On 24 September, Himal Southasian brought together four voices from the frontlines of these movements to examine what connects these uprisings—and what dangers lie ahead. The panellists were Pranaya Rana, editor of Kalam Weekly in Nepal; Ambika Satkunanathan, former Human Rights Commissioner of Sri Lanka (2015-2020); Zyma Islam, senior correspondent at the Daily Star in Bangladesh; and Harsh Mander, Indian peace activist and co-founder of Karwan-e-Mohabbat. The discussion, moderated by Roman Gautam, editor of Himal Southasian, revealed a pattern of anger without answers—and a dangerous vacuum that reactionary forces may fill.

The Unfinished Revolutions

In Sri Lanka, the promise of change has already begun to sour. After President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country in July 2022, the National People’s Power (NPP) swept to victory with a two-thirds parliamentary majority, riding a wave of hope. One year on, Ambika Satkunanathan reports widespread disillusionment.

“Many reforms that were promised, they’ve not begun the process of initiating them,” she explained. “Where corruption is concerned, we have seen many arrests—and I think that concern is quite a savvy response because for the public it’s also performance. But where, for instance, the repeal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act [2], the repeal of the Online Safety Act [3], where issues related to wartime violations are concerned, those really have not been implemented.”

The new government’s approach to power troubles her. “It seems that they are listening to the bureaucracy, which is still the same. They’re giving the same advice that they gave during the Rajapaksa regime,” Satkunanathan observed. Even former opposition politicians, once critics of authoritarian laws, now embrace them when in power. “Our current government, when it was in opposition, criticised the Online Safety Act. But now they do not want to repeal it, they only want to amend it.”

Bangladesh faces an even more precarious situation. Zyma Islam noted some successes—political parties are talking rather than fighting in the streets, a remarkable shift for a country where violent political conflict has been the norm. But darker currents are rising.

“We are seeing the far right becoming more empowered, getting more of a voice, conducting daily activities of violence, of aggression,” Islam warned. “This government is not able to handle that. Bangladesh has always been a very tolerant nation when it came to religion. Though we have a very large Muslim majority, we were still very tolerant.”

The interim government, meant to prepare for elections in February 2026, appears to have already ceded power. “This government seems like they’re being operated by the political party that is slated to come into power once we have the elections, which is the Bangladesh Nationalist Party,” Islam said. “Judges are being appointed based on the BNP’s recommendation, key government posts are being filled according to the BNP’s recommendation. Everyone knows who’s calling the shots.”

Most troubling is the abandonment of secularism. “Bangladesh was brought to reality as a secular nation, as a nation where secularism was enshrined in our constitution. And that’s something that we are going to be doing away with,” Islam explained. The political parties have agreed to replace secularism with “pluralism”—but in a Muslim-majority country, she fears this means unequal voices at the table.

In Nepal, the revolution is barely two weeks old. On 8-9 September 2025, protests against the government turned deadly when security forces killed 19 to 21 young demonstrators. The following day, protesters stormed and set fire to the executive building. An interim government led by former Chief Justice Sushila Karki now promises elections within six months.

Pranaya Rana describes a movement energised but directionless. “The movement has really rejected the political parties almost wholesale. And that is kind of problematic because we still remain a multi-party democracy and we cannot really have a democracy without political parties,” he said. The three main parties—Congress, the Unified Marxist Leninists, and the Maoists—“still do represent a fair chunk of the population. Perhaps maybe not the Gen Z, but they still have the people’s will.”

Some demands worry him. “There is a demand to get rid of federalism in Nepal,” Rana noted. “But is that something we should work towards? Because that federal demand was a Madheshi [4] demand. It came from the Terai Madhesh Plains, and many lives were lost getting federalism enshrined in the constitution.”

Neoliberalism’s Failure and the Rage of the Young

What connects these three countries? Harsh Mander sees a generation confronting the wreckage of broken promises.

“Young people today, by and large, are seeing no future for themselves,” Mander argued. “Jobs, decent work opportunities are very difficult to access. Public systems, public education, health care, are not functioning in the way they should. On the other hand, we’re seeing massive levels of inequality. In India, our levels of inequality today are greater than they were under British times.”

The model that promised prosperity has delivered oligarchy instead. “I think that we’re looking at the consequences of the failure of neoliberalism as a whole—the idea that with the opening up of our economies, great wealth will be produced, which it has, however, very unequally distributed, but also that jobs will be created in the millions and everyone would be better off. And I think that is a substantial failure.”

Ambika Satkunanathan agrees. “This is the outcome of the failure of neoliberalism. And whilst I am for burning things down that need to be burned down, what are we going to build? How are we going to rebuild it? And I think for that, you do need an ideological base. You do need a value base.”

The problem, she suggests, is that young people have never experienced real democracy—only its corrupted form. “All our countries, we say we’ve had a democracy, but it has really not been a democracy. It’s been an electoral authoritarianism in a way. People cast their ballot, but have no understanding of what it means to be a citizen and to hold those in power accountable. And we view politicians as demigods and it is a culture of feudalism and patronage.”

For young people who only know this system, the conclusion seems obvious: democracy itself has failed. “They think that this is what democracy is, because this is what we know and therefore it does not work. We want something else. But what is the ’something else’? And have we actually experienced democracy as it is supposed to function?”

The Internet: Equaliser and Amplifier

Social media platforms have transformed protest in all three countries—but with contradictory effects. In Bangladesh, Zyma Islam explains, “This was a Facebook-led revolution, very similar to how Nepal’s was a Discord [5]-led revolution. Everything was done on Facebook.”

