Nepal is in the grip of what is being described as a Gen Z uprising, where young people have thrown out a regime of corrupt politicians. On Indian social media, a predictable lament followed: Why does Gen Z in India never protest against corruption? 

What these naysayers don’t realise is that India has already staged its grand anti-corruption show. And it wasn’t led by restless 20-year-olds but by a man old enough to perform anulom vilom on a park bench. 

His name was Anna Hazare, who cosplayed Gandhi in the heart of Delhi, winning the devotion of the middle class. Hazare discovered the art of turning the body into ketosis as a protest long before Silicon Valley tech bros rebranded it as wellness.

On the Internet, Gen Z is shorthand for the youth who want something – nobody knows exactly what, not even them – and who are forever peering into a glorious future vacated by the millennials. 

What Gen Z wants is the great mystery of our age, a puzzle pursued alike by political strategists and social media marketers, both hoping to mine the subconscious of the young and sell them either slogans or sneakers.

But the term often misleads more than it explains. In India, the person sipping matcha at Starbucks is Gen Z, and so is the one dancing to Sapna Choudhary in Rohtak. To put them in the same bracket is to say nothing at all. Their lives have little in common beyond the accident of birth year. 

Yet in popular imagination, Gen Z is not a generation but a class costume.

There is the one who writes “tbh” instead of “to be honest,” and also the one who says “sun mere mitar” instead of “excuse me”. As a collective identity, Gen Z collapses under the weight of its own semiotic confusion.

So the idea that Gen Z in India never protests, that they are merely a lazy, privileged tribe of Netflix and chill people, is false. 

Across states, there are constant uprisings led by another variety of Gen Z, the ones who don’t live in fashionable neighbourhoods and are, in dull bureaucratic language, called “students”. Their rebellions are not against abstract evils but against paper leaks, exam delays, and recruitment scams, like the BPSC protests in Bihar or the NEET and SSC protests elsewhere. Another historical specimen of Gen Z-led protest in India was against the implementation of the Mandal Commission in 1990, which, depending on your political leaning, was either a “tragic farce” or an “unfinished revolution”.

India is too fractured by class and caste to ever rally behind a single cause.

What emerges instead is a scattered landscape of miniature protests, each reflecting its own taste of their caste and class. In October 2023, for example, a Bengaluru influencer marched into the streets with a flock of Swifties, staging a noisy campaign to bring Taylor Swift to India. They sang, they danced, they blocked traffic, until the police arrived and the revolution politely shifted to another lane.

Gen Z may be divided by identities and trigger points, but what unites them is their addiction to the Internet, which today is hardly even considered an insult. The Nepal uprising was born of this perpetual online existence, where one faction of Gen Z turned against another. The trending buzzword was “Nepo Baby,” as TikToks and reels showcased the extravagant lives of ministers’ and bureaucrats’ children. 

The irony was that nothing was really “exposed” and the evidence came directly from the privileged Gen Z’s social media feeds, who, like everyone else, were enslaved to the algorithm and the dopamine hit of a stranger typing in the comment section, “Omg you’re slaying in this dress”.

Little did they know that by flaunting their allegedly lavish lifestyles, they were slaying the peace of those who lacked the same access. The less privileged Gen Z seized these posts, sliced them into edits, and hurled them under the speeding truck of the algorithm. 

Their kids versus our kids. 

Soon the anger fused with other grievances against the state, and when the government tried the oldest trick in the book – something Ashok Gehlot in Rajasthan had once made a habit of – shutting down the internet. All hell broke loose from there on. 

The protest videos had a surreal quality. A boy lay in front of a moving truck, scrolling through memes as if the algorithm would shield him, and uploaded it with the caption: “Mogged down this government.” 

Another boy danced to a TikTok routine, his shoulders jerking to the beat while behind him an office block coughed black smoke into the sky. There were even drone shots which featured the wide, sweeping views of chaos. Edited with melancholic music, as though the revolution was seen through the eyes of a wedding videographer.

In all the chaos and absurdities, one thing the Nepal protest made clear is that power misread the internet. They assumed the young were too lazy, too lost in doomscrolling. What they failed to see is that even aimless scrolling can turn political. 

When enough discontent passes through a feed, it gathers weight, it finds a chorus, and it takes only one spark to set it ablaze. What looks like distraction can often be a rehearsal. The old men in charge still prepare for crowds on the street; they don’t realise the real uprising has now started to begin in the comment section.

In our time, the most valuable real estate is not land or institutions but the subconscious of the young. Everyone wants to build a house of narrative there, to replace what already exists with their own design. That is why the future looks messy: the old order is upside down, and the old logic cannot explain it. To understand where power now lives, one has to stop looking at the streets and start looking at the feed.

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