By Asis Mistry
While
mass protests are reshaping South Asia’s political landscape, India’s paradox
lies in its multiple democratic safety valves that defuse discontent before it
topples regimes.
Governments in South Asia
are increasingly being overturned not at the ballot box but in the streets. In
2011, the Arab Spring set the template for a new grammar of political change,
where digitally mediated protests displaced conventional opposition parties as
the decisive agents of regime crisis. Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya in 2022 was
emblematic: what began as a revolt over fuel and food shortages turned into a
mass occupation of Colombo, ending in the resignation of President Gotabaya
Rajapaksa. Pakistan’s urban middle classes and youth rallied in 2022–23 around
Imran Khan, paralysing the state machinery and fracturing the political order.
Bangladesh, after months of campus-centred protests converging with social
unrest, saw the unprecedented ouster of Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League in 2025.
Just weeks ago, Nepal’s abrupt social media ban triggered the deadliest street
movement since the Madhes uprisings.
The pattern is striking.
Across the region, the locus of democratic contestation is shifting from
parliaments to pavements. Where elections are perceived as compromised,
manipulated, or inadequate to channel popular anger, the street has become the
court of last resort. And yet India, paradoxically, stands apart.
Over the last decade,
India has witnessed some of the largest mass protests anywhere in the world.
The anti-corruption movement in 2011 drew millions and shifted the national
discourse. The Citizenship Amendment Act protests in 2019–20, largely led by students
and women, created the first digitally networked opposition to the government.
The farmers’ agitation of 2020–21, sustained for over a year, represented one
of the most organised rural movements in decades. Each had disruptive
potential, each shook the government of the day, and yet none culminated in
regime change. Unlike Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, or Nepal, India’s protests have
stopped short of overthrow. Thus, the question is: why does India remain an
exception to South Asia’s protest wave?
The first answer lies in
the resilience of India’s electoral institutions. For all their flaws,
elections are regular, fiercely contested, and genuinely consequential.
Anti-incumbency has not vanished; it is simply displaced onto state-level
regimes or absorbed in periodic national verdicts. Discontent that in other
countries explodes in the streets is here refracted through the prism of
electoral politics.
Federalism also matters.
India’s state governments and regional parties act as safety valves, absorbing
protest energies before they coalesce into a single, nationwide anti-regime
movement. In Tamil Nadu, Kerala, or West Bengal, voters can punish ruling parties
without destabilising the system as a whole. Where unitary states like Sri
Lanka and Nepal funnel dissent directly against central authority, India’s
multiple arenas of contestation diffuse it.
More importantly, India
possesses what may be called multi-level shock absorbers — institutional,
social, and political mechanisms that prevent dissent from escalating into
overthrow. Despite evident pressures, both remain forums where grievances are
aired and occasionally redressed. Their very existence reduces the need to seek
insurrectionary outlets. Trade unions, caste organisations, religious networks,
and NGOs mediate between citizens and the state. They channel anger into
negotiations rather than regime collapse. Expansive welfare schemes — free
foodgrain to 800 million people, rural employment guarantees, subsidised
healthcare, and cash transfers — blunt the radical edge of discontent. They
stabilise the social base of the state even amid rising inequality. By
articulating linguistic, caste, and regional grievances, subnational actors
fragment opposition to the central government into multiple currents,
preventing a singular anti-incumbent wave. This architecture, therefore, does
not eliminate protest, but it transforms its function. It ensures that the
Indian state bends but rarely breaks.
India’s cultural grammar
of protest is also distinctive. Historically, protest here has functioned less
as an instrument of insurrection than as a form of pressure politics. The
independence movement, the anti-Emergency protests of the 1970s, the Mandal and
anti-Mandal agitations of the 1990s — all exerted enormous force but did so
within the legitimacy of the constitutional framework. The expectation is not
that protests will unseat governments but that they will pressurise them into
concessions or adjustments.
Contrast this with Sri
Lanka, Nepal or Bangladesh, where mobilisations rapidly assume maximalist
demands for regime change. In India, even movements as large as the farmers’
protests or CAA sit-ins remained calibrated: governments could wait them out,
negotiate, or partially concede, secure in the knowledge that the final
judgment would be delivered in elections.
The Indian state’s sheer
size and capacity reinforce this dynamic. With vast policing powers,
intelligence networks, and bureaucratic reach, it is difficult for protesters
to seize control of symbolic state institutions as easily as in Colombo or
Kathmandu. At the same time, Indian politics is adept at co-optation: protest
leaders are absorbed into party systems, welfare is expanded to mollify
discontent, and symbolic gestures are made to blunt confrontation. This dual
strategy of repression and accommodation prevents movements from breaching the
threshold of overthrow.
But to recognise India’s
distinctiveness is not to assume its permanence. The paradox rests on fragile
foundations. Three vulnerabilities stand out. First, youth unemployment is now
at crisis levels: nearly 45% of graduates under 25 remain jobless, a figure
that corrodes faith in the future. Second, economic inequality has sharpened,
with the top 1% of Indians controlling over 40% of wealth, even as welfare
schemes provide subsistence without mobility. Third, democratic backsliding is
eroding the very shock absorbers that stabilise the polity: a pliant media,
weakened judiciary, and shrinking civil society space reduce the outlets
through which anger can be expressed.
If electoral credibility
diminishes, if state governments lose the capacity to channel dissent, or if
welfare buffers collapse under fiscal stress, India could begin to look more
like its neighbours. The paradox is not that India is immune, but that its institutions
have so far postponed the logic of regime overthrow that grips South Asia.
India’s distinctiveness
in the regional protest wave is therefore double-edged. It reveals the
resilience of a democracy that remains capable of absorbing dissent without
collapsing. But it also highlights the fragility of that resilience, dependent
as it is on safety valves that are themselves under strain.
The lesson of South Asia
is that when the ballot loses credibility, the street becomes the arbiter of
legitimacy. India, for now, has kept the two in balance: noisy streets but
electoral stability, mass protests but regular alternation of power. Whether this
paradox endures will depend on whether India’s institutions remain credible,
whether welfare sustains hope, and whether the young can see in democracy not
just survival but a future.
For now, the ballot still
outweighs the street. But if India’s shock absorbers weaken, the paradox that
distinguishes it may dissolve, and the Indian exception may become just another
South Asian case of democracy’s fragility.
Asis Mistry is Assistant Professor, Department of
Political Science, University of Calcutta
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