PUBLISHED
October 05, 2025
LAHORE:
South Asia is once again restless. Pots bang in Dhaka, pirate flags wave in Jakarta, young Nepalis dodge curfews by tunnelling through VPNs and Sri Lankans march until their prime minister flees. The newspapers, hungry for shorthand, dub it the Asian Spring.
On one hand, these are undeniably uprisings of the dispossessed, angry at corruption, unemployment, and dynastic rot. On the other, they fit all too neatly into a familiar script: Western “democracy promotion” amplifying dissent, financing NGOs, and guiding “leaderless” networks toward regime change.
Leaked intelligence, whistleblowers and official pronouncements across the spectrum suggest the latter is not paranoia but a recurring structure.
Bangladesh erupted in a 2024 student-led revolt that (according to some accounts) forced longtime ruler Sheikh Hasina from power. On the surface, the protests demanded jobs and quota reform. However, investigations by think tanks and media allege a foreign-backed regime-change plot.
For example, the Gateway House think tank observed that the unrest was driven by “opposition parties, religious extremist groups, NGOs within and without Bangladesh, [and] meddlesome great powers”.
In other words, a coalition of domestic dissidents and foreign actors – especially Western NGOs – was blamed. Former US officials have since confirmed elaborate plans along those lines. Ex-State Department aide Mike Benz revealed that USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) aimed to destabilise Dhaka’s government, recruiting hundreds of “pro-democracy activists” and even funding Bangladeshi rap groups to produce protest songs.
One rap was explicitly designed to “sow resentment against the sitting government,” he said. Benz adds bluntly that “this is how we end up funding … terrorists, paramilitaries, criminals, and even prostitutes in the name of soft power projection”.
His revelations confirmed alarms raised by many in the Global South who have endured the results of these ‘revolts without revolutions’: aid labelled “capacity building” or “rights” can be warped into covert regime‐change tools. As Benz put it, Western funders see “all options to destabilise” a country when its leader won’t cooperate.
In practice, this has meant US grants for Bangladeshi NGOs rose steeply (nearly doubling to $477m by 2023). The Ford Foundation, for instance, long operated with “head-of-state-like” clout in Dhaka. An official registry shows 81 US NGOs working in Bangladesh, dwarfing India’s mere two.
It is worth recalling that the Ford Foundation once withdrew grants from Incite!, a US-based radical feminist collective, over its support for the Palestinian liberation struggle. Critics have long accused the Foundation of similar interventions elsewhere: channelling funds into programmes designed to “revitalise” Indian religions in order to blunt the appeal of communism.
Such tactics not only defused leftist opposition but also fed the growth of religious fundamentalism and the rise of Hindu Right nationalism.
Nor was this limited to South Asia. Across the Third World, foundations played a direct role in neutralising revolutionary movements. In South Africa, Ford Foundation programmes were instrumental in redirecting the anti-apartheid struggle away from its anticapitalist roots and into a pro-capitalist framework.
The pattern is clear. The Ford Foundation has historically been entangled with US intelligence operations, working hand in glove with the CIA to undermine radical movements worldwide.
Hasina herself has accused the interim regime of illegitimate foreign ties. In July 2025, she denounced Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus (putative head of the new government) for having “made billions, taken foreign money, and [ruined] our country,” charging that he lacked patriotism.
In June 2023, Hasina claimed, that her domestic opponents and outside forces were threatening Bangladesh’s sovereignty over Saint Martin.
Nikolai Patrushev, a top aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, also claimed that the US and Western allies orchestrated chaos in Bangladesh because Hasina refused to let the US establish a military presence there.
Nepal – Youth-Led ‘Gen Z’ uprising
Meanwhile, Nepal’s “Gen Z” protests grew from outrage over a social-media ban and endemic graft. Thousands of young Nepalese, mobilised via Discord and TikTok, rallied for an end to corruption and better jobs. The movement was chaotic and leaderless, and within days it toppled Prime Minister Oli and installed the first female PM, Sushila Karki.
The branding of Nepal’s turmoil as a “Gen Z” revolt conceals more than it reveals. What is advertised as a cluster of “leaderless” youth groups has in practice, coalesced around one organisation: Hami Nepal.
Once an obscure NGO devoted to earthquake relief, it has now, without precedent or mandate, emerged as the fulcrum of regime change in a country of 30 million.
English-language Nepali Times noted that Hami Nepal “played a central role in guiding the demonstrations, using its Instagram and Discord platforms to circulate protest information and share guidelines”. That an earthquake-aid outfit should so suddenly pivot to digital agitation raises questions. In the space of a year, its remit has expanded into direct political action.
