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Paper short abstract

Comparing Nepal and India’s borderlands, this paper revisits the “South Asian Spring,” showing how Gen-Z mobilisation diverges: centripetal anti-corruption protest in Nepal versus decentralised, autonomy-seeking movements in Assam and Ladakh shaped by precarity, ecology, and digital repertoires.

Paper long abstract

Recent debates on youth politics in South Asia have increasingly treated large-scale protests as evidence of a region-wide generational rupture. This paper challenges that reading by asking why similar Gen-Z grievances of economic precarity, corruption, and political exclusion generate sharply different forms of mobilisation across contexts. It revisits the “South Asian Spring” thesis through a comparative analysis of youth mobilisation in Nepal, where protests consolidated into a nationally coordinated anti-corruption movement, and in India’s political peripheries, where mobilisation has taken decentralised and autonomy-oriented forms, including youth assertions in Bodoland and Karbi Anglong in Assam and the climate and statehood movement in Ladakh.

The study draws on multi-sited ethnography and digital analysis of protest communication, combining interviews with movement leaders and activists with vernacular social media material. The analysis identifies a clear divergence in protest trajectories. In Nepal, mobilisation has been predominantly centripetal, oriented toward influencing or reforming the state centre. In contrast, mobilisation in India’s border regions is largely centrifugal, oriented toward autonomy from central authority.

The paper argues that this divergence is shaped less by the intensity of grievances than by differences in state incorporation capacity and centre–periphery relations. In peripheral settings, young actors rework longstanding claims for political recognition through a contemporary grammar of economic precarity, ecological stress, and unequal access to employment. Political stability in South Asia will hinge on the capacity of states to respond to enduring claims for dignity, livelihoods, and political recognition articulated through Gen-Z mobilisation beyond metropolitan centres.