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This season, once again, the street in Bangladesh fills before it decides why it has filled.

Bangladesh has once again become the place where South Asia’s unease gathers. The protests are familiar in form – students, slogans, police lines – but their cause resists precision. They are not only about water, though the rivers matter. They are not only about borders, though the dead along them are remembered. They are not only about diplomacy, though the language of insult and interference circulates freely.

What moves beneath these moments is older and more intimate: a feeling that pressure is being applied from beyond the horizon, that decisions are being made elsewhere and lived locally, that proximity itself has become a burden. India enters these scenes less as an actor than as a presence: structural and unavoidable, and therefore endlessly interpretable.

This essay begins here, not because Bangladesh is exceptional, but because it is emblematic. Over the past half-century, similar moments have surfaced across South Asia, appearing suddenly, intensifying quickly, and dissolving without resolution. Moments like this have come to be called “India Out”, though what they name is not an ideology so much as a recurring strain of proximity.

India is rarely absent in South Asia. Even where it is not invoked, it is felt: through rivers that thin without warning, through fuel queues that lengthen toward dusk, through borders that harden unexpectedly, through a rumour that arrives before reason can intervene. For many of its neighbours, India is not a policy problem so much as a condition of life: proximate, immense, and inescapable. It is this condition, more than any single action, that explains why, at moments of strain, the street turns outward and demands that India go.

These moments do not announce themselves as ideology. They do not sustain programs or carry manifestos. They appear instead as moods. A gathering thickens at a crossroads; a slogan hardens; a phrase repeats itself until it no longer sounds like news but like truth. By the time the words ‘India Out’ are painted or shouted, the work has already been done elsewhere: in the mind, in the image, in the shared sense that something has been taken, withheld, or imposed without consent.

Over decades, since India ceased to be an episodic actor and became a structural presence in the lives of its neighbours, such moments have surfaced repeatedly across Bangladesh, the Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. They differ in scale and consequence. Some pass without blood; others do not. Yet they share a peculiar intimacy. India is not a distant empire to be denounced, but a neighbour whose presence is already woven into daily life; into water, trade, labor, language, cinema, and news. 

To protest India, then, is not to reject an abstraction.........

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