Flight into the Dark: South Asia’s Protest Republics

In South Asia, the street has become a republic of its own. Since 2022, three governments have fallen, not to coups or foreign invasions, but to citizens reclaiming a voice denied. From Colombo to Dhaka to Kathmandu, the multitude overpowered dynasties and decrees.

Each collapse began with a spark: economic ruin in Sri Lanka, a quota decree in Bangladesh, a digital ban in Nepal. Yet the pattern was larger than its triggers. Centralizing regimes, brittle from corruption and conceit, drifted into fragility; a sudden grievance ignited fury; repression swelled into fracture; and by nightfall leaders vanished, leaving ministries abandoned and palaces hollow.

The choreography was eerily familiar: crowds swelling, blood on pavements, soldiers wavering, cabinets dissolving. In their wake rose not only new governments but a reminder that protest itself has become a republic, an arena of legitimacy where rulers are judged and toppled.

For partners watching from beyond, the lesson lies not in the collapse of leaders alone but in the endurance of societies. Deterrence in the Indo-Pacific cannot rest on fleets and treaties alone. It must reckon with republics of the street, where legitimacy falters or endures, where resilience is tested as much on the street as at sea, and where the balance of power is first unsettled.

Echoes of Protest

South Asia has long carried protest in its marrow. Bangladesh’s anti-Ershad movement in 1990 toppled a dictator after weeks of student-led demonstrations. Sri Lanka’s 1953 Hartal paralyzed Colombo in fury over food subsidies. Nepal’s Jana Andolan of 1990 and 2006 remade its constitutional order and ended a monarchy. Pakistan’s 2007 Lawyers’ Movement revived judicial independence after General Musharraf’s dismissal of the Chief Justice. India’s ‘Total Revolution’ movement of 1974–75 mobilized youth, students, and workers in ways that helped usher in the Emergency. Even Bhutan, often seen as insulated, had its share of demonstrations in the 2008 transition to constitutional monarchy. The Maldives saw youth-led pro-democracy protests in the 2000s, while Afghanistan, under both republic and Taliban, has witnessed students, women, and minorities take to the streets despite immense risks.

What differs are outcomes. In Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal, governments fell. In Pakistan, it was parliamentary maneuver, not the multitude, that forced change. In India, farmers compelled retreat but not collapse. In the Maldives, ballots shifted power where barricades could not. Protest in South Asia is constant, yet never certain; it can break dynasties or bend only policies, depending on where memory meets fracture.

Sri Lanka: Colombo’s Implosion

Sri Lanka’s fall in 2022 was the slow implosion of a dynasty that mistook inheritance for legitimacy. The drift came through dynastic consolidation: the Rajapaksas filled cabinets with kin, hollowed institutions, flaunted wealth while the economy cratered. I had watched the country’s unravelling for decades; first as a journalist embedded with the Tamil Tigers in the long war, later as a scholar tracing how patronage and repression outlived the battlefield. The illusion of victory was always fragile, and once governance decayed into corruption and decree, collapse was only a matter of time.

The trigger was economic ruin: inflation, shortages while shelves emptied and fuel queues wound for miles. Rash decrees banning fertilizer devastated fields, while corruption drained even the will to hope. The Aragalaya (“struggle”) rose from this ruin; not merely students and unions, but clergy, professionals, even the diaspora whose remittances were squandered. Tear gas dissolved into air, curfews failed, and soldiers hesitated. Ministers abandoned ship, resigning in clusters. By the time citizens entered the palace, wandering its chandeliers like tourists in the house of ghosts, the dynasty had ended.

What collapsed was more than a presidency. It was the conceit that palatial wealth could outlast the hunger of the betrayed. And the lesson stretched beyond Colombo: in a region where deterrence is too often measured only in fleets and aircraft, Sri Lanka showed how the rot of governance can unsettle security just as profoundly.

Bangladesh: Dhaka’s Revolt

In Bangladesh, collapse came in 2024, not from famine or fuel but from a rule about jobs. The restoration of quotas seemed small, technical, even trivial. But to students, it was the tightening of shackles already felt for years: narrowed democratic space, opposition erased, media throttled, corruption excused as loyalty’s reward.

With my notebook and camera in hand, I moved through Bangladesh in 2008, just after Sheikh Hasina’s party swept the polls, as the country adjusted to the scale of its surprise. That election was read as the first step back toward credible democracy after two years of military-backed caretaker rule, and as a mandate to end corruption. The optimism of that moment made the later tightening of shackles – narrowed democratic space, opposition erased, media throttled, corruption excused as the price of loyalty – all the more stark, turning the promise of reform into the prelude to revolt.

They marched, and the state answered as it always had: bullets, batons, blackouts. Dozens were killed, their names scattered into the dust. Yet each death multiplied the marchers. By dusk on August 5, Sheikh Hasina fled on a plane, abandoning not only her office but the myth of permanence.