The internet has democratised voice in unprecedented ways. “What the internet does is that it equalises everyone’s voices,” Islam said. “Some young teenager from a far-off village in the northern part of Bangladesh who probably hasn’t even passed high school will not be able to reach a newspaper like the Daily Star. We—newspapers or the traditional media—ultimately do serve the centres of power.”

But there are dangers. “What democracy often means in countries like ours is that the loudest voice wins. And unfortunately, that’s almost always Muslim and male in a country like Bangladesh,” Islam warned. “When you’re running a government based on what’s more prominent on Facebook, if a certain idea is exploding on Facebook and you decide to translate that into real-life policy, that’s problematic because you’re not hearing from the quiet voices, from the women, from the religious minorities.”

In Sri Lanka, social media incubated resistance during the pandemic. “During the pandemic you saw people, especially young people, increasingly using social media because that was the only way to express, to get information,” Satkunanathan recalled. The #GoHomeGota hashtag that defined the Aragalaya began online.

But the internet’s role is double-edged. In India, Harsh Mander observes that social media channels rage into religious hatred. “Hate has become such an intoxicant,” he said. “Earlier, when we used to have incidents of mass communal violence, there used to be a moment and an explosion of hate. But here you don’t need that explosion because every time you open your phone, you get a new fix of hate.”

The Dangerous Vacuum

What troubles the panellists most is not what these movements have destroyed, but what might fill the void. Harsh Mander’s fear is visceral: “The anger and upsurge—very legitimate of young people against corruption and inequality—is only going to create a vacuum that is going to be filled with us moving our polities and our societies, much more dangerously than our polities, further and further to the far right, into religious fundamentalism, into ethnic hatred.”

He points to India’s history of anti-corruption movements that empowered the right. The JP movement [6] against Indira Gandhi’s Emergency brought the RSS [7] “out of the shadows” into government. The anti-corruption Anna Hazare movement [8] of 2011-12 “pushed civil society further and further to the right.”

Zyma Islam sees the same pattern emerging in Bangladesh. “These very high-voltage emotions that young people have about corruption, about state violence throughout Sheikh Hasina’s tenure—what it has done is that it’s channelled a lot of it into hate,” she said. “Whilst we’re talking about how to bring back money that was pilfered off to Dubai, whilst we’re talking about prosecuting the Awami League, whilst we’re talking about justice for the victims of the revolution, we are not necessarily talking as much about what we will look like as a society that was falling apart at the seams, that now needs to come back together again.”

In Nepal, Pranaya Rana worries about the interim cabinet’s composition: “filled with upper-caste men mostly.” The revolution’s spectacular moment—government buildings aflame—has overshadowed crucial questions of accountability. “What happened the day before on 8 September with the government that cracked down on this peaceful protest and shot 19 to 21 young Nepalis in cold blood, that is a conversation that we haven’t had yet—on holding these people responsible. The head of the police, the head of the armed police, they haven’t really been questioned over their roles in those killings.”

What Must Be Defended

Despite their critiques, all the panellists insist that certain gains must be protected—even as they are threatened by revolutionary fervour.

In Nepal, Rana argues, “The constitution that we have right now, no matter how flawed—and it is flawed—was promulgated in very dire circumstances. But right now there are demands from the young Nepalis to do away with the constitution and write a new one. I don’t think we should get into that process because that’s another whole new can of worms.”

The constitution, he notes, guarantees “secularism and federalism and inclusion and representation. These are all things that we should continue with, and we cannot just throw them all out because we do not like how they were being implemented or not implemented by the previous regime.”

Ambika Satkunanathan warns against the seduction of swift action. “Quick justice—that is not going to be justice, that will always be unjust. All these extralegal actions, they worry me because what they’re saying is that we don’t respect the rule of law. We think because we are better than the previous regime that we can do what we want outside the law. Actually, you can’t because what you’re doing is perpetuating the same culture of impunity and the refusal to be held accountable.”

The Work Ahead

During Sri Lanka’s 2022 protests, Satkunanathan and others organised “teach-outs”—public discussions in Galle Face and other protest sites where experts would lead activist discussions on issues like states of emergency or the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

The teach-outs were too small, too brief. But they point to what’s needed: sustained self-education in democratic values, dialogue across generations and communities, and most critically, an ideological foundation for what comes after.

Pranaya Rana emphasises the need for inclusive dialogue. Young protesters “need to talk with people outside of their immediate circles and maybe talk to men and women from different backgrounds and ethnicities and castes to make sure that the movement truly is inclusive and does not reinforce existing inequalities and hierarchies.”

Southasia at a Crossroads

As Roman Gautam noted in opening the discussion, “There are so many parallels between our countries and certainly there is nowhere near enough conversation on all of this.” The abuse of cybercrime laws, the failure to create decent work, the suffocating grip of oligarchic elites, the manipulation of religious and ethnic divisions—these bind Southasia together in crisis.

The young people who have risen up in Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka are right to be angry. They are right to demand better. But anger alone cannot build a just society. Without a clear vision of equality, without protection for minorities, without genuine democratic institutions, these revolutions risk becoming mere preludes to something worse.

“Their anger against what they’re opposed to, I think they’re reasonably clear about,” Harsh Mander said. “Their imagination of what we will replace this with is much, much less worked out.”

The danger is not just that the revolutions might fail. It’s that they might succeed in tearing down the old order—only to midwife something more authoritarian, more violent, more exclusive than what came before. In a region where democratic space is already shrinking, where religious majoritarianism is on the march, where hate politics finds eager audiences online, that danger is terrifyingly real.

The question facing Southasia’s youth movements is ultimately simple but profound: What future do you want to build? Until that question finds answers rooted in justice, equality, and inclusion—not just rage against corruption—the fires of revolt may light the way to deeper darkness.

Adam Novak