Originally posted in Asian Dispatch on 18 September 2025
Wealth Inequality is at the Heart of ‘Gen Z’ Revolution Across Asia
The youth in Nepal toppled its government in a span of 48 hours in what can be called one of the world’s fastest regime falls. But there are lessons in rebuilding a nation from youth-led revolutions across Asia.
In early September, as a peaceful protest swiftly turned violent in Nepal’s capital city Kathmandu, Koan* knew things were getting out of hand. On September 4, Nepal’s government had put a ban on 26 social media platforms, prompting students to fight back peacefully on the streets.
Last week, when security forces opened fire – killing at least 72 protesters, mostly students – protests turned ugly. Unknown actors burnt down key buildings including the Parliament and the Supreme Court. Student protesters distanced themselves from the violence but within 10 hours, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and his cabinet resigned, effectively setting in motion what can be categorised as one of the world’s fastest regime falls.
But this was just the beginning.
25-year-old Koan, who was a part of the protests and requested anonymity to protect his privacy, says that there was a lot of chaos during the protests.
“[When the shooting of students happened] everyone was confused: why did it happen? Who ordered the shooting? Moreover, we didn’t have a fixed plan for the protest. We just knew things had to change [in the country] and it needed to be done fast,” he tells Asian Dispatch. Following the police action and announcement of resignations, Koan says the focus shifted to filling the power vacuum in the country.
In the thick of this confusion, Gen Z protesters created a server on the social networking and gaming app Discord. Started with nearly 12,000 members, by the weekend, it had over 160,000 people. The group held a vote and negotiated to form an interim government with Nepal’s Army in a Discord livestream.
By Saturday, President Ramchandra Paudel dissolved the parliament and announced Sushila Karki as the interim prime minister until the elections on March 5, 2026. Karki was Nepal’s first woman Chief Justice and faced an impeachment motion in 2017 after she overruled a police appointment.
Initially, the Discord channel, Koan says, arose because of chaos but it helped them organise themselves. “People were scattered on every social media platform, and on the ground,” he says.
“The Discord server streamlined discussions so that people on the ground can get announcements based on their location.”
This group has since published a public manifesto called ‘Reform Nepal’, which is now open for public consultation and is undergoing legal and constitutional review. This proposal focuses on decentralisation of power, wealth disclosures by all politicians, transformation in education, and banning political affiliations in student politics, among others.
Nepal’s ruling class once comprised a monarchy that lasted roughly 240 years. This was followed by shaky, successive governments that did little to reform the country. Citizens paid the price of political instability and weak governance for years as corruption scandals exacerbated the wealth gap.
The Himalayan nation is one of the poorer nations in South Asia with a GDP of $42.91 billion (as of 2024) and the country ranks 107 out of 180 in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. The hashtag #nepokids during the ongoing protests highlighted the vast disconnect the young generations feel with the political elites and their children. The average monthly income in Nepal is $123 per capita. The richest 10 percent of Nepalis have more than 26 times the wealth of the poorest 40 percent, according to the non-partisan think tank Nepal Economic Forum.
Nepal’s current political crisis, says Narayan Adhikari, the co-founder and South Asia director of Accountability Lab, isn’t an overnight outburst of anger. Young people have long been left out of political decisions, processes, and outcomes. In Nepal, people in the age group of 16-40 constitute 40 percent of the population, but make up only 11.6 percent of the country’s parliament.
“We’ve been ruled by kleptocrats who captured politics and state machinery, and siphoned off resources especially in the last 15 years,” Adhikari says. “Young people understand why they’re left out, why they’re poor, why they’re uneducated. They see the lives of their peers who come from wealthy families – the nepo babies – on social media. They channeled their anger into this new way of thinking that they can fight for what they deserve.”
However, Nepal’s youth are not alone in thinking this way, says Adhikari, adding, “Young people are leading the change across the world. Nepali youth see it on social media. It’s inspiring them.”
Koan reaffirms this.
“I speak for the majority of us when I say that our movement is technically inspired by movements in South and Southeast Asia,” he says. “A lot of countries have seen a lot of turmoil. Nepal started on a similar level. We knew the government was corrupt and that things weren’t going well for the last 20 years. We needed to stand up.”
