India does not have a protest problem. It has a responsiveness problem that periodically expresses itself through protest. The distinction matters. Democracies are designed to absorb dissent.
Across the country, in recent months, one has seen a wide spectrum of mobilisations. Students have agitated over campus decisions and living conditions; anganwadi workers have pressed for long-pending honorarium revisions; farmer groups have signalled renewed anxieties over trade and procurement frameworks; youth activists have experimented with theatrical forms of protest to capture attention in an algorithmic age; and universities have attempted temporary restrictions, triggering counter-accusations of democratic overreach. Each of these movements has adopted a different form, scale, and emotional pitch. Each has drawn a different institutional response, ranging from engagement to prohibition to policing. Yet, in the relentless churn of the news cycle, the deeper question often goes unasked. Do we, as citizens, meaningfully examine these signals unless the disruption enters our own daily lives?
Consider the recent aggregator taxi strike in Mumbai. Large numbers of passengers were stranded, fares surged unpredictably, and urban mobility tightened with very little visible coordination to cushion the citizens. Drivers argued economic distress and platform asymmetry. Aggregators cited contractual frameworks. State agencies largely confined themselves to doing almost nothing. When competing economic actors withdraw service in a regulated urban ecosystem, where does responsibility for continuity of public convenience ultimately reside?
This is not an argument against the right to protest or strike. That right is embedded in the democratic compact. Nor is it a case for heavy-handed intervention in every sectoral dispute. Markets require flexibility and labour requires voice. India’s governance architecture has become highly capable at building large systems, from digital payments to identity rails. It is less consistently agile in managing friction at the interface between citizens and service ecosystems. When disruptions occur, accountability often diffuses and eventually is forgotten or ignored, giving way to the next bigger narrative.
The persistence of protests across sectors should, therefore, be read less as episodic unrest and more as distributed feedback. India’s formal democratic institutions remain intact and vigorous. Yet, the lived experience of democratic listening often feels uneven. Electoral verdicts arrive every few years. Administrative processes unfold continuously but slowly. Public consultation, though improving in some sectors, still tends to occur after political or policy contours have largely hardened.
What has also changed, and insufficiently acknowledged in policy circles, is the evolving grammar of protest itself. In the age of algorithmic attention, dissent is no longer directed only at the state; it is staged for visibility in a crowded digital arena where symbolism often travels faster than substance. From theatrical disruptions to hashtag storms and meme cascades, the objective is increasingly to compel notice rather than patiently negotiate outcomes. This does not automatically delegitimise protest, but it does complicate democratic signalling. For governments, the risk is overreacting to spectacle or not responding at all. For citizens, the risk is normalising outrage without sustained engagement. And for institutions, the deeper question persists: when electoral verdicts are episodic and deliberative forums appear compressed, by what everyday metrics should the public judge whether democratic listening is genuinely functioning?
Even within Parliament, the citizen as distant observer often confronts a troubling optics gap. Legislative productivity in terms of bill passage may remain high, yet the depth of deliberative debate visible to the public frequently appears thin relative to the complexity of the issues being legislated. Sessions are disrupted. Discussions are compressed. In a democracy that prides itself on argumentative tradition, perception of diminished deliberation carries long-term institutional costs.
The policy question, therefore, is not whether protests should occur. They will and should with civility. The more consequential question is whether governance systems are evolving fast enough to absorb citizen feedback before it escalates into street expression or service disruption.
First, grievance redress mechanisms require structural strengthening and independent audits. India has built multiple digital portals and helplines, but their credibility ultimately rests on time-bound resolution and visible closure rates. Ministries and state governments would benefit from publicly accessible dashboards that track grievance lifecycles, escalation timelines, and departmental accountability. Where citizens see movement, the impulse to mobilise reduces.
Second, regulatory frameworks in sectors that directly affect daily life, such as urban mobility platforms, gig work ecosystems, and essential local services, need clearer continuity protocols. When disputes arise between platforms and service providers, there must be pre-defined minimum service obligations or contingency arrangements that protect public interest without undermining legitimate labour negotiation. The absence of such protocols converts private disputes into public hardship.
Third, parliamentary and legislative processes require greater visible deliberative depth. This is not a partisan critique but an institutional one. Democracies do not weaken when they argue in the open.
Even when the state, for reasons of political strategy or narrative positioning, may view a particular demand as unworthy of engagement, the democratic compact requires something more patient. With the narrow and necessary exception of national security concerns, most grievances rooted in difference of view deserve structured space and time for reasoned debate. That, after all, is the operating promise of a constitutional democracy.
India’s democratic story is still fundamentally strong. The republic retains institutional depth, electoral vitality, and constitutional resilience. Yet, the texture of citizen expectation has changed faster than the pace of institutional adaptation.
Protest, in that sense, is not the disease. It is often the early symptom. The real policy task before the state, regulators, and institutional leadership is to ensure that the system hears the signal before the volume rises to a level that imposes avoidable cost on the very citizens democracy is meant to serve.
Dr Srinath Sridharan is a policy researcher and corporate adviser. X: @ssmumbai
