the continuity across generations where students have been the “vanguards” of protests. “Each generation, and each decade, in fact, has had its own kind of student protest or students’ movement. In the 1960s, students were driven by the desire to make society better, more inclusive, and more equal. In France, in 1968, students from the University of Nanterre protested — to begin with, primarily against a hostel issue, confined to the campus — which went on to include important questions concerning the shape of capitalism in France,” he recalled.

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Closer home, many of the demonstrators who had occupied Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 in a peaceful protest demanding democratic reforms, had reportedly been students and youth. Hundreds are said to have been shot dead by the army in an effort to crush the protest, in what is commonly referred to as the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Jha added: “The backbone of the JP movement [against Indira Gandhi in the 1970s] was students and the youth. And it was primarily against a kind of order, which, in fact, appeared to them as a kind of defiance of the ideals of the freedom movement. So, in Gujarat and Bihar, you had a massive student protest, which subsequently resulted in the overthrow of the Indira Gandhi regime.”

According to Jha, however, in the current generation or ‘Gen Z’, the “nuances” and “shape of the movement” are “entirely different”, as in the digital era they are more connected to the world.

“They know that visuals are important. So, their emphasis is also on creating more visuals about their dissatisfaction. And that's why it gives a sense of anarchy to people who actually do not understand, or they don't wish to look beyond their vantage point,” he said.

Many political observers are of the view that over the years student-and-youth-led movements have played a big role in shaping public opinions and perceptions.

“However, the movements of the internet age, starting with the Arab Springs [pro-democracy, anti-government agitations in the early 2010s] or even the 'colour revolutions' in the former Soviet bloc [to replace pro-Moscow governments with pro-West governments], represent another kind of mass movement, largely initiated by students,” said political scientist Aditya Nigam, former professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). “These have emerged from horizontal communications, often across ideological barriers, enabled by the internet. They also belong to the moment of the collapse of the utopian Left imagination and are, hence, focused not on larger change but on issues like corruption… The uprisings in Bangladesh and Nepal have not been very different in this respect.”

So, what drives young people to take to the streets, often before others in the community? Activist and former Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student Anirban Bhattacharya, who had been jailed along with fellow students Umar Khalid and Kanhaiya Kumar on charges of sedition over a controversial event organised to protest the hanging of 2001 Indian parliament attack convict Afzal Guru, points to three factors.

“One, many a time, students bear the brunt of decisions and conditions not of their making. The frustration and disillusionment that they harbour expresses itself in protests and agitations, propelling the chariot of change against the status quo... Two, students [college and university students] are of an age when they have stepped out of the protective and docile corners of their homes, starting to face the world as it is. The sense of indignation and the romanticism for a better, more just future is infectious, given that they are occupying the same space and socialising together in educational institutions,” he explained.

The third reason that propels students to take a stand, according to Bhattacharya, is that while “pragmatism is not necessarily a bad quality, it is the unfettered and audacious leap of minds that is possible in youth that ultimately drives change”.

For activist Natasha Narwal, who was arrested in the 2020 Delhi riots case and subsequently released, students occupy a unique position “ to become representatives of the general unrest in society, as they have not entered particular professions or the workforce, so their world is not sequestered. Symbolically, they are the inheritors of the future as well as makers of it”.

While some voice concern over the violence associated with recent students’ protests — as was reported in Nepal and Bangladesh — former Jawarharlal Nehru University Students’ Union (JNUSU) secretary, Satarupa Chakraborty, argued that such perception was “part of a larger disinformation campaign to isolate students from the rest of the society”.

“Recently, in Nepal too, the Gen Z protesters made public declarations disassociating themselves from the violence. In our experiences of struggles, we often encounter that violence is usually orchestrated either by the ruling dispensation or by some vested interest groups backed by power,” she alleged.

Drawing a distinction between organised protests under unions and spontaneous outbursts, Chakraborty added, “In the case of unorganised or leadership-less movements, the challenges of fringe actors coming in and playing a destructive role during the movement are higher. This should reinforce the need for organised movements, demands for unions, national-level coordinating committees, etc., rather than setting a narrative such as students are ‘violent’, ‘trouble makers’ or ‘misguided’.

Narwal, on her part, questions the very definition of “violence”, claiming, “it also depends on who is the one who is branding or deciding what is violence and what is not”.

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Yet, despite there having been youth protests in India, from the Emergency era to the recent agitations against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), they did not consolidate into a massive nationwide upsurge or sustained movement, point out political observers.

Explaining this, Jha argued, “Every country shapes its protest, art of protest or the craft of protest through its own culture, material and non-material. In India's case, size itself is actually a matter we should always factor in. And of course, there are issues of caste, there are issues of religion, region, different kinds of temperament, different local challenges. So, the youth of India should not be seen in the same homogenous category as we see in a country like Bangladesh or Nepal.”

For journalist and former JNUSU president Amit Sengupta, the question of what transforms a youth protest into a sustained movement for change was also one of ideology.

“Spontaneous student movements can lead to long-term political changes, locally and globally, even radical changes. If the vision and ideological content are strong, it gets entrenched in historical memory and resurrects in new forms,” he stressed.

Sengupta added: “Movements, with no visionary ideological content, and as an immediate or pent-up reaction to, for instance, corruption, can get co-opted by vested interests, or, they might fizzle out.”

Congress MP Manish Tewari too raises a similar concern about these protests being potentially orchestrated by a “hyperpower”.

“What happened in Sri Lanka in July of 2022, or Bangladesh in July of 2024 or Nepal in September of 2025, there is a pattern to it. And the same pattern as what happened in the Arab Spring… Now we know from very responsible published sources that this wasn't spontaneous. Tech camps were organised by a hyperpower where political activists were trained in the use of social media for political mobilisation and how to beat censorship and try and keep ahead of these regimes,” he said.

Tewari added: “Somebody needs to very seriously investigate and analyse whether these protests were organic or whether they were inspired by forces which would benefit from instability in South Asia.”

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For the Congress MP, the vulnerability lies in youthful aspiration. “Young people are aspirational, and they are also inspired by a sense of idealism. So, they are more easily harnessed, and then they are genuine grievances. It is not that there is an absence of grievances… But, you know, for those conditions to be then harnessed for undemocratic regime change. And all these countries were essentially democratic countries. So, these have national security implications, which should be seriously looked at,” he said.

Yet, according to Bhattacharya, the capture of a movement is not just limited to students or youth, and the blame for it cannot and should not fall on them.

“It is true for any condition and any moment in history. It depends on the existing socio-political contours of the society and the way the student movement is interacting with them. It depends on their ideological bent and the tactics they may adopt at a particular time. It is also possible at times that it may go beyond their hands and develop a more mass character,” he argued.

For Bhattacharya, student movements “usually show a spark, a dissatisfaction with the way things are. It shows a mirror to the society that it had otherwise accepted as fate”. After the initial outburst, however, the direction it takes, he insisted, “depends on multiple factors for which student agitations need not be held responsible”.