The timing is curious. In NED’s public “Asia Grant Listing FY24” appears a line item: “Promoting Youth Participation in the Struggle for Democracy” — US$123,000 earmarked to foster youth mobilisation through workshops, advocacy, and documentation.
The document is regional, not Nepal-specific, but the coincidence is striking. The sudden transformation of Hami Nepal into a political vanguard fits squarely within that rubric.
Its audacity is matched only by the novelty of its methods. On September 12, Hami Nepal presided over the “election” of interim premier Sushila Karki, via Discord. The NGO’s server counts 145,000 members, but no one knows how many participated in the vote.
Hami Nepal, a previously obscure NGO, has in days toppled a government and seated a new ruler. That should give pause. And it becomes more troubling when one surveys the organisation’s list of “brands that support us”. Among them: luxury Western hotels, shoe and clothing labels, Shanker (Nepal’s largest private investor), messaging app Viber, Coca-Cola (long notorious for human-rights abuses across the Global South) and the Gurkha Welfare Trust, funded by the British Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence.
More telling still is Students for a Free Tibet—openly funded by the NED, an organisation widely recognised as a CIA front.
The geopolitical context is inescapable. In August 2023 Nepal’s government endorsed a National Cyber Security Policy modelled after China’s “Great Firewall,” curbing foreign internet traffic while cultivating local platforms. The policy was denounced by Digital Rights Nepal – bankrolled by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations – as a prelude to censorship.
In February, NED published a report warning that “countries worldwide,” including Nepal, were looking to China’s digital sovereignty as a “model”. What worried Washington was not censorship, but Beijing’s “prestige” rising globally.
The policy had teeth: all foreign social media companies had to register with Nepal’s Ministry of Communication and Information Technology. TikTok and Viber complied. However, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube and LinkedIn refused. On September 3, the government responded with bans on 26 foreign-owned sites.
That ban lit the fuse.
On September 4, the Federation of Nepali Journalists – funded by NED and Open Society –released a joint statement with 22 civil-society outfits, denouncing the shutdown. Most of these organisations are likewise tied to Western foundations or platforms directly threatened by the law. For Hami Nepal, this was the “tipping point”. It called a mass rally for September 8, complete with a “protest support helpline” and meticulous preparation.
The demonstrations spiralled into violence. Self-styled “Gen Z” leaders claimed their peaceful protests were “hijacked” by “opportunists”. However, inside Hami Nepal’s Discord in the preceding days, users openly advocated killing politicians and their children, called for weapons, including machine guns, and vowed to “burn everything”.
Against this backdrop, what emerges is not a spontaneous eruption of youthful energy, but a movement steered through digital channels funded, sponsored and amplified by Western networks with a long record of engineering “pro-democracy” spectacles abroad.
Nepal’s attempt to tax and regulate foreign tech firms collided head-on with Washington’s preferred order, and suddenly “leaderless” youth protests appeared with NGO logistics, helplines, and international backers in tow.
In fact, the US embassy reportedly advised Nepalese youths – through officials like Ambassador Alaina B. Teplitz – to exercise peaceful protest, a subtle encouragement sometimes interpreted as tacit support.
Aragalaya
Sri Lanka’s 2022–24 Aragalaya (“struggle”) protests threw out the Rajapaksa dynasty and installed a leftist JVP-led government. Mass outrage at food and fuel shortages roiled cities, culminating in President Gotabaya’s resignation and new elections. On paper, this was a grassroots economic revolt. However, many Sri Lankan analysts insist it was imported.
Nationalist leaders – even some former regime insiders – loudly blamed foreign powers. For example, Wimal Weerawansa (a former minister and ally of the Rajapaksas) claims he uncovered a “sinister” international plot behind the protests. In a July 2023 interview, Weerawansa announced a forthcoming expose alleging US meddling.
He boasted “the CIA chief was in Sri Lanka with some 20 others” at the height of the Aragalaya, suggesting clandestine meetings to install a caretaker government. He demanded a presidential inquiry into this “international conspiracy”.
Likewise, the National Freedom Front published a book in 2023 claiming foreign funding instigated Aragalaya.
Even ultranationalists who otherwise supported Trump used his anti-NGO rhetoric as evidence: after USAID was discredited in US politics, they pointed fingers at it for funding Sri Lankan unrest.
