COMMENT | The Yemeni peace activist Tawakkol Karman once said that youth is a revolution; they cannot be stopped, they cannot be oppressed, and they cannot be silenced.

That was certainly true in Bangladesh on Aug 5. The sudden toppling of the country’s authoritarian ruler, Sheikh Hasina, led Karman’s fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus to declare it Bangladesh’s “second independence day.”

What began as a non-violent student protest against the country’s highly politicised system of public-sector job quotas quickly escalated into an anti-government Gen Z revolution.

This youth uprising lit a match in a...