The Gen Z movement changing a country with memes and mass marches
Devendra Nath Mahto had not eaten for 16 days. The 33-year-old student leader from the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand was on hunger strike over alleged rigged government job exams, calling for an independent inquiry.
By 10 August, his fast had left him so weak that he was taken to hospital in the state capital, Ranchi. But he remained defiant. “I would rather die than step back,” he told reporters. On Tuesday, he won. The government agreed to cancel the exams, and Mahto broke his fast.
It was the latest victory in a wave of youth revolts sweeping Asia, movements that have toppled governments from Bangladesh to Nepal. India’s moment came this summer when the Cockroach Janta Party — its name a defiant answer to a judge’s reported jibe that jobless graduates bred like the insects — grew from an online joke into a national campaign.
On 20 July, its supporters marched on parliament in Delhi, where police met them with baton charges and tear gas. They demanded the resignation of the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s most senior figures. Five days later, he stepped down.
Victory brought a reckoning. Within days, the government detained hundreds of students in the poor northern state of Bihar alone, some charged with attempted murder, and the movement’s account was blocked on X on national-security grounds.
But the same anger surfaced in deprived states like Jharkhand, where thousands of students and job-seekers marched on the state assembly over alleged cheating and leaked papers in exams run by two state bodies that recruit for coveted government posts. They encountered tear gas, water cannon and batons, with police saying some had broken through the barricades. The clashes injured officers and protesters alike, and a police case named hundreds of unnamed people.
India has the world’s largest youth population, and millions compete for a shrinking pool of secure state jobs, because private work is largely informal and insecure. A government post means a guaranteed wage, a pension and a step up the social ladder that money alone cannot buy. For many young people from poor or lower-income families in Jharkhand, a government job is not simply another career option; it is seen as one of the few stable and secure ways to lift an entire family out of financial hardship.
Ajay Kumar, 28, said he had spent five years studying in Ranchi, with his father sending him the equivalent of £75 a month. He said he was protesting because the state government “recruit only their people”, claiming people were paying tens of thousands of pounds to secure jobs.
Another demonstrator, Prakash Kumar, said he wanted to find out: “Who is responsible for ruining our lives?”
Manoj Yadav, 45, added: “The system is corrupt … It has gone on for 20 years. I went to jail fighting for justice.”
So why has this generation proved so hard to stop? Its movements are leaderless, online and hard to head off: arrest one organiser and ten more are trending by morning. They have turned concerns about job exams in one state into a universal argument about fairness, pulling in the anxious middle class. They move faster than any ministry can. And they now have a record of winning, and each victory emboldens the next.
It fits into a broader pattern across the Global South. In Bangladesh in 2024, protests over government-job quotas forced prime minister Sheikh Hasina, in power for 15 years, to flee. In Nepal in 2025, a youth revolt against corruption and a social-media ban toppled the government in days. In Kenya, Gen Z protesters forced President William Ruto to drop a finance bill in 2024. Similar movements shook governments in Indonesia, Madagascar and Peru across 2025.
Back in Ranchi, three hunger strikers, including Mahto, ended their fasts this week when Jharkhand’s chief minister, Hemant Soren, said the government had decided to cancel a flagship exam and recruitment tests run by a private contractor “one of the major demands of the protesting students”.
The students called off a mass march on Soren’s home planned for Thursday.
But Soren refused their other key demand, a national inquiry run by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), and insisted the state’s investigation would continue.
The organisers say their protest is paused, not over.