Asia’s Restless Generation

From India to Indonesia and Vietnam, Gen Z is testing the limits of power, accountability and public dissent.

The Jantar-Mantar agitation in New Delhi between June and July 2026 was largely participated in and handled by Gen Z. Many had travelled from outside Delhi to participate, and it had echoed in some other cities like Mumbai. It was triggered by youth anger caused primarily by the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) paper leak and other irregularities, and was targeted at the then Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, demanding his resignation. Pradhan, after much hesitation and mediation by a few fellow ministers, finally submitted his resignation. Some analysts were commenting on this unrest as being a cascading South Asian phenomenon, first appearing in Sri Lanka in 2022, followed by Bangladesh in 2024, and then by Nepal in 2025. They, referring to the regime change that followed post agitations in all these three countries, predicted similar situation developing in India too this year, which however did not happen.

Stifled Expression

It would be interesting to have a look at the scene in Southeast Asia that possesses a cultural connection figuratively with South Asia, specifically with India. A long shot view of the Southeast Asian region informs us about a general lack of space for public expression. In the mainland sub-region, India’s immediate neighbour Myanmar has long been under military rule, where the military is busy fighting its own citizens tooth and nail. Lao PDR and Vietnam are under a single party communist rule, ruling the possibility out. Cambodia has a show of a democracy, not a real one. The only one that stands a little apart is Thailand, where the show of democracy is more spacious, and as a result, the world has seen few public agitations in the past, the last and major one being in 2020. In the maritime sub-region, the picture is more democratic. Although Singapore too has a show of a democracy, it also has a track record of good governance. Brunei is an Islamic Sultanate under a hereditary monarchy. In short, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines are the ones where democracy thrives, which provides scope for matters of public expression.

At this backdrop, we notice two cases of the above South Asian genre, one each from the mainland and the maritime pars of the region. The mainland springs up a surprise actually, in the example of Vietnam. Despite the authoritarian regime, where prosecution of protesters for ‘disturbing public order’ is routine, the Gen Z somehow engineered a way to express their feelings about the cause against the high-handedness of the powerful and those in power. The anger kept suppressed for a year or so was about a road accident in May 2025, where a BMW driven by a former Deputy Head of the National Assembly had bumped off a two-wheeler riding father-daughter duo, which had caused the daughter’s death a few days later, and that ‘powerful’ driver had gone scot-free. The trigger was however provided in August 2026 when country’s Culture Minister, who happens to be the wife of that ‘powerful BMW driver’, arbitrarily decided to ban a popular rapper’s album. Vietnamese youth could not take all this coming from the same family, and started agitating in a unique manner, by marking the tree standing near the BMW accident spot as the place for offering tribute to the unfortunately dead girl, and thus indirectly highlighting the lack of justice in the system as such.

In the maritime Southeast Asia, Indonesia has been witnessing almost a year of protests intermittently. Although the situational triggers have been different from time to time, the underlying theme is the same – simmering and rising public frustration about the governance in general, and the style of functioning of the president in particular.

Soaring Unemployment

The mass feeling is about the worrisome economic situation, where unemployment is high, and the youth are slipping out in the neighbourhood and elsewhere in desperation for seeking employment. This being the background, the real cause of public anger is twofold – routinely experienced deep-rooted and broad-based corruption throughout the system, and wasteful expenditure by the government on its pet projects in the name of public welfare that cuts deeply through the budgets allocated for public expenditure. All this is topped up by the high-handed working of the police force, and the increasing involvement of the military in the civil duties of the government. The public agitations, where the Gen Z is of course at the forefront, involving the various universities’ students and their federations, had been rising by the day, which culminated in a grand show in the last week of August 2026, sending serious warning signals to the government to pull up its socks and start meaning business. A grave development was however noticeable, about the appearance of private mobs on the streets to intimidate the protesters, likening to the lathi-wielding people using them against the Jantar-Mantar protesters in Delhi, later explained by authorities as plain-clothes policemen. 

Be it India or Indonesia or Vietnam, the message comes out clear as the expression of restlessness of the people, led by Gen Z, supposedly bolder than the rest by all standards, about many things of public life going wrong, and their collective perception about either lack of or delay in doing justice on the part of the authorities. The respective scenarios may not be equally grim in comparison, both in the sense of governance-gaps and public reactions, but the feeling of frustration is real.

(The writer is a Ph.D. researcher in international relations. Views personal.)