It appeared that India’s moment in South Asia’s Gen Z revolution had finally arrived. As one journalist observed, for the first time since 2014 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office, fear had “switched sides”. The common theme for these protests is that they were essentially leaderless or horizontal movements and had no single political party behind them. But most had no grass-roots political mobilisation which could convert their street power into an organised political movement and lead to electoral success. A youth movement toppled the Awami League government of Sheikh Hasina and installed a technocratic interim set-up under Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus , which struggled to hold elections on time.