‘Foreign NGOs Dividing Us’
In Indonesia, politics took a somewhat different tack. There were mass protests (over everything from labour laws to corruption) in recent years, but equally notable were government crackdowns on foreign-influenced civil society. Upon taking office in late 2024, President Prabowo Subianto publicly warned Indonesians against foreign-funded NGOs.
At a national Pancasila Day event in June 2025, he denounced unnamed external actors funding NGOs to “divide” Indonesia under the cover of democracy and human rights.
He urged citizens to “remain vigilant and not be manipulated by any country,” saying that foreign nations long sought to weaken Indonesia’s unity. In Prabowo’s words, “For hundreds of years… they fund NGOs to pit us against each other, all while claiming to uphold democracy, human rights, and freedom of the press”.
Prabowo’s critique was consistent with reality: US agencies have given over $800 million to Indonesian civil society since 2020, and Japan and Europe likewise fund democracy programmes.
At the same time, analogies are drawn between Jakarta and historical contexts. The Indonesian narrative of a Western “divide and rule” campaign parallels colonial-era suspicions (the Dutch colonial regime once blamed local rebellions on British intrigue) and Cold War anti-communism (Sukarno accused the CIA of subversion).
However, analysts caution that many Indonesian protests are just as much about bread-and-butter issues as they are about ideology. The truth is likely mixed: foreign funding and ideology play a role, but only by amplifying and giving tools to underlying domestic discontent.
Hegemony and ‘democracy promotion’
At the heart of the current wave of uprisings lies a clash of interpretations. On one side stands the romantic view: each movement is cast as an eruption of “people power,” authentic, leaderless and pure.
On the other is the harder reading: that these mobilisations, while fuelled by real grievances, are at least partly orchestrated or absorbed by outside forces whose fingerprints are visible in their slogans, funding streams and media amplification.
Much of South and Southeast Asia emerged from World War II not as autonomous actors but as semi-peripheral economies tethered to a global system they neither defined nor controlled.
Within that order, foreign aid, NGO programming and cultural diplomacy function less as charity than as disciplinary instruments. By universalising Western idioms of “democracy” and “human rights”, imperial powers set the terms of debate in societies where the real antagonism is economic dependency. The vocabulary of liberation itself becomes colonised.
Echo of ‘colour revolutions’
The echoes are familiar. The “colour revolutions” of the 2000s — Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine — followed the same script: mass mobilisations whose authenticity was never in doubt, but which Western governments later admitted to supporting through training, grants and logistics.
The Arab Spring of 2010–11 carried similar fingerprints, with NGOs and Western media outlets openly championing the crowds.
Today’s Asian protests resonate with those precedents. Bangladesh’s 2024 upheaval has been likened to Myanmar’s 2021 protests, which themselves were shadowed by allegations of Western NGO involvement.
Some even draw parallels to Europe’s Velvet Revolution. In each case, grievances were genuine, such as corruption, repression and authoritarian drift. However, the choreography of revolt aligned neatly with external agendas.
History also supplies counterpoints. The JVP insurgencies in Sri Lanka in the 1970s and 1980s, or Nepal’s Maoist war of 1996–2006, were popular uprisings that targeted US-backed elites and comprador classes. Their slogans were explicitly anti-imperialist.
As those movements declined, their discursive terrain was gradually overtaken by NGO-led activism. The rhetoric of “freedom” and “dignity” survived, but stripped of its class antagonism and repackaged in a liberal register palatable to Western donors. What once was a revolutionary struggle now returns as a donor-friendly protest culture.
This is the paradox of the current cycle. Leaders like the Rajapaksas or Sheikh Hasina are castigated as authoritarians — not without reason — but their opponents increasingly cloak themselves in Western idioms and institutions. Nepal’s “Gen Z” revolt fits the same mould: outrage against corruption and censorship expressed through platforms, NGOs and networks long woven into Western democracy promotion circuits.
Local Fire, Global Oxygen
The uprisings in Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia cannot be reduced to puppetry. They are driven by authentic discontent with corruption, inequality, dynastic politics and state repression. However, neither can they be read as wholly indigenous. A dense archive of evidence — leaked donor strategies, declassified cables, bold statements by statesmen — shows how foreign “democracy promotion” infrastructures insert themselves into these moments.
The dialectic is clear: local fire, global oxygen. Genuine anger, sparked by lived conditions, but fanned, directed and legitimised by networks whose interest is less emancipation than the reproduction of a global hierarchy.
To deny the grievances is naïve, and to ignore the orchestration is equally naive. What we see is not liberation in its own name, but resistance folded back into the very circuits of Empire it sought to upend.
