Sri Lanka in 2022, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal and Kosovo in 2025, France in 2025 and 2026, Albania, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Spain, Italy, Argentina, Serbia, Hungary and India in 2026. Across continents, ideological lines and economic tiers, ordinary people have taken to the streets to confront a shared malaise – institutional hubris, political lethargy and systemic unaccountability of their ruling establishments.While many nations have responded to protests as an urgent wake-up call, India’s ruling dispensation has defaulted to a far more sinister defence mechanism, vilifying public outrage as an engineered conspiracy by extra-territorial forces to effect regime change. This paranoia is especially unfounded because unlike violent upheavals seen elsewhere, Indian protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, anchored firmly within the constitutional framework. Nevertheless, these protests and the government’s response have raised some profound questions for us as a nation.Firstly, any self-aware government’s default reflex when faced with citizen protests is self-introspection. After all, for ordinary citizens to abandon the quiet routine of their daily lives to take to the streets means that either policy has faltered or communication has broken down, or public distress has breached a threshold.A government for, by and of the people inevitably reaches this conclusion, and seeks ways to course-correct. It sees dissent as an act of patriotic duty, in wanting to make one’s own nation better. Given this, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government’s reflexive paranoia exposes a damning contradiction at its heart. For the BJP, the voter is an enlightened sovereign architect whose choice at the polling booth bestows absolute legitimacy on all that it does (and doesn’t do).Yet, the minute that same citizen steps onto the street to protest, that respect evaporates. The minute the regime doesn’t get blind conformity and compliance, citizens are caricatured as treacherous anti-nationals, colluding with a shadowy nexus of “foreign forces”. By treating protest as treason, the BJP government is reducing the citizen from a sovereign stakeholder to a subject.While Prime Minister Modi publicly vilified protesters as “enemies of the nation”, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat suggested they are “Western demonic forces” striving to “install their own proxies” and defence minister Rajnath Singh caricatured them as “instruments of anarchy”. To reduce ordinary citizens to mercenary actors clandestinely taking wire transfers from abroad to destroy their own nation is an extraordinary leap of imagination.Also read: Nepal’s Gen-Z Movement and the Ghostly Afterlives of RevolutionAs is assuming that civil society is being steered by external forces to undermine the stability of governments (even prompting the assertion from National Security Advisor Ajit Doval that civil society is the “new frontier of war”). Equally bizarre is the premise that mainstream political parties, which compete in democratic processes and (like all citizens) are fiercely patriotic, would blithely proxy for foreign powers simply for the sake of temporary electoral gains.To make these conspiratorial assumptions about legitimate democratic stakeholders operating within the constitutional framework is fundamentally undemocratic. We need to all ask ourselves this – why is our elected government assuming, with such practiced alacrity, that popular outrage is treason? Why does a government committed to Sabka Saath…Sabka Vishwas not fathom a situation where citizens act out of genuine grievance and dissatisfaction?Separately, by smearing citizens protesting for electoral integrity as “regime-change” agitators, the BJP has walked straight into a trap of its own making. Keep aside the fact that the BJP’s propaganda machinery (which has unleashed a coordinated wave of press conferences and social media propaganda) has no business functioning as a constitutional umpire’s bodyguard. The real irony lies in the party’s own admission.If a demand to audit voter rolls or replace the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) equals to “regime change” in the BJP’s eyes, it is tacitly acknowledging that its mandate is tethered to the CEC’s conduct. The BJP cannot claim that reforming the ECI brings down the government without confessing that the game was rigged to keep it in power; that its legitimacy rests not on popular consent, but institutional capture.Essentially, the BJP is telling the nation that demands for electoral integrity are not democratic imperatives to be accommodated, but threats to its hold on power. This is the crux of India’s problem: the integrity of the ECI is inseparable from that of the broader institutional framework, which the BJP has systematically subjected to a gleichschaltung to further itself.Secondly, regardless of how hard the BJP caricatures and denounces protesters, the deeper structural fracture can no longer be disguised. These nation-wide protests are not foreign-engineered chaos, but represent the friction of a systemic crisis of power. Most societies are driven by a shared legend of a future utopia (which Prime Minister Nehru famously invoked as “building the noble mansion of free India”).This horizon animated both national aspiration and mass consciousness. Over the last decade however, India has lost its horizon of the Indian Dream. Fractured by socio-cultural polarisation, politico-ideological fault-lines as well as economic stagnation, the silent majority can no longer