From Dhaka to Delhi, why Gen Z movements are about jobs, not ideology

A digital communications strategist named a satirical party after an insect that survives anything you throw at it, to protest a justice's insulting remarks. Weeks later, that party's followers were being tear-gassed outside India's parliament, demanding the resignation of a cabinet minister.

The Cockroach Janta Party, born online in May, has by late July turned Delhi's Jantar Mantar into the site of India's most sustained youth uprising in years. Its single demand is narrow: it wants Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign over the leak of this year's NEET medical entrance exam question papers. 

Its energy, though, is anything but narrow. 

Activist Sonam Wangchuk has been on hunger strike at the site for weeks. Farmers, lawyers and even children of ruling-party leaders have joined in. Police have used tear gas and baton charges to disperse marchers trying to reach parliament.

On the surface, this is a protest about one exam and one minister. Underneath, it is something bigger and eerily familiar to anyone who watched Bangladesh's July Uprising unfold two years earlier. And not just Bangladesh. It's happening all across the world.

So the question has arisen: Is this, once again, a story about jobs, or is it a story about ideology?

The exam was never just an exam

For a country producing millions of graduates every year, an entrance exam is not a bureaucratic footnote; it is one of the last remaining doors into a formal, stable livelihood. When that door is rigged, the anger is not academic.

The numbers explain why the anger runs so deep. 

According to the State of Working India 2026 report by Azim Premji University, the share of graduates among India's unemployed youth rose from 46% in 2017 to 67% in 2023. Less than half of all graduates in the country report having any work at all, and barely one in 15 holds a permanent, salaried job. 

India's youth unemployment rate (ages 15–29) climbed to 15.2% by March 2026, with women bearing a sharply higher burden than men. Roughly five million graduates enter the job market every year; only around 2.8 million find any employment at all.

Arka Bhaduri, an Indian journalist and executive editor at The International and The Hammer magazines, says the NEET leak was simply the spark.

"Unlike Bangladesh's quota reform movement, this was not directly a movement demanding employment," he told TBS. "However, in a broader sense, because the controversy centred on the NEET examination, it was ultimately about employment and opportunities."

He points to a second, quieter driver: time.

"When Narendra Modi first came to power in 2014, a child who was five years old is now 17 and old enough to participate in these protests," Bhaduri said. For a large share of young Indians, the Modi government is the only one they have ever consciously known, and when they struggle to find work, it is the only government they know to blame.

A pattern that keeps repeating itself

Widen the lens, and India stops looking like an exception.

In Bangladesh, the July Uprising of 2024 grew out of a quota system that reserved a third of civil service jobs along non-merit lines at a time when graduate underemployment was running above 40%. 

In Nepal, a social media ban lit the fuse in September 2025. But it was the youth unemployment exceeding 20% that sustained that fire. And in a country where nearly 840,000 young people left for foreign labour markets in a single year and remittances make up a third of GDP, things had an explosive ending. 

In Peru, a regressive pension reform triggered the Bicentennial Protests in a country where the share of young workers holding jobs that lack legal regulation, written contracts and social safety nets runs as high as 83%, and up to 96% in rural areas. 

In Morocco, official youth unemployment sits at 35.8%; in Indonesia, a housing-allowance hike for MPs collided with a currency slide and fuel-price hikes to bring students back onto the streets. And in all these cases, the protests were violent and driven mostly by Gen Z.

Even the imagery has become shared property. We have seen similarities in the language used by protesters in both Dhaka and Delhi. We have seen protesters from Kathmandu to Jakarta to Lima wave the "Jolly Roger" straw-hat flag from the manga One Piece as an anti-corruption symbol.

This is a detail that researchers at the Carnegie Endowment note is real, even as they caution against reading too much unity into it. Their Global Protest Tracker data shows youth-led unrest in 2025 was significant but not unprecedented; similar rates were recorded between 2017 and 2019. What is different this time, analysts at the World Economic Forum argue, is the scale of the mismatch between education and opportunity.

Across Asia, youth unemployment runs two to three times higher than the national average, and in India, government data shows barely 2.3% of workers have any formal skill training, against 75% in Germany and 96% in South Korea.

An Ipsos global survey cited by researchers tracking these movements found that 68% of respondents worldwide believe the economy is rigged in favour of the wealthy, a sentiment researchers say explains roughly a third of the recent global surge in populist politics.

Unlike the great ideological revolutions of the past, these movements are not driven by a coherent political ideology. Scholars have coined the term 'revolutions without revolutionaries' to describe them. Their only unifying ideology is what might be called the ideology of opposition.

Dr Asif Shahan, Professor, Development Studies, DU

Revolutions without revolutionaries

Asif Shahan, professor at the Department of Development Studies at the University of Dhaka, places these movements in what he calls the fourth generation of revolutionary theory, a pattern that also includes the Tulip Revolution, the Green Movement and the Arab Spring.

"Unlike the great ideological revolutions of the past, these movements are not driven by a coherent political ideology," he said. "Scholars have coined the term 'revolutions without revolutionaries' to describe them. Their only unifying ideology is what might be called the ideology of opposition."

That absence of ideology is, in his view, both a strength and a ceiling. It lets people of very different political persuasions unite around a single grievance, and it makes the decision-making structure of these movements far more decentralised. But it also means the movements rarely aim at — or achieve — the deep, class-based social transformation that revolutions were once defined by.

"At best, it could lead to a change of government or even a change of regime," Shahan said of the Indian case. "I do not think it is likely to achieve much beyond that."

What ties all of them together, in his reading, is not ideology but legitimacy; specifically, what happens when a government tries to substitute one kind of legitimacy for another.

"We often distinguish between two types of legitimacy: input-oriented and output-oriented," he explained. "Input-oriented legitimacy comes from the democratic process itself; output-oriented legitimacy comes from performance and delivery.

"What often happens is that governments undermine input-oriented legitimacy while relying increasingly on output-oriented legitimacy to some extent; that is precisely what the Awami League attempted to do," Shahan added.

The danger, he said, is what happens when performance itself starts to fail. "Citizens may tolerate restrictions on democratic rights for some time, but once the government also fails to deliver economically, public frustration intensifies. The accumulated grievances over declining economic performance merge with existing political discontent, producing a much broader wave of popular anger."

Is India different?

Bhaduri, for his part, is careful not to overstate the parallel with Bangladesh, Nepal or Sri Lanka. "India has undoubtedly become more authoritarian," he said, pointing to a weakened Election Commission and a judiciary that produced the phrase "caged parrot" in public discourse. But he stops short of calling the current unrest a mass uprising in the mould of Dhaka or Kathmandu.

"I would not describe it as the kind of popular uprising witnessed in Bangladesh, Nepal or Sri Lanka. Rather, I see it as a large-scale democratic mass movement," he said. "Despite all its shortcomings, India still has a functioning democratic framework. Elections continue to take place regularly. I can severely criticise the Modi government and still remain outside prison."

The economics underneath it all

Strip away the flags, the slogans and the satire, and a single thread runs through Delhi's Jantar Mantar, Dhaka's July streets, Kathmandu's burning ministries and Lima's university gates: a generation that did everything it was told to — study, get a degree, wait its turn — only to find the job market locked against it anyway.

Bhaduri, describing himself as a Marxist, puts it plainly, "Economic conditions remain the fundamental driving force in any society, even where other grievances — corruption, repression, and the labelling of dissent as anti-national — add fuel to the fire."

And the rising Gen Z movements worldwide continue to point in the same direction. Ideology may supply the slogans. 

Increasingly, it is unemployment that supplies the crowd. And it is going to be the challenge for every government, democratic or authoritarian, in the days to come.