Madagascar coup: How Indian Ocean Region has become a ring of instability

The reported exfiltration of Madagascar’s once-reformist President Andry Rajoelina—which Paris is yet to confirm—following a coup by elite commandos of the nation’s military should raise concerns for India’s extended neighbourhood. The coup was preceded or followed—again, there is no clarity—by a nationwide Gen Z youth uprising protesting allegedly poor governance and corruption, which by now has a pattern to it in the region.

Thus, in India’s immediate neighbourhood, which is some distance from Madagascar, and is in the strategically important western Indian Ocean, seven of 13 nations have faced mass protests that have led to a ‘regime change’. In the very immediate neighbourhood, four nations faced such a transition in as many years—Sri Lanka (2022), Pakistan (2023), Bangladesh (2024) and Nepal (2025).

In the relatively extended neighbourhood, Indonesia and the Philippines also faced youth protests, almost on near-similar grounds, but the movements did die down. If ‘democracy’ is going to be the yardstick, Afghanistan and Myanmar have autocratic governments. Myanmar has had a military junta ruling the nation for most of the past 60-plus years.

In Afghanistan, the hyper-fundamentalist Taliban returned to power after a 20-year-long break, during which time the US-led Nato forces were supposed to have ‘cleansed’ the nation (by killing hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children?). Today’s Taliban rulers are more confident than they were pre-9/11, which incident alone caused the US-led military intervention.

No Clarity

Looked at from Madagascar’s own perspective, interestingly around the time of the youth uprising and coup, Kenya, not far away in mainland Africa, across the Mozambique Channel, did face people’s protests this year, but they did not overflow to topple the government. Right now, Gen Z protests are rocking Morocco in North Africa, not very close to Madagascar, which too is an African nation, located in the western Indian Ocean. The fact that Morocco is located in the broad area where the ‘Arab Spring’ and later-day people’s protests, like in Gaddafi’s Libya, occurred could mean that the unfinished job from the past is returning, but possibly less violent and less gruesome.

But coups and violence have not always been the case in the neighbourhood—and that should be welcome. For instance, Seychelles, which is not a faraway neighbour of Madagascar, went through the periodic presidential poll without any hiccup. In the second, run-off round of the election, incumbent Wewak Ramkalawan lost to opponent and predecessor Patrick Herminie, polling 52.7 per cent vote share. The transition too was smooth, as always.

Consumerist World

Where is it all headed? Or, where is the world headed? Did the world and global governments and polity miss something in the post-war and/or post-colonial socio-economic reconstruction? While a common, invisible external hand has been suspected ever since the ‘Arab Spring’ and ‘Orange Revolution’ elsewhere a decade and more ago, and the modus too has pointed towards one, there is no denying the frustrations of youth in each one of these ‘chosen’ countries.

The pattern is uniform. The Gen Z in each of these countries is frustrated over lack of employment, and at times even adequate educational opportunities, and individual incomes and the social status that come with it, especially in an increasingly evolving consumerist world. While protestors have been deploying social media to amass people, they have also been ‘exposed’ to the ways of their political leaders, constitutional institutions and worse.

Traditionally, it is said that where 20 per cent of the nation’s population comprises youth, that’s a boiling pot for revolution of some kind or the other. If the leadership is alive and active, they can direct them into constructive channels by evolving into a better place for their people to live in and their children to grow into entrepreneurs and engineers, doctors and other well-paying professionals.

In the case of Africa as a whole, the median age is said to be 19. Hence, not just one nation or the other, but the continent as a whole may be ripe for some kind of a revolution, though in stages and in one nation after another. Thus, you had a change of elected government in Botswana last year, and the iconic African National Congress (ANC) lost vote share, falling below the halfway mark for the first time since the end of the apartheid.

Demand for Change

Simply put, they want ‘change’, a change from the status quo, a change for the better. Beyond that, most of them do not know anything about the kind of change that they are aspiring for and how to achieve the same.

Hence, in nations like Sri Lanka and even Pakistan, where the constitutional system took over, despite the protest and limited violence, the established scheme took over. Hence, there was no talk of a military coup or anarchy, which is what was anticipated in both countries.

Why, even in the US, the world’s ‘oldest functioning democracy’, the emergence of President Trump as the ‘disruptor par excellence’ twice within a decade is an expression of the people’s angst for change, which remained, or continues to remain, unfulfilled. The early signs became available when, in the presidential poll of 1992, billionaire-Independent Ross Perot polled a high 20 per cent vote share without adequate organisation at the grassroots level in most states.

The American people, starting with the youth, wanted change, but like every other American, after casting their vote, they went away to their daily chores. It thus became easy for Establishment America—call it the ‘Deep State’, if you please—to carry out their post-’92 vow that they ‘won’t allow this to happen’. What America has since gotten is possibly worse than what the nation was prepared for, and the so-called Deep State was capable of facilitating—or was/is it what they wanted, at least as far as Trump 2.0 was/is concerned?

Where the constitutional scheme is inherently weak and the established political system is unable to stand up, or both, then there is a coup, anarchy, and/or the kind of hard wall that yesterday’s protest leaders are forced to stare at, with no idea about the future— theirs and that of their nation. In the evolving situation, Bangladesh may be a good example. Pakistan may still not be out of it.

Thus the question is not only about Madagascar or other nations in Asia and Africa but across the world. Where some nations or their Deep States (let us not stop with branding only one nation as such) change regimes elsewhere, maybe for their economic and strategic reasons, they may need to keep a watch also on their own front yard and backyard alike.

It is not about the size of those nations or their populations, but about a triggering issue that could bring the people—say, the youth, to begin with—to the streets, and in an organised manner, to boot. For instance, in Madagascar, the immediate issue was about frequent power cuts and water supply. It is one of Africa’s poorest nations, and anyway, the power supply was woefully inadequate to begin with.

In ways, thus, it’s the mechanism that comes into place first, and that mechanism identifies issues that can appeal to a large segment. No, it does not mean that someone is sitting in a room and drawing up an action plan on a blackboard with timelines and all. Someone simply collects such others who feel equally strong and launches a small protest. Possibly, he or even they do not even know that there are others who feel the same way and feel as strongly as they do.

That is the trigger. And that is the trigger that nations, governments and polity need to be aware of and avoid too.

N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst & political commentator. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.