picture a better tomorrow. Consequently, their energies are not focused on a utopian future, or on how to collectively breathe life into these goals. Instead society is focused on mythical and historical utopias.Also read: As the American Dream Gets Costlier, India Must Turn This Opportunity Into a ‘Reverse Brain Drain’Unable to deliver tangible progress and possibly riding on stolen mandates, the BJP has substituted a forward vision with high-voltage nostalgia marketing (by striving to establish a cultural hegemony, and what John Koenig famously referred to as anemoia, which is essentially a longing for a past the young never lived).For over a decade, the BJP has relentlessly imposed the narrative of how a pristine Hindu golden age was destroyed by Muslim/Christian invaders, and subsequently the architects of modern India. However, pinched by economic stagnation and sickened by curdled politico-ideological promises, the silent majority is no longer quietly enduring the state’s betrayal. In the face of a smug establishment, millions are asking hard questions, and pouring into the streets to reclaim (and rebuild) the nation.(Extra)ordinary citizens across caste, creed, region, language and gender are increasingly asking one inescapable question – who does their government work for? They see a future without opportunities for upward socio-economic mobility (with surging unemployment, unaffordable housing and basic needs, inaccessible education etc.It is no coincidence that the World Inequality Lab data shows that India’s richest one percent holds over 40% of national wealth – higher than under the British Raj – and the ILO’s India Employment Report shows youth account for 83% of the unemployed workforce.Demonstrators gather for a counter-protest organised by India Diaspora UK to express support for the Indian government and Election Commission, at Parliament Square, in London, October 17, 2026. Photo: PTI.Indians today feel helpless, with no influence in decisions that shape their lives, concentrated political power, and unfair electoral processes. They feel cheated and angry, with public resources like land, national wealth and infrastructure being parcelled out to crony capitalists and failing public services. And most of all they feel ignored and repressed, with an unaccountable government which crushes civic rights and freedoms whenever they ask questions.Like in the rest of the world, what citizens – especially the young – are demanding is the right to shape their own future. Even though the protests in India differ from other global demonstrations in form and surface issues, they share a common despair of an uncertain future. At their core, these global protests are expressions of frustration with a political order that consistently prioritises entrenched business, political and bureaucratic interests over the public good.Thirdly, these protests are also symptoms and indictments of progressive parties globally. When progressive forces abandoned their historic promise of an equitable redistribution of wealth, agency and power – both domestically and globally – and become accomplices of hyper-financialised techno-capitalism, they created an ideological vacuum.It is this standpattism which paved the way for the Right. Right-wing populist-autocrats have hijacked the void created by progressives, insidiously channelising material desperation and socio-economic dread into divisive culture and (mis)information wars.These populist-autocrats have stripped progressives of their historic moral high ground, caricaturing them as custodians of entrenched corporate and political cartels hoarding power at the expense of the silent majority.Consider how all populist-autocrats operate. Every single one converts public disaffection into a sledgehammer against democratic guardrails. US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi target the deep state, Argentinian President Javier Milei attacks la casta (the political caste), United Kingdom Leader of Reform Nigel Farage targets “Westminster’s political class”, Leader of the National Rally Parliamentary Group in the French National Assembly Marine Le Pen targets the “Paris/Brussels Technocrats” and Brazilian Senator Flávio Bolsonaro the electoral court or left-wing coalitions.Also read: ‘To My Dear Friend’: Modi Congratulates Fierce Trump Critic Lula on ElectionSimilarly, rather than confronting global structural problems, these populist-autocrats invariably pose hyper-digestible villains. Decades of deindustrialisation, unemployment, wage-stagnation, cost of living crisis and state withdrawal are flattened into manufactured panic over foreign immigration, insidious “globalist elites” or the bogeyman of “woke ideology.”Every single one sells a mythical utopias promised on the promise of national resurrection. Whether it is Trump’s “Make America Great Again”, Sarah Knafo and Éric Zemmour’s existential call for “Reconquête” (re-taking of France), Farage and Le Pen’s crusade for a “Restoration of Sovereignty” or Modi’s civilisational rhetoric of “Amrit Kaal” and “Viksit Bharat”, the underlying mechanism is identical.They all promise the recreating of a mythical golden past whilst masking the authoritarian future they actually aim to herald. Clothed in anti-establishment armour, these populist-autocrats are pulling off the ultimate political heist by projecting themselves as the real champions of the working poor while delivering tax cuts for oligarchs, environmental deregulation, the erosion of labour rights and civic rights and freedoms.By surrendering their historic promise of radical economic redistribution and settling