A Deepening Divide
The Asia-Pacific region is home to 60 percent of the world’s adolescent and youth population but they’re increasingly getting left out of jobs, education, and seemingly optimistic economic growth in their own countries.
This region holds 35.9 percent of the global wealth, according to the Global Wealth Report 2025. However, the distribution is disproportionate due to inherent and a colonial legacy of corruption, nepotism and cronyism, thereby giving rise to a class of billionaires who “took” – not earned – wealth through these measures, according to a January 2025 report by Oxfam International titled ‘Takers, Not Makers’.
The world’s billionaire wealth has risen three times faster in 2024 than 2023, the report adds, but the number of people living in poverty – an estimated 3.6 billion people – hasn’t changed since 1990.
At this juncture, young people are finding ways to break out of the rigged system.
“The young people [in Asia] are unhappy with what the future looks like. There is deep insecurity,” Meenakshi Ganguly, the deputy director of Asia Division, Human Rights Watch, says. “In almost all these cases [of protests across Asia], the trigger was different but the underlying concerns are very similar. And in almost all these cases, it was also because of authoritarian actions by the state.”
As young people in Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka occupied the streets, their voices were uniformly met with violent repressive tactics by the state machinery. “Protests can be peaceful,” continues Ganguly. “But it translates into anger because of security forces abuses, which happens when the forces believe they have the protection of the state.”
Indonesia, Thailand, and the Arab Spring protests are other such examples. The Arab Spring protests that spread across the Arab world in the 2010s were in response to growing corruption and economic stagnation.
The protests that began in Indonesia on August 25 were a part of one of the 14 mass demonstrations that happened between October 2024 and September 2025. A 2025 Indonesia Inequality Report by Center of Economic and Law Studies states that the wealth of 50 richest Indonesians is equal to the total wealth of 50 million Indonesians.
The outrage over parliamentarians’ perks – which was nearly 10 times the minimum wage in Jakarta – snowballed after a police car killed a 21-year-old motorcycle taxi driver, Affan Kurniawan. Many protesters torched and looted politicians’ homes, revealing tangible evidence of disproportionate wealth.
Rebecca (uses only her first name), who works with a youth-focused non-profit called Pamflet Generasi (or “Pamphlet Generation”) in Jakarta, says she experienced wealth gap first-hand while growing up in north Jakarta, which is economically poorer than the south, and is also at the forefront of submergence due to a combination of climate change and groundwater extraction.
Indonesia is the world’s third-largest democracy, where political dynasties have held key political positions since independence in 1948. President Probowo Subianto, who was elected last year, himself has personal links to former President and dictator Suharto. Last year, he called the process of democracy “really very, very tiring…[and] very, very messy and costly.”
Disquiet in the Neighbourhood
Thousands of miles away in Bangladesh, the 2024 student uprising ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina accusing her of nepotism, corruption, and crushing dissent and opposition. During the protests, an estimated 1,400 people died — vast majority reportedly shot by security forces — in a span of 46 days. Now on a run for over a year, Hasina faces several charges, including by her country’s International Crimes Tribunal, which she established in 2010.
Students atop former prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s official residence. Photo: Sajib Hasan
Students atop former prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s official residence. Photo: Sajib Hasan
Interestingly, global consulting firms and economic surveys consistently hailed the nation of 170 million people as one of the fastest-growing consumer markets in Asia. But a recent white paper published by the interim government revealed it might all just be falsehoods.
Last year, the governor of Bangladesh’s central bank claimed that $17 billion was siphoned off in 15 years under Hasina. A 2023 government data shows that the wealthy 10 percent controlled 40 percent of the nation’s income in 2022, while the bottom 5 percent received only 0.37 percent.
“In Asian countries, whatever progress has been made, the benefits have not been shared equally because of the political and state capture of institutions,” Fahmida Khatun, the executive director of Centre for Policy Dialogue, a think tank in Bangladesh, tells Asian Dispatch.
She says that while there was economic stability, low inflation, export income and remittances helped with forex reserves, this didn’t meet the basic requirements of the citizens such as employment. “In fact, towards the end of the previous regime, the economy had essentially crumbled.”
Ganguly adds that social media, in this scenario, prised open the facade of development across these countries. “In a generation where a lot of people live their lives on social media, that disparity becomes even more glaring. Politicians cannot point to stock markets or some growth rate because that doesn’t translate to lived experiences of the people,” she adds.