The revolt was not confined to campuses. Bangladesh lives on its sons and daughters abroad, the remittances they send home, the daily lifelines of calls and transfers. When the internet was cut, the pact between rulers and ruled frayed beyond repair. The state had severed more than cables; it had cut the threads that bound sacrifice abroad to survival at home. And in a region where stability is often framed in terms of growth and geopolitics, Bangladesh showed how quickly endurance can dissolve.

Nepal: Kathmandu’s Digital Uprising

Nepal’s reckoning came in 2025, when the government sought to legislate silence in the age of networks. A ban on TikTok and Facebook might have seemed technical, but in a country where nearly a third of wealth depends on remittances, it cut deep. Sons in the Gulf and daughters in Malaysia could not see their families, could not send a joke, a prayer, a cry across the screen.

From fieldwork I co-conducted in Nepal in 2007, we argued in a study of the country’s earlier phone blackouts that shutting down networks cripples not only communication but also the fragile scaffolding of economy and politics. What we saw in villages and streets then, the dependence on connection for survival and dignity, was already the warning. That warning, carried forward across years, proved prophetic when students rose: the TikTok generation, born into networks rather than institutions. They filled the streets, and the state answered with bullets. Over fifty dead, but their deaths stiffened resolve. The army balked at massacre, and K.P. Oli resigned.

What ended was not simply a government. It was the illusion that identity could be commanded by decree, that silence could be engineered. Nepal’s first digital-rights revolution revealed a paradox: the more rulers sought to sever their citizens from each other, the more citizens found themselves in the act of resistance.

India: Buffers and Fractures

India has heard these echoes too. Farmers camped at Delhi’s gates for a year, sustaining each other across caste and class, until the government repealed its farm laws in 2021. Earlier, students and minorities gathered against the Citizenship Amendment Act. And in 2011, an anti-corruption campaign filled the capital with thousands, a reminder that even in the world’s largest democracy, patience has limits.

For decades, India’s federalism absorbed dissent, bending but not breaking. Opposition-led states offered platforms to critics; elections punished incumbents; courts, at times, offered reprieve. These buffers allowed India to withstand what might have toppled others. Yet buffers erode. They bent during the farmers’ siege, and may bend again. Endurance is not immunity.

The neighborhood offers its warning. Sri Lanka’s institutions bent until they snapped. Bangladesh’s growth masked narrowing space until a quota dispute revealed the hollowness beneath. Nepal’s federal experiment could not shield it from the force of digital-age grievance. India’s guardrails remain stronger, but they are not unbreakable.

The ‘Foreign Hand’

Across the region, the instinct to deflect blame outward has become reflex. The “foreign hand” is a Pavlovian response, most often aimed at the West, and above all at America. Pakistan has long leaned on it, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh invoke it when unrest spills into the streets, and India reaches for it whenever agitation threatens to swell beyond control. The bogeyman is convenient, but it cannot disguise the truth: collapse begins at home.

It is tempting to see a heavy external hand. Yet in case after case, the spark was domestic failure, not India, China, or the West. India entered mainly in the aftermath: stabilizer in Sri Lanka, lightning rod in Bangladesh, marginal in Nepal. China loomed in debt and diplomacy, the West in statements of concern. None could ignite the streets.

Faced with agitation at home, governments have often invoked the familiar specter of a “foreign hand,” alleging that protests are aided, abetted, or financed by hostile powers. The trope has long served to shift anger outward, to paint dissent as conspiracy. But no bogeyman can mask the failures that drive citizens to the street.

The lesson is sobering: external actors amplify, but the cause is within. For Washington and its allies, these upheavals revealed that deterrence in the Indo-Pacific is not secured by fleets or bases alone. It depends just as much on whether societies can withstand the shocks of corruption, economic collapse, or digital severance; on whether political orders can absorb fracture without imploding.

Patterns Across South Asia

Across these crises, governments fell when autocratizing drift met a sharp trigger. Unresolved conflicts, patronage systems, and fragile institutions do not vanish; they linger as shadows until a spark exposes their rot, as I argued in Ghosts at the Border: South Asia’s Unfinished Wars. The street, whether filled by students with placards, migrants’ families cut from their remittance lifelines, or citizens shut out of the ballot box, became the place where those shadows were named and resisted.

The outcomes varied: dynasties ended in Colombo, permanence dissolved in Dhaka, silence collapsed in Kathmandu. Elsewhere, rulers bent without breaking. Protest in South Asia remains constant yet uncertain, capable of toppling governments or merely denting their pretenses. The lesson for the region’s leaders is stark: autocratization buys time, not immunity. And when the choreography begins, it ends with flight into the dark.

The protest republics of South Asia remind us that legitimacy is never secured, only contested. States may arm themselves for deterrence abroad, but it is on the street, where citizens resist silence, scarcity, or fraud, that the true foundations of endurance are tested. When the foundation gives way, no arsenal can steady it.