for tepid incrementalism, progressive parties worldwide have opened themselves up to attacks of being custodians of an unequal status quo. For example, former UK prime minister Keir Starmer emphasised technocratic supply-side reform while refusing to reverse key spending cuts or introducing aggressive capital wealth taxation.Similarly, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is partly gaining ground because of glacial attempts to address public disaffection, like, for example, incremental minimum wage hikes amidst the maintenance of rigid debt-brake policies.Sadly, Western progressive politics is also overwhelmingly filtered through focus groups and polished campaign machinery designed to appease “median swing voters”. Essentially, these centrist-progressives position themselves as “more competent managers” of the existing system, leaving the underlying socio-economic architecture intact. The problem is that if voters have to choose between nicer managers of neoliberal decay and demagogic autocrats promising a panacea to all ills, they will invariably opt for the more convincing option.Voters are seeking through this risk-averse and bland politics, which is creating a vacuum of passion that the Right easily exploits with raw (even rabid) anti-establishment energy. Frankly, unless progressives urgently recalibrate how wealth, capital, and democratic agency are distributed (and find a more convincing way to communicate their sincerity at effecting a policy revolution), the global authoritarian wave will continue to feed and grow on legitimate public anger.Also read: The Right Has a Plan. What About the Progressives?Amidst this global crisis of progressive politics, Hungary, Serbia and Brazil offer striking counter-examples. In each nation, progressive parties built strong alliances with civil society, mobilised at the grassroots, and tackled everyday economic anxieties (whether indebtedness, cost of living, wage stagnation, weak economy, education etc.). They also managed to bypass the extensive support that cloud-capitalists extended to their opponents. Consequently, each one of them were able to convert public anger into electoral victory, and stemmed the Right-wing tsunami.India takes this further, and Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi has been operationalising a blueprint for a structural counter-offensive against the Right. Rather than managing the existing system, Gandhi has demanded the removal of the 50% legal cap on affirmative action and conducting a nationwide caste census (a survey mapping the inventory of wealth, asset ownership, and institutional representation).In doing this, he has reframed inequality not as an incremental policy oversight that can be redressed by technocratic solutions, but as a systemic structural problem which excludes 85-90% of the population (OBCs, Dalits, Adivasis, and minorities) from India’s constitutional promise.This is a revival of positive liberty (adapting from Isaiah Berlin) because it tangibly promises the silent majority real material agency. Likewise, by putting himself on the line along with satyagrahis fighting against electoral malfeasance (like the jan sunwais of voter rolls in Delhi’s Trilokpuri in 2026), rot in the education system (the protest outside the Prime Minister’s residence in 2026), or rising atrocities (like in Hathras in 2020, Rae Bareilly in 2025, or Una in 2016) Gandhi has consistently stood with those who the BJP caricatured as existential threats to the nation.The significance of this frontline solidarity cannot be overstated. For 13 years, the BJP had strived to delegitimise all dissent as disorder and presented themselves as the bulwark protecting a supposedly threatened majority. Led by Gandhi, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) bloc’s interventions have successfully ruptured the BJP’s model of antagonistic democracy and challenge its manufactured false consciousness.In doing so, he has reclaimed the moral legitimacy of dissent. That is why today, an increasing number of people see the satyagrahi not as an anti-national but as citizens making legitimate political claims.At a juncture where nation after nation is capitulating to the Right, Gandhi stands out as a rare leader bucking the global trend. Through disruptive mass campaigns like the Bharat Jodo Yatra, Samvidhan Bachao Sammelans and guerrilla satyagrahas, including the forthcoming November 1 rally in Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan, he has not just abandoned cautious centrism but reclaimed the lost edge of progressive politics.By painstakingly dragging public discourse back to the battleground that truly matters: systemic corruption, rampant crony capitalism, institutional rot, and the staggering concentration of wealth and power, he has sidestepped the Right’s trap of religious-nationalist polarisation. These efforts are finally demolishing the narrow domestic walls that the BJP built into every neighbourhood and home for over a decade.In doing so, Gandhi has restored a fundamental truth our freedom struggle bequeathed to our Constitution – the Republic belongs not to the government of the day, but to the citizens who give it life. This is also a much needed reminder of what binds us together – our common humanity.To march for our common humanity (as millions will do on November 1) is to fulfil the highest duty of citizenship. This march is the moment India reclaims her soul, and no regime can stop a people who have finally remembered who they are.Pushparaj Deshpande is Samruddha Bharat Foundation’s Director and editor of The Great Indian Manthan (Penguin).