While Bangladesh is still negotiating changes within an interim government, Sri Lanka provides lessons in rebuilding the country after kicking out its populist President Gotabaya Rajapaksa during the 2022 “Aragalaya” – Sinhalese for “The Struggle” – movement.
Mostly led by young people, the movement blamed the Rajapaksa family, who have been entrenched in the political class for decades, for the economic crisis, and accused them of siphoning off $18 billion from the country.
Amid food, fuel, and medicine shortages, citizens braved violent repression by security forces and forced Rajapaksa to resign and flee the country overnight. A 2024 polling by the Institute for Health Policy shows that 92 percent of Sri Lankans believe the income gap in the country has widened in the last decade.
Since the uprising, though the Rajapaksas are back, the country voted for left-leaning Anura Kumara Dissanayake as its new president last year. Many see it as a refreshing outcome of the 2022 movement.
Thisara Anuruddha Bandara, who ran a Facebook group called “GoHomeGota2022” during the movement and also faced arrests in 2022 for his activism, says that the Aragalaya movement succeeded in having its popular demands met to a large extent.
“In a country where historically peoples’ uprisings have been suppressed, we could end with a victorious outcome.” However, he adds, the movement couldn’t completely overhaul the political system. “We think that within the limitations of a public force and a movement, we accomplished the maximum possible tasks. However, many tasks still remain to be accomplished in the future.”
The Hashtag Generation
If #NepoBabies were at the heart of Nepal’s recent protests, in Sri Lanka, it was #GoHomeGota. In Indonesia, it was #PolisiPembunuhRakyat, which translates to #PoliceThePeopleKiller alongside a parallel social media movement that spread across Southeast Asian countries calling for “SEAblings” – or SEA siblings i.e. Southeast Asian brotherhood.
In Bangladesh, the digital mobilisation stood against 22 days of internet blackouts, curfews, and military crackdowns, during which VPN usage shot by by 5,016 percent and young Bangladeshis increasingly released rap and memes to express their discontent against authoritarianism. Digital rights platform AccessNow called 2024 the “worst year” for internet shutdowns.
In Nepal, Koan says that while social media helped unify everyone, it also opened them up to pro-government trolls. Last week, when Koan and Sah started a Google Doc to start putting together a list of proposed reforms, “malicious actors” infiltrated the document. “There was a lot of vandalism on the document itself,” he says.
Human Rights Watch calls digital repression and violence a violation of fundamental rights, which disproportionately hurt vulnerable communities.
“We’ve been concerned about instigation of violence and targeting of minorities that happens on social media, especially in mob violence like we saw in Myanmar and Sri Lanka,” Ganguly says. “At the same time, social media is the driver to create collective moves in situations where protests build up, as it’s happened in Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. Information is also more transparent here.”
Rebecca of Pamflet Generasi says that the internet is instrumental in the political awakening of the younger generation, where they express both rage as well as empathy and solidarity.
However, she points out that social media doesn’t represent communities from all socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. This, according to her, resulted in Indonesia not seeing any reformative changes.
We are stuck in a cycle of collective rage and frustration. The middle class and the privileged people feel good enough that they have acted upon the inequalities [online] while the vulnerable and marginalised keep living with injustice everyday. – Rebecca, Pamflet Generasi
Back in Nepal, Usha Mahato, a 28-year-old nurse, adds that for many Nepalis, especially those in the remote corners, the internet is a lifeline. She works in a government hospital in the agrarian province of Gandaki, located in central-western Nepal, and says that eight years ago when she was deployed in a remote location, she relied on the internet for upskilling, seeking information about scholarships, and connecting with medical professionals.
“It [The internet] provides young people with a platform to connect, learn, grow, and be seen. It’s a bridge to a brighter future,” she adds. Lack of domestic opportunities forced over 227,000 unskilled Nepali workers to leave the country last year for jobs, Nepal’s official estimates say.
“For over three decades, we’ve faced political instability, often led by a small group of ageing politicians, many of whom are not highly educated or capable,” adds Mahato. “The long-term development of our country depends on the active participation of its younger generation.”
