Opinion | The Protest Economy: How The Subcontinent Has Turned Legitimacy Into Narrative Warfare |
In December 2025, a protest in Dhaka did something unusual. It did not change a law, topple a government, or occupy a ministry. Yet within hours, India summoned Bangladesh’s envoy and visa operations were disrupted. The march itself never reached the Indian High Commission.
The narrative did.
This is the defining political shift underway in the Indian subcontinent. Protests are no longer primarily instruments of domestic bargaining. They are mechanisms for external signalling, designed to force diplomatic reaction, international visibility, and narrative dominance. What appears as disorder is, in fact, a system: a protest economy where outrage substitutes governance and attention becomes leverage.
To understand why this works, one must look beyond individual incidents and examine incentives, data, and history.
For much of the last decade, Bangladesh was held up as an economic success story. Between 2010 and 2022, GDP growth averaged above 6 per cent. Poverty rates fell sharply. Export earnings crossed $50 billion. Yet institutional trust moved in the opposite direction. Election participation declined. Opposition space narrowed. Courts and regulatory bodies lost credibility in public perception. This divergence — economic growth without institutional consent — created a vacuum.
Political science has a name for this: institutional exhaustion. When formal channels cease to absorb dissent, protest becomes the only remaining site where power can be seen and felt. But protest itself has evolved. In an algorithmic media environment, its success is no longer measured by policy concessions but by reach.
That is why protest language escalates so quickly. Student leaders invoke geopolitics not because they control borders or armies, but because such language travels. A slogan framed in domestic terms mobilises thousands. A slogan framed in sovereignty terms mobilises millions across borders, screens, and newsrooms. The goal is not execution. It is circulation.
India enters this narrative not by accident but by historical design. Since 1971, India has occupied a dual position in Bangladesh’s political memory: indispensable to liberation, yet perpetually available as a symbol of dominance. This duality is empirically visible. Text analysis of Bangladeshi political discourse over decades shows that references to “interference" and........