I hope everyone’s following the incredible progress of the Cockroach Janta Party in India?
For the last four years, I’ve been devotedly following every single example of youth-led political protest going on around the world. Trust me: it’s the cheapest route to rejuvenation that I can offer older people ‘resigned’ (as they see it) to a slow but steady decline into varying shades of apocalyptic breakdown.
Wake up, all you old farts! We live in a world electrifyingly inspired by young people, and the least you can do is get your heads around the power of Gen Z revolutionaries.
Back to the cockroaches in India. Earlier in the year, India’s Chief Justice compared young people to “cockroaches” and “parasites”. An enterprising GenZ-er (Abhijeet Dipke) put out an outraged message on social media: “what if all we cockroaches came together?”. Within weeks, the Cockroach Janta Party CJP – taking the piss out of PM Modi’s BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) — had 22 million followers, more than the all-powerful BJP.
Scroll forward to right now: after weeks of protest against the wretchedly corrupt Ministry of Education, the CJP has now become the biggest threat to Modi’s entire wretchedly corrupt government. Tens of thousands of CJP protesters in Delhi are threatening the status quo in a way that promises…. well, revolution. It may not come to that. But it may. Either way, delight in it for what it is: prospective revolution. And don’t forget there are 600 million young people in India today.
And over the weekend, the CJP achieved a remarkable breakthrough in forcing the resignation of the Education Minister — which Modi vowed just a few days ago “would never happen”. So much for Modi’s much-heralded “invincibility”!
I can’t help but think the Cockroaches of India have themselves been massively inspired young people in Nepal.
Not many people noticed the earthquake in Nepal back in March — few countries, after all, are more earthquake-prone than Nepal. However, this one was a bit different – a political rather than a geological earthquake.
For the first time in more than 50 years, one party won enough seats (182 out of 275) to be able to form a government without going into coalition with any other party. That party was the Rastriya Swatantra Party , with its 35-year-old leader, Balendra Shah, rapper-turned-politician who had shot to fame back in 2022 in becoming the mayor of Kathmandu. In the March election, he beat the long-serving Prime Minister K.P.Sharma Oli by standing against him in his own seat.
The tremors that led to this seismic event started back in September 2025 when huge numbers of students took to the streets of Kathmandu to protest against the corruption and nepotism at the heart of Oli’s government — as well as its ill-advised ban on social media. At first, the protests were completely non-violent, but the government’s gratuitously violent response (more than 75 people were killed) turned protests into riot, with many government buildings severely damaged.
The government immediately resigned; a caretaker administration stepped in before the elections in March — and the ensuing electoral earthquake.
This is probably the best known of a wave of ‘Gen Z’ uprisings over the last few years, including the toppling of the tyrannical Sheikh Hasina’s government in Bangladesh in 2024. Sri Lanka’s government had gone the same way in 2022; Madagascar’s in 2025. In more than a dozen countries, demonstrations led by Gen Z protesters have forced governments to change key policies and personnel.
Gen Z (people born anywhere between 1997 and 2010) has been described as “the most educated, most underemployed, most apprehensive and most indebted”. A recent ‘youth bulge’ across much of the global south means that the population of many countries is heavily weighted to young people — 46% of the population in Nepal is below the age of 24. They have understandably high aspirations regarding their future, but many end up having to cope with extremely precarious working lives.
A combustible combination. And it seems highly likely that this all but guarantees future uprisings.
None of which comes as any surprise to me. Back in 2012, I wrote a book called ‘The World We Made’ looking forward to the year 2050, and in that I speculated about the likelihood that young people would eventually rise up against the continuing betrayal by older generations. This is what I wrote at that time:
“In July 2018, the Enough! movement exploded into life in France, the USA, India and Russia, and then went global. Huge numbers of young people were mobilised around a shared vision, with young people occupying government buildings, parliaments, stock exchanges, newspapers and TV companies, banks, oil and mining companies, town halls and civic centres — an irresistible tide of shared fury and compassion.
Chaos reigned for several months — at which point governments all around the world began to respond to those demands, pledging to introduce radical reforms on fair taxation, climate change and protection of the natural world. Some meant it and were almost grateful for the fresh start. Most didn’t — but it didn’t matter. Too high a price had been paid; too many young people had been mobilised to let things slide back”.
Well, that obviously didn’t happen in 2018, although we did see an explosion of concern amongst young people at that time, all around the world, with the Fridays for Future movement and the inspiring leadership of Greta Thunberg.
Fourteen years on, unfortunately, we find ourselves in a very different place, where levels of concern about the climate crisis have all but collapsed.
According to the Climate Change Observatory at the University of Colorado Boulder, in a report earlier this year, global news coverage of climate change dropped by 38% since its peak in 2021 — a decline confirmed by the US-based watchdog Media Matters analysing output from all major broadcast networks in the US. Even the New York Times, which published a lot of articles on the climate crisis back in the early 20s, has so radically ‘de-prioritised’ climate reporting that its output in 2025 was down by 66%. And this all has a marked effect on levels of public awareness and readiness to take action in homes and workplaces.
Many young people are outraged by this continuing refusal to get to grips with the climate crisis. Every year, things go on getting just a little worse, climate-induced disasters just a little more intense (and a lot more expensive), with more and more people affected by rising temperatures, drought, wildfires, extreme weather and so. And that’s all happening right now, driven by an average temperature increase of just 1.5°C since the Industrial Revolution. Prospects for young people at 2°C, let alone 2.5°C, are beginning to look truly terrifying.
Imagine yourself as part of today’s Gen Z: how could you not be angry at what all this means for the future? How could you not feel betrayed by those currently in power?
This blog is already far too long. However, my final go-to rejuvenation for today will take you from India’s cockroaches – via Nepal – to the flamingos of Albania.
What started out as a local protest back in May, against a luxury tourism development near the Narta Lagoon (home of the increasingly famous flamingos in the South of country) has escalated into a national campaign to get rid of the corrupt and incompetent government of Edi Rama. The protest has been turbocharged by the fact that the luxury resort is the brainchild of the odious Jared Kushner (son-in-law of you know who), Edi Rama’s best mate. He saw Kushner’s resort as the first of what he hopes will be a wave of new tourism investments of that kind in Albania — serving only todays global elite.
It’s now day 62 of daily demonstrations in Tirana, involving hundreds of thousands of people. (Not all of them Gen Z, by the way).
Check it out: Flamingo Revolution!
So much of what’s happening in the world today represents a devastating intergenerational betrayal. But what if the earthquake in Nepal, the Cockroaches in India, the defenders of flamingos in Albania, and every other Gen Z-led protest, are now sending us the clearest signal as to what might happen next?
Jonathon Porritt 27.7.2026
