Across campuses and capitals, the most striking crowds today are overwhelmingly young. Teenagers and twenty-somethings—armed with smartphones, hashtags, and restless impatience—are reshaping the architecture of protest. “They don’t wait for pamphlets or podiums; their assemblies can spark with a meme, a livestream, or a viral clip. This new cadence of dissent—fast, networked, performative—has amplified Gen-Z’s role in politics far beyond its years. But with this surge of civic energy also comes volatility. Peaceful marches can morph into flashpoints, and the same fluidity that empowers youth can be hijacked by mercenaries, criminals, or opportunists bent on destabilisation,” says O P Singh, a senior IPS officer in Haryana. In a conversation with The Indian Express, O P Singh, who heads the Haryana State Narcotics Control Bureau and has over three decades of service experience—from dealing with youngsters as Haryana’s sports director to handling farmer agitations without letting them spiral into violence and to diffusing communal tensions in wake of Nikita Tomar murder case in Faridabad when grief threatened to harden into divides—Singh reveals how it is also one of the aspects of his upcoming book, Why We Gather: Crowds, Smartphones and The Future of Democracy. Singh explains what Gen-Z activism means for public order, how it differs from past waves of protest, and how governments must adapt to the double-edged nature of digitally native crowds. Q: Who exactly are Gen Z—and what distinguishes them as activists? O P Singh: They are today’s teens and twenty-somethings: born into broadband, raised on smartphones. Their default organising unit is the network, not the committee. They prize authenticity over titles and speed over ceremony and are the largest youth cohort in history, globally connected. A meme in Manila can galvanise a march in Mumbai by sundown. Q: Who amplifies Gen Z—and who’s coming behind them? O P Singh: Two rings matter. Upstream—older millennials and Gen-Xers contribute scaffolding: legal aid, fundraising, media skills. Downstream—Gen Alpha, immersed in creator culture, supercharges distribution. Their meme factories give the Gen-Z causes cultural stickiness. Add diaspora networks and NGOs, and you get a coalition that can scale without a single command post. Q: How is Gen Z making its presence felt—both online and on the street? O P Singh: They braid the two. The internet is the assembly hall, logistics desk, and loudhailer; encrypted groups for planning, open platforms for narrative, and livestreams for accountability. On the ground, they move like swarms, decentralised meeting points, peer marshals, QR codes for routes, pop-up supply points. Online and offline are braided. While momentum builds in feeds, impact lands in streets. Q: Structurally, what’s new about this ‘architecture of protest’? O P Singh: Three shifts—tempo: mobilisation cycles compressed from weeks to hours; topology: networks replace hierarchies, movements are leader-full, not leaderless; and optics: the stream is the stadium, protests are staged for phones as much as for plazas, meaning rumour control is crowd safety and legitimacy must be performed continuously, not just declared once. Q: How do skilled rioters exploit Gen-Z protests to overwhelm security? O P Singh: Their playbook involves piggybacking and provoking, blending into a large youth crowd, seeding rumours, creating mini-stampedes to split attention, and striking preselected targets—legislatures, substations, and media vans, seeking images that dominate coverage. If authorities lump the peaceful many with the violent few, spoilers win twice. For such crowd control, precision is the key - isolate the arsonists without criminalising the assembly. Q: Is this becoming a tool of regime change? O P Singh: Protests have always shaped politics, but today’s speed, scale, spectacle accelerate delegitimization. We’ve seen youth-heavy uprisings help precipitate exits - from the Arab Spring to Sri Lanka’s 2022 collapse, to Kathmandu’s burned-out parliament. It’s not that Gen-Z plots coups; rather, uprisings create vacuums that other actors exploit. When trust is brittle, a few incendiary nights can tip institutions already on the brink.
