The following is the text of Neera Chandhoke’s plenary address at the meeting of the International Political Science Association in Seoul in July 2025. From the Arab Spring in 2011 to Bangladesh in July/August 2024, and from New York in 2011 to popular protests against President Yoon Sukyeol’s attempt to impose martial law in Seoul – a million people assembled on December 14, 2024, outside the National Assembly when voting on the motion to impeach the president was taking place – we witness a major transformation of 20th century forms of political engagement. These protests are de-centred, leaderless, fluid, quick to respond to new circumstances, and they rely on social media. The sudden and ephemeral nature of these protests have shifted the ground from beneath our feet. Despite criticism about lack of leaders, or of an ideology, an agenda, and a programme of social and economic transformation, it is this form of protest that has erupted in practically all parts of the world that are ruled by autocrats. Though autocracies impose soul destroying silence, we hear at unexpected moments a rising crescendo of catchy slogans to the tune of popular music.Attempts to conceptualize the significance of resistance in a digital age can prove difficult since these forms do not resemble, even remotely, revolutionary moments that have clear ideologies and strategies of mobilisation, hierarchy of leadership and programmes of social and economic transformation. Nor do they resemble social movements in civil society which strive to provide an alternative to the power-hungry state and the profit driven market.Let me make a couple of prefatory points before venturing to make sense of quintessentially twenty-first century styles resistance. One, a great deal of sophisticated work has been done in political theory on the relationship between power and resistance and which component precedes the other after 2011. Arguably the exercise of power per se does not catapult resistance provided power presents itself as moral authority. In South Asia we see the eruption of big and spectacular protests because we find abuse of political power and institutionalized injustice. We are not speaking of everyday resistance, significant though it may be. We are speaking of flareups of collective anger at the squalid and inhuman conditions to which citizens have been banished. We are speaking of the ugly face of institutionalized injustice. And we are speaking of the perceptible gap between liberal constitutions and autocratic practices.Two, the usual criticism is that spontaneous resistance has no agenda of social and economic transformation, no mobilizational strategies, and no intent to link up with trade unions or oppositional political parties. Resistance may well be chancy, contingent and ephemeral. We need to recollect that in autocratic states accepted forms of protests-marches, rallies, and sit-downs- are simply not available to protestors. Protestors have to dodge the relentless gaze of surveillance states that control the lives of citizens in ways unknown to earlier states. It is precisely this genre of protests that has swept the world since 2011, forcing at least four heads of state to resign, and two of them to flee their country.Three, to judge this form of resistance from the vantage point of revolutionary movements or social movements of civil society is not only unfair, it is bad methodology. Let us therefore suspend judgement from the vantage point of organized protests, and consider the ways popular protests contribute to the literature and practices of resistance in autocratic states. Let us view these protests in their own historical specificity. This is both fair and unprejudiced.To understand the nature of these protests I draw upon E.P. Thompson’s celebrated essay in the journal, Past and Present on the ‘Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’ (1961). Vehemently disagreeing with interpretations that saw food riots and other protests in the country as spasmodic, Thompson suggested that it is possible to detect legitimising notions in eighteenth century modes of resistance. A different set of dynamics marked out these protests. Men and women were inspired by the belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs, and that in this they were supported by the wider consensus of the community. This consensus was so strong that it overrode fear or deference.The food riot in 18th century England was a highly complex form of direct popular action, suggests Thompson. It was disciplined and it had clear objectives. Riots were triggered off by soaring prices, by malpractices and by hunger. Significantly, he suggests that these grievances operated within a popular consensus on what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, etc.These practices were in turn grounded upon a consistently traditional view of social norms and obligations, and the proper economic function of several parties within the community. Thompson conceived of these characteristics as constituting the moral economy of the poor. Any act that outraged these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation, was the usual occasion for direct action. While this moral economy cannot be described as political in any advanced sense, nevertheless it cannot be described as unpolitical either, since it supposed definite, and passionately held, notions of the common weal-notions which, indeed, found some support in the paternalistic tradition of the authorities. These notions the people echoed so loudly in their turn that the authorities were in some measure, the prisoners of the people. This is the framework I adopt in the argument below.People shout slogans during a rally to celebrate the ouster of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol in downtown Seoul, South Korea, Saturday, April 5, 2025. Photo: AP/PTI.The Signature of AutocracyLet us perceive the supreme irony of autocracies. The autocrat retains and offers ritual nods to constitutions and institutions, but forgets that constitutional democracy has captured the imagination of citizens. The modern constitution is a social contract based on reciprocal obligations. It confers entitlement on citizens in their own right, transforms