Building the Future, Collectively
Koan and Sah, the two members of Nepal’s Discord group, say that the protests were just the tip of the iceberg. There, now, lies the formidable task of rebuilding a country.
While these protests were largely dubbed as ‘Gen Z’ protests, people like Aradhana Gurung, a 45-year-old development professional in Nepal, supported the negotiations as a governance expert.
“I’m 45. My mother is 78. I have a 13-year-old child. When [the Gen Z protesters] reached out to me last week, I saw the need to focus on the future for all of us,” she says.
Gurung says she was a part of student protests during the decade-long armed conflict between the monarchy and Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), but in those days they didn’t have the tools like the ones that this generation has and even the support from their older generations was missing.
The 45-year-old says that now the group will work towards making their reform manifesto inclusive and accessible to everyone. “We’re making an effort to get these conversations to the communities at the local level and collect feedback,” she says. “This manifesto is not perfect but it’s a start, and we want people to critique and challenge it. This is big and we want to think of a big and bold future.”
Down south in Sri Lanka, Bandara says that the support of civil society organisations, intellectuals, trade unions, and farmers’ organisations, among others, was critical in making the Aragalaya movement a success. “While we can expect some short-term results – such as replacing individuals, appointing more responsible individuals who can perform their duties better, and initiating a new process – we can only achieve a long-term solution with a sustained commitment,” says Bandara.
Bandara says his political arrest in 2022 – which he labels as an abduction since the police didn’t inform his family of his whereabouts – resulted in him pursuing law and becoming an election observer in his country along with other Asian countries including Indonesia and Nepal. “This exposure has allowed me to create regional and global networks,” he adds. “Based on these experiences, we continue to strive to advance social pressure groups, organise them, and provide the necessary pressure and intervention to keep up the civic activism.”
Across Asia, student protests have been a foundational basis of the region’s politics. “In Bangladesh, it was so in the 1960s, for our language movement, or 1970s for independence, or even in the 1990s, in the context of removing the army general in power,” says Khatun, the economist. “[Young people] facilitated the fall of regimes and brought in new chapters in our history. But this time was different. While in the past, students went back to their educational institutions after the movement was complete, this is the first time when students wanted their share in power.”
After taking positions in the interim government, young Bangladeshis have now launched a new political party. As Bangladesh hurtles towards the first general elections since the uprising, in February 2026, Khatun says that young revolutionaries should remember that interim government is just that – temporary.
“Interim arrangement should focus on institutional strengthening through reforms, which in itself is a continuous process,” she says. “Rather than opening it up on every front, just focus on crucial agendas. That is easier to follow through and implement and then quickly follow up with elections.”
Bangladesh’s fragile economy, which was once a $416-billion one, is slowly picking up as it receives millions in bailouts. The interim government is particularly focusing on reforms, particularly in banking, governance, and electoral sectors.
Rebecca from Indonesia says that the recent youth movements have ushered many young people into politics. Calling this a significant step, she says that the education system needs to go beyond assessing the political participation of the younger generation by the number of the voters and voter turnout. She suggests defining it through voicing of political opinions, volunteering with civic and political authorities, solidarity with all classes and so on.
“However, we have to critically ask if the participation is meaningful and inclusive (or at least, representing the diversity of youth’s identity),” she says. “The [prevalent political] system has made only certain groups of young people in the formal political arena: Those with higher degree, with connections, or with social power (i.e. influencer/celebrity). Most of the young people we met through our work in Pamflet Generasi are already fed up with formal politics, which is influenced by a feudal culture.”
At the moment, Nepal is struggling with economic blows particularly from the tourism sector, which contributes eight percent to the country’s GDP. Adhikari says that maintaining law and order is also critical to the safety of citizens right now. “The priority,” he says, “is to have a strong interim government that maintains law and order, and builds trust as the country plans its new elections, while also maintaining international relations and geopolitical order.”
Khatun adds that reforms are a continuous process. “One or two elections wouldn’t change this culture. It’s an iterative process,” she says. “If we can install a cycle of good elections, that would be our checks and balances and it would facilitate the delivery of the government’s commitments to their people.”
*The person’s name has been changed to protect their identity, upon their request.
Pallavi Pundir is an independent journalist from India who covers the intersections of politics and identity across South and Southeast Asia.
