A day or two ago, rocking gently on the swing on my terrace, in a balmy, breezy July evening, with a long train of thought rattling through my mind, the mind suddenly wandered to Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. There, only recently, a gathering of Gen-Z youngsters – and if memory serves me right and a few apolitical “roaches” scurrying around the commotion – had managed to put the Modi Government in Delhi on the back foot.

What began as a street gathering soon turned into something resembling a pressure cooker! The young protesters came face-to-face with the full armory of the State: pellet guns barking, water cannons roaring like angry elephants, and lathis came raining down like fury of torrential monsoon battering the window panes. Yet, the crowd refused to scatter.  If anything, every baton seemed to add another log to the fire.

The spectacle was almost surreal: a government armed with the machinery of the State and a bunch of young people armed with little more than smartphones, stubbornness and audacity of the youth.  The former had barricades, lathis, helmets, and water cannons; the latter had hashtags, live streams, and apparently an inexhaustible supply of courage.

Watching the drama from afar, I imagined Jantar Mantar as a modern-day tug-of-war except that one side had the entire state apparatus and the other had the Gen-Z pulling the rope with bare hands and cheeky grin.

The Jantar Mantar saga left an obstinate question rattling around in my mind.  Has Westminster-style representative democracy in South Asia has become an aging ox-cart, expected to carry the rocket-fueled dreams of a restless young generation, branded as cockroaches from the seat of justice! The democratic vehicle still has the familiar steering wheel, pedals and horn – but the passengers have changed! They arrive armed with smartphones, hashtags, and dreams moving at the speed of fiber optics, while the political machinery creaks along like a bullock cart stuck in the same old rut of yesterday.

Perhaps the problem is not that democracy has run out of road but that our version of it is still travelling with a nineteenth-century map in a twenty-first century traffic jam. Young people are asking for a vehicle sturdy enough to carry their dreams onto the highway of truth and opportunity, meanwhile, political leaders and creaking institutions roll out a refurbished ambassador – its paint barely hiding the rust, one tyre punctured, the engine coughing like an old smoker – and then, they bobbing head solemnly from side to side, their admonishing index finger raised towards the heavens, and, the snow-white beard trembling with manufactured wisdom- as they hand them a lecture on the virtue of patience from the safety of a bulletproof-glass pulpit.

The result is a democracy in which the ballot box still stands proudly at the entrance, but the public increasingly doubts whether anything useful happens once they step inside.  Democratic institutions are beginning to look like grand old restaurants with impressive menus but a kitchen that takes forever to serve. As faith in their ability to deliver results thins, the streets are becoming the new political chamber- where protests, uprisings, and popular fury increasingly serve as the citizen’s megaphone, and sometimes rather inconveniently for those behind the velvet curtains, as the only language power seems willing to understand.

Where is the South Asian Westminster-style democracy gifted by the British Raj heading—and can it survive if it remains trapped on a track laid with outdated ideas, hauled by the rusted machinery of a bygone age? Its democratic engine still wheezes and chugs like an old steam locomotive, while the men at the controls keep promising bullet trains.

The irony is almost comic: a twenty-first-century digital generation is being asked to board a nineteenth-century political locomotive, while its drivers stand at the podium boasting about high-speed futures. They promise a future gilded with hope, innovation and prosperity, yet govern with the creaking machinery of the past.

Perhaps the real question is not whether the locomotive can keep running—but how long a generation racing on smartphones and AI will tolerate being pulled backwards by a democracy still running on steam.

As I, a child of the Baby Boomer generation, haplessly see the South-Asian boat of democracy being battered by the typhoons of youth-led uprisings, the storm is telling us something we would rather not hear: the old vessel may no longer be seaworthy. The old machinery may keep rattling and wheezing, but something’s got to give!

Let us walk back down the old political road paved by Westminster’s democratic ideals, a gift of British Raj given to South Asian nations –ideas inherited from the British and once held aloft by our political elites as if democracy were a finished foolproof blueprint rather than a living system that must evolve with the times.

I cannot resist taking a stroll down the old political road paved with the cobblestones of Westminster democracy—a road our leaders still insist leads to the future, even as its machinery creaks and groans like a relic from another age.

As Bangladesh’s young Gen-Z army pounded the Dhaka streets towards Sheikh Hasina’s residence by the morning of 5 August, democracy seemed to have abandoned its Westminster manners and gone bare-knuckle— there was no umpire to blow the whistle, no linesman to flag the breach, and no referee capable of restoring order when the very foundation of the democratic game began to crumble.