them from subjects to citizens, and lays the ground for political obligation. The relationship between the obligation of the state to secure the wellbeing of the people and the obligation of citizens to obey the diktats of the government, constitutes in the sense theorised by E.P Thompson, the moral economy of modern constitutionalism.However skilled the autocrat may be in evading responsibility for damaging democracy, there comes a time when repeated violations of the codes of this moral economy provides a trigger for resistance. When expectations that the government will ensure wellbeing and non-discrimination are belied, when rights of citizens are suspended, when neither a captive media or a caged judiciary is willing to fight to restore these rights, and when the autocrat casts a miasma of fear and suspicion on society, we gasp for breath.Brahma Prakash, author of Body On The Barricades, writes “I take the risk to assume that at least some of us are feeling suffocated by the situation shaping Indian society. We are feeling barricaded, chained in our bodies and spaces. I am looking for words and phrases to describe the times we are living through. For me, no other words match the potential and vulnerability of ‘I can’t breathe’. I am looking for a figurative image that can capture his situation in body and action. The image I see is that of the body on the barricades.” The feeling he calls breathlessness draws upon the condition that afflicted people struck by the pandemic. The words ‘I can’t breathe’ were uttered by George Floyd in May 2020 when he was ruthlessly murdered by a white racist policeman in the United States.ResistanceIf struggling to take breath is a physical response to breathlessness, resistance is a response to abuse of power that violating the moral economy of constitutional democracy leaves us breathless. We struggle to take breath. For this we must struggle. When power is twisted and becomes exploitative, when it damages our psyches and our bodies, and when it descends from moral authority to tyranny, spontaneous protest is the only way out in a country that imprisons activists, satirists, cartoonists, and columnists.The political assertion of a people may be a transitional phenomenon, it may be ephemeral, and it may be the outcome of contingency. But it serves to hammer in the message that masses can come together and cast doubt on the autocrats’ competence to rule, his many injustices, and his cynical exploitation of emotional and material vulnerabilities. The picture presented by autocratic states in South Asia is not pretty, yet there is a glimmer of hope in the way new and innovative forms of resistance have erupted onto the political horizon resulting in heads of government in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh fleeing the country in the face of massive protests.Take Sri Lanka that has experienced decades of unrest, violence, uncertainty, a civil war, several humanitarian disasters as well as outbursts of resistance. The country has an active civil society focussed on a vast range of issues from political rights to wellbeing. Families of disappeared victims oppose disappearances state during the civil war till today. The latest demonstration on 8 May 2025 marked 3000 days of continuous demonstrations. Civil society groups have protested against atrocities, threats to freedom of expression, repression of media, and the wrongful impeachment of Chief Justice Bandaranayake who presided over two panels that ruled against the government in 2013. Despite state sponsored violence, intimidation and other tactics including arbitrary restrictions, resistance in Sri Lanka developed new forms of protest- street demonstrations, litigation, public debates, and through art, theatre and social media. The judiciary has become, as in other countries, an arena of constitutional and political contestation.Yet people were completely unprepared for the economic crisis that hit them in 2022. Public anger erupted as thousands of citizens struggled to find essential items such as fuel, food and medicine, and confronted disruption of essential services which impacted education, livelihoods, and nutrition. The country suffered from thirteen hours power cuts. The economy ground to a halt as inflation surged and foreign reserves dwindled.Popular anger against the government that failed to ensure that citizens live the way human beings ought to live was intensified by resentment against the three brothers of the Rajapaksa family who held high public office as president, prime minister, and defense minister. They held the fate of the country in their hands.The result could have been predicted. On March 9, 2022 protesting crowds gathered at Galla Face Green, a popular beach facing public space in Colombo. This heralded the beginnings of a major movement against President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government. The protests fetched wide support because the witty slogan ‘GotaGoHome’ was not about the removal of an individual, it asked for the dismantling of a corrupt and appropriative system. The government had proved unworthy, people were no longer obliged to obey its laws.Bangladesh has a history of resistance to military governments and arbitrary measures; for instance the 1990 democracy movement to oust the Ershad government that had ruled the country since 1982, the 2006/2007 student protests against a military backed caretaker government on charges of electoral corruption, and the student led 2018 movement against authoritarianism, corruption, erosion of democracy and for reform of the quota system that granted 30% quota in civil service jobs for descendants of participants in the freedom movement in 1971. The quota system dates back to 1972 when it was introduced by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. It was cancelled in 2018 by the government in response to student protests that charged that the system was unfair and discriminatory because it benefited the Awami League, a party that had played a major role in the war of independence.Protests on the Raju Bhaskar statue – dedicated to student leader Raju who died fighting – at the Dhaka University area. Photo: Shome BasuIn 2024, protests that lasted for about