A generation raised on cell phones has learned to bring down governments without holding a single rally that anyone planned months in advance. In the past few years, young people in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Kenya, Nepal, and Madagascar have used little more than a hashtag and a shared sense of betrayal to force out presidents and prime ministers who had spent decades building the machinery to survive exactly this kind of challenge.None of these uprisings had a known leader when they began. None of them ran on a party manifesto. They ran on rage at a tax bill, a hiring quota, a blackout, an internet ban, each one a specific grievance that opened onto a much larger one – a generation convinced that the people running their countries had stopped listening. What these movements share is a method, and what they leave behind, once the streets empty, is the far tougher question of who actually inherits the power that a leaderless crowd cannot hold onto for long.India’s turn came this summer. In mid-May, a Supreme Court hearing on fake law degrees produced a stray comparison between unemployed youth and cockroaches, a line the Chief Justice later said was aimed at fraudulent degree-holders rather than the country’s youth. The clarification changed nothing on the street. Within a day, strategist Abhijeet Dipke had turned the insult into a banner, and the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) was born. It grew the way its global cousins had, through volunteers rather than cadres, around a single wound – a leaked medical entrance exam that had already been linked to the suicides of grieving students.Five weeks of marches, tear gas, and a 26-day hunger strike by environmental activist Sonam Wangchuk later, Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on July 25. CJP spokesperson Saurav Das told the crowd at Jantar Mantar, “we have done it.” CJP folded its tents and apparently chose to remain a watchdog with a manifesto, rather than register as a political party.The peace did not hold. Within days, police in Assam, West Bengal, and Bihar had opened cases against protest organisers, some of whom stayed in custody even as the movement declared victory. CJP called it a breach of the government’s own word and demanded the cases be dropped. That reversal raises a question that outlasts India’s own summer of protest – whether a movement built to avoid leaders and parties can ever hold the ground it takes, or whether the very qualities that let it topple a minister in five weeks leave it unable to stop the system from taking that ground back.A global waveCJP belongs to a family of youth movements that have appeared across the world in recent years. In Bangladesh, students rose up in 2024 against a government job quota system, and the protest grew into a full revolt against prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who fled the country. In Kenya, young people organised through social media against a finance bill that would have taxed basic goods, and president William Ruto withdrew the bill and dismissed his cabinet.In Nepal, a government ban on social media set off protests that forced prime minister K. P. Sharma Oli out of office. In Madagascar, anger over blackouts and water shortages pushed president Andry Rajoelina to flee after the army refused to move against protesters. Sri Lanka’s 2022 Aragalaya forced president Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign amid an economic collapse.What connects these movements is their method. They organise through cell phones rather than party offices. They avoid naming leaders, so that no single person can be arrested or bought off to end the protest. They form around one grievance, whether it is a tax, a quota, an internet ban, or an exam leak, rather than a full programme for governing. This makes them fast to build and hard for a state to negotiate with, in the usual way.India and Pakistan have not seen the same kind of regime-toppling revolt. Part of the reason is system size and internal geopolitics. India is a large federal country, and anger in Delhi does not always spread evenly to every state the way it did in the smaller, more centralised capitals of Kathmandu or Dhaka. Part of the reason is that Indian voters have regular elections to channel frustration into, so protest and the ballot box compete for the same energy. And part of the reason is that the Indian state has effective tools, from internet shutdowns to curfew orders, to slow a movement down before it reaches critical mass.Does the street win feed the Right?A common worry about these uprisings is that they tear down a government but leave the field open for whichever political force already has money, discipline, and local networks. This is often a conservative or religious party. In Bangladesh, after Hasina’s fall, the youth-backed National Citizen’s Party struggled to build grassroots reach, and established groups such as Jamaat-e-Islami and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) moved into the space.Something similar happened after Egypt’s 2011 uprising, when secular, digitally organised youth in Tahrir Square forced out Hosni Mubarak, only for the well-organised Muslim Brotherhood to win the following election, before a military coup replaced it with a government stricter than the one that fell. In Peru, protests against corruption and crime turned into a demand for hardline policing, which conservative populists were happy to supply.But this is not a fixed rule. Nepal’s 2025 uprising was followed by the election of the centrist Rastriya Swatantra Party, not a religious or nationalist one. Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya eventually led to the election of Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a Left-wing candidate. Chile’s student protests of 2019 to 2021 put a former student leader, Gabriel Boric, into the presidency on a progressive platform. So the direction a movement’s aftermath takes depends more on what political organisations already exist and are ready to receive the energy the protest releases.India offers its own precedent here. The 2011 anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare weakened the ruling Congress party by tying it to a string of corruption scandals and by turning the urban middle class against it. Hazare’s protest refused to become a party. One faction of it, led by Arvind Kejriwal, split off and formed the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which went on to govern Delhi.But nationally, the movement’s anger fed the campaign of Narendra Modi and the BJP in 2014, in part because the BJP was the only large, organised opposition party positioned to catch the wave. CJP’s own founder, Dipke, worked earlier in his career for the AAP, and questions have already been raised about whether CJP can stay independent of it or of other established parties looking to absorb its supporters.What the uprising means and how it mattersThis political trajectory has a name in political theory – a movement can be strong at tearing a system down and weak at building a new one to replace it. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has written that digital tools let a protest grow to hundreds of thousands of people within days, without the months of organising that earlier movements needed, which also means the protest has no internal machine ready to negotiate once the state asks who its leaders are and what they want.Robert Michels, writing a century ago, argued that any organisation that wants to survive eventually needs some form of leadership hierarchy. Movements like CJP resist this on purpose, out of fear that leaders can be jailed or bought off, but the same choice can leave them unable to fill the vacuum they create. Power then tends to go to whichever group was already organised before the protest began, whether that is a party, a religious network, or the army.Some movements try to close this gap without giving up their outsider identity. Chile’s Frente Amplio and Nepal’s Rastriya Swatantra Party both grew out of street movements into electoral parties. Others act as a kind of standing watchdog, pushing for specific fixes such as an exam board overhaul rather than a change of government, and using the threat of future protest to keep pressure on. CJP looks closer to the second model for now.CJP forced a resignation that no opposition party in India had managed in over a decade, and it built a following that cuts across caste and region in a way Indian politics rarely allows. That is a real achievement. But the FIRs filed against organisers within days of the deal show how quickly a government can offer a concession on one point while working to make sure nothing about the underlying system changes.Whether CJP becomes a lasting check on power or fades into a memory of one good week at Jantar Mantar depends on choices that have not been made yet – whether it builds any lasting structure, whether it stays independent of the parties trying to absorb it, and whether India’s next exam leak, whenever it comes, finds the same movement ready to answer. However, as Arundhati Roy wrote, the cockroach movement is part of a larger wave of unrest across India. Protests over tribal rights, environmental destruction, and regional conflicts are unfurling alongside growing public anger over unemployment and rising prices. This is at a time when allegations of corruption surrounding the Ram Temple project have intensified criticism that religion is being exploited for political power and private gain.K.M. Seethi is Director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension (IUCSSRE), Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU), Kerala. He also served as ICSSR Senior Fellow, Senior Professor of International Relations and Dean of Social Sciences at MGU.