Sheikh Hasina, who had ridden the waves of Westminster-style old electoral politics and the first past the post system to the summit of power, was ultimately swept from office by a far more turbulent tide – the fury of students (Gen-Z) pouring into the streets of Dhaka like a tidal wave, braving the Hasina regime’s bullets and overwhelming the political order that had seemed so firmly entrenched.  The student revolt spilled into the streets and snowballed into an avalanche before Sheikh Hasina could make head or tail of it—by the time she reached for the political umbrella, the storm had already blown the roof off.  The fortress of power, once thought impregnable, collapsed like a house of cards. And from the debris rose a new breed of political actors – not creatures dyed in the hues of democracy or draped in the turbans of socialism, or men and women wearing the read headband of the hammer and sickle.

The August 2024 student uprising in Bangladesh began as a spark over the government-job quota system, but before long, it set the entire political house ablaze. What started as a demand for fair access to public jobs spilled onto the streets and quickly swelled into a nationwide revolt against Sheikh Hasina’s rule. The government’s violent crackdown didn’t extinguish the flames; it poured paraffin on them. The quota protest became a raging popular uprising sweeping aside the political barricades that had stood for years. Within weeks, the citadel of Hasina’s power crumbled and she was forced to flee. With her departure, the fifteen-year edifice of Awami League rule came crashing down.  And a movement with no conventional electoral mandate acquired greater immediate political legitimacy than an elected government.

The Bangladesh saga begs a haunting question. Has South-Asian Westminster democracy become a threadbare vessel – too brittle to carry the aspirations of a young, digitally wired generation? Can an old political architecture, built for another age, withstand the restless winds of a generation that lives by the swipe of a screen, demands instant accountability and has little patience for the old, rusted machinery of traditional politics?

Taking a long, grateful breath of respite, my thoughts wandered back home—to Nepal, where the Gen-Z youth, apparently with a fresh charge of Gorkha blood and old-fashioned valor in their veins, sent our democracy-harping rulers scrambling for the exits. In less than 48 hours, the political furniture was being rearranged at breakneck speed—so fast that even Dhaka and Delhi might have been tempted to reach for the stopwatch.  Those who had spent years preaching democracy from the high pulpit suddenly found themselves practicing the oldest democratic tradition of all: making a hasty exit when the people came knocking. Westminster democracy, it seemed, had briefly turned into a game of musical chairs—with the music stopping rather sooner than anyone in power had expected.

And then there is Nepal, where a 35-year-old Prime Minister now sits at the helm of a generation that learned politics not from dusty textbooks but from algorithms, hashtags and the restless bloodstream of the digital age. To many of these Gen-Z minds, Karl Marx, Hegel, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau may sound less like political philosophers and more like characters auditioning for a James Cameron utopian blockbuster. Meanwhile, the old Westminster-school politicians continue to trumpet democracy through megaphones, while the rule of law lies gathering dust on the rickety shelves of institutions. But something refreshing is stirring. The new Gen-Z leaders appear less interested in delivering sermons from the podium and more interested in rolling up their sleeves in the backroom, drawing blueprints, testing ideas and—most importantly—walking the talk. Perhaps this is not the death of democracy but its much-needed software upgrade: the old machinery may still be creaking, but a new generation seems determined to give it a reboot—and, hopefully, put the country back on the road rather than merely polishing the old political vehicle.

Now an architectural engineer has moved into the Prime Minister’s chair—a curious choice for a political age addicted to sound bites. He is, however, sparing with words; they seem to leave his mouth only after passing through a strict architectural approval process. Perhaps that is not such a bad thing: after decades of politicians constructing castles in the air, Nepal may finally have someone interested in putting up a few solid structures on the ground.

Perhaps the young need not reinvent democracy; they need only to put their feet into the old political shoes and prove they can run farther and faster than those who have worn them for decades. If they can take the rusted machinery of Westminster representative democracy, hammer out its dents, replace its worn-out parts and rebuild its institutions so they actually deliver, then democracy need not become a relic hauled behind a wheezing steam locomotive. It can be rebuilt into a bullet train—swift enough to carry the dreams of a digital generation down the highway of truth, hope and opportunity.

That, perhaps, is the real promise of Gen-Z: not the death of democracy, but its resurrection; not the demolition of the old house, but the courage to renovate it from the foundations up. The old political class may nurse its wounds and wonder what hit it. The young, meanwhile, may have discovered something more consequential than a new way of protesting: a new way of making democracy work.

And if they succeed, democracy will have proved that it is not an obsolete machine condemned to wheeze along the tracks of history. It is a living idea—capable of renewal, reinvention and acceleration. The destination is still the same: a country where truth has a road to travel, hope has somewhere to arrive, and opportunity is not reserved for those already sitting in the driver’s seat. The engine may be old. But the journey does not have to be.