five weeks from July 1 to August 5 were triggered by a High Court decision to restore the controversial 30 percent quota. An organization called Students Against Discrimination began to agitate from 1 July 2024. The agitation developed over a short period into a movement demanding justice and the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of the Awami League.India has a history of resistance since independence, and we witnessed the rise of civil society organizations after the end of the internal Emergency in 1977. In 2019 the trigger for resistance was provided by the enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act by the Bharatiya Janata Party government that had come to power for the second time on a huge majority. Cleared by the cabinet in the previous week the CAA, passed by Parliament on 11 December 2019 grants Indian citizenship to refugees who seek to escape religious persecution in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, three countries in which Islam is the official religion. Eligible categories included Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Christians, Sikhs, Parsees, and Christians. Muslims were excluded.The connection between citizenship and religion clearly violates the Constitution of India and carries ill tidings for the Muslims. The Home Minister who had piloted the Bill, stated that the CAA would be followed by the implementation of a National Register of Citizens. Indians would have to prove their citizenship by providing relevant papers when asked. Failure to do so would result in detention of ‘illegal immigrants’, and their deportation.File image of anti-CAA protests in 2020. Photo: Ismat Ara/The WireMost of us despaired. The opposition had hardly a presence in Parliament, and civil liberty and human rights organizations have been banned. There was no one to take up cudgels on behalf of the Muslim community. And then the political miracle happened. On 15 December 2019 students belonging to the University-Jamia Milia Islamia-in Delhi came out in large numbers to protest against the Constitutional Amendment Act. The procession marched through the streets of an upper-class colony in South Delhi carrying banners that demanded withdrawal of the law that connected citizenship rights with religion. The procession was savagely attacked by the police who proceeded to ransack the university. Several students were injured. The incident sparked off massive protests led by university students across the country that lasted till February 2020, when engineered communal riots erupted in North East Delhi. Subsequently the outbreak of the pandemic cleared streets and public spaces of protestors.The Shadow of State Coercion Protests in all three countries were met by appalling state coercion particularly in Bangladesh. The government deployed the police, para-military forces and party members of the Awami League to repress the agitation. According to an Amnesty report, students of Dhaka University holding placards and flags were demonstrating peacefully on 15 July 2024. Suddenly they were attacked by a group belonging to the Bangla Chattra League an affiliate of the Awami League armed with sticks, rods, and clubs, as well as by a few individuals brandishing revolvers. The police used tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber and live bullets to shoot indiscriminately into crowds and directly at students. One police officer told Human Rights Watch that he witnessed officers firing at vital organs.In the afternoon of 16 July police attacked protestors in front of Begum Rokeya University in the north-western city of Rangpur. The protest was coordinated by a student Abu Sayed. He stood up and confronted the police with his arms wide open. At least two police officers fired 12-gauge shotguns directly at his chest from across the street. They fired two more times. He was 25 years old.News about the death of Abu Sayed and other students spread across the country and sparked off a mass uprising of students and their parents, citizens and opposition parties. On 17 July the state broadcaster and two brand new metro-rail stations that had been shown as Hasina’s gift to the country’s infrastructure were vandalized. Slogans referred to her as a fascist and a killer.According to a report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk, government violence against students left about 1400 hundred people dead. In addition to those killed by the security and intelligence forces of the former government, and Awami League party associates, thousands were injured including one young boy who was shot in the hand at point blank range for throwing stones.“There are reasonable grounds to believe that officials of the former government, its security and intelligence apparatus, together with violent elements associated with the former ruling party committed serious and systematic human rights violations” the Human Rights Commissioner reported. Mr Turk continued that some of the gravest violations detailed in the report may constitute international crimes that can be heard by the International Criminal Court. Alleged crimes against student-led protest included hundreds of extra-judicial killings, extensive arbitrary arrests, detention and torture, and ill treatment of children as well as gender based violence. These were carried out with the knowledge, coordination and direction of the former political leadership and senior security officers, in order to suppress the protests, and secure the tenure of the government.On 19 July 75 protestors, journalists and bystanders, were killed The government imposed a communications shutdown for five days, and a shoot at sight curfew was implemented. Sheikh Hasina taunted the protestors as descendants of Razakars or traitors who had sided with the Pakistani army during the liberation war. The students turned the sarcastic phrase on its head by chanting-Who are you? Who am I? Razakar, Razakar. Who said this-autocrats, autocrats.In the middle of the protests, on 21 July the Supreme Court issued an order to reduce the quota from 30 to 5 percent. The protestors widened their demands to ask for justice and accountability for those who had been killed, injured and arrested. They wanted nothing