For a Gen Z Revolt, Pakistan Needs a Cause, Not a Captain

The resignation of India’s Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on July 25 was the first real concession Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has made to street protesters in several years.

The protests were spearheaded by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), an online satirical initiative of Abhijeet Dipke. It was a response to a comment by Chief Justice Surya Kant, who described unemployed youth who “attack everyone” online as cockroaches. The CJP attracted a million sign-ups online and went on to draw youth to Jantar Mantar. But the movement it spurred was not about Dipke.

What galvanized the sit-in was the corruption that manifested in leaked question papers for the NEET medical exam, youth frustration over the sense of a rigged system, and joblessness. Police brutality, which India’s Gen Z put on display in reels and videos, catalyzed the mass rage with the Modi government.

These reels reached Karachi and Lahore within the hour. And then came the inevitable question: after Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and now India, where is Pakistan’s Gen Z revolt?

The question deserves to be taken seriously. Many may argue that the missing ingredient in Pakistan is anger, or nerve, or a leader whom young people can rally behind. Pakistan has all three in surplus.

What it lacks is a cause that unites Pakistanis across ethnic, political, and provincial lines.

Look at South Asia’s four recent Gen Z uprisings. Colombo in 2022 rose over empty fuel pumps and dark houses, and for the first time brought Sinhalese and Tamils, unions and students, the devout and the secular, into a single crowd. It had no leader and wanted none. Dhaka in 2024 began as a fight over a civil service job quota and, once the shooting started, coalesced into one powerful goal to oust Sheikh Hasina, which happened on August 4, 2024. Youth in Kathmandu burned their parliament building and media houses in September 2025 over corruption and a social media ban. They forced Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli out of power within two days.

Not one of these Gen Z revolts was a fan club. Not one was built around a politician. They were unified not by a blueprint for tomorrow, but by a breaking point with today.

Of the four Gen Z protests, Nepal’s was the most significant. That leaderless movement did not merely topple a government. Six months later it walked into an election and handed 182 of 275 seats to the Rastriya Swatantra Party, whose figurehead, the rapper-turned-Kathmandu mayor, Balen Shah, beat the once-powerful Oli in the latter’s stronghold. Frustration with the old guard that began in the street ended at the ballot box. It converted street power into a democratic win.

Pakistan has witnessed countless protests and agitations, some that even took on the country’s powerful military.

Indeed, in recent years, massive protests led by the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) have roiled Pakistan, but without success. This is because they are organized around an individual: Imran Khan. An immensely popular former captain of Pakistan’s cricket team, Khan formed the PTI and was Pakistan’s prime minister from August 2018 until April 2022

Khan rode to power with support from Pakistan’s all-powerful military, but fell afoul of the generals in late 2021. He was ousted from office through a parliamentary vote of no-confidence in April 2022.

Khan’s brief initial detention triggered widespread political unrest and then violent protests in May 2023. Violence targeting the military came in handy for the generals to crack down on Khan’s supporters. He was formally arrested and imprisoned in August 2023 and remains behind bars following convictions in multiple legal cases involving corruption and state secrets. Khan and his party contend that these charges are politically motivated to block his political comeback.

The PTI-led protests demanding that Khan be set free are built on an individual, and have been very different than the recent Gen Z protests built on shared grievance.

While a cause can build coalitions, a politician can be divisive. “The economy has collapsed” implicates a whole country and can hold together people who agree on nothing else. “Free Imran Khan,” in contrast, implicates one half of the country and repels the other.

That distinction is pertinent to the Pakistani context. Youth respond to every mobilization already sorted into camps: Youthia, Patwari, or Jiyala, which are slang terms for die-hard supporters of Imran Khan’s PTI, Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N, and Bilawal Bhutto’s PPP, respectively.

Whether the issue is a leaked exam, power cuts, or economic privation, each is refracted through the bitter, zero-sum political rivalry and tribalism among dominant political factions.

Khan has been in Adiala jail since August 2023, and sentenced again on December 20 of that year to 17 years in prison. His solitary confinement has been flagged by the U.N.’s special rapporteur on torture, and denied by the Pakistani government.

Despite being Pakistan’s most popular leader, however, Khan cannot form the center of a movement. His young supporters do not want a system repaired; they simply want a man released.

In November 2024, thousands of Khan’s supporters broke through containers and reached the edge of Islamabad’s D-Chowk. But a midnight operation by the state jailed hundreds of people. Even that protest’s larger slogans regarding the stolen mandate and the constitutional amendment rode entirely on Khan’s name. A mobilization whose single demand is the freedom of one jailed man can be beaten by keeping him jailed, which is exactly what the state did.

To be sure, Pakistan has several issue-first movements. The Baloch Yakjehti Committee that Mahrang Baloch leads organizes around the issue of enforced disappearances rather than partisan loyalties. The Pashtun rights marches, the Aurat March, the lawyers who once faced down Gen. Musharraf – none of them was a fan club.

But each of them soon hits a ceiling that the Delhi protests did not. They are read as ethnic, or provincial, or feminist, or foreign-sponsored, and limited before they can attain national salience.

The Pakistani state prefers it this way, of course. For instance, Karachi’s grievances were folded into the Mohajir Qaumi Movement and delegitimized as foreign-sponsored. National fury at the Sharif and Bhutto dynasties was muted by its association with Khan as the agent of change.

A cause cannot be contained the same way, so the establishment survives by encouraging this sort of personality politics. Today the PTI draws off nearly all the political oxygen in the country, leaving little for any other issue.

What has helped the establishment is a ban on student unions imposed by Gen. Zia-ul-Haq in 1984 that has never been lifted. A 1993 court ruling locked the ban in place, along with the affidavit that students and a parent must still sign, swearing off politics as the price of admission.

Bangladesh’s revolt was launched by a non-partisan student platform. Sri Lanka’s grew from a leaderless citizens’ movement. Nepal’s was driven by a generational mobilization that crossed party lines. Pakistan, on the otheer hand, dismantled its own independent student unions 40 years ago and let nothing grow in its place. Meanwhile, its political parties are merely vehicles for personalities.

The wall is not without a crack. Hamza Khawaja, a law graduate from Lahore University of Management Sciences, has petitioned the Supreme Court to restore the unions and strike down the pledge requirement for university admissions, and the court has put the government on notice to answer. Its outcome may not be as swift as mobilized action by a crowd, but it is the rare Pakistani fight waged over a system rather than in support of an individual savior.

When young Pakistanis stop introducing themselves as Youthia or Patwari or Jiyala, and start identifying themselves as unemployed, overcharged, or simply students – that is, when they define themselves by a condition they share rather than a leader they follow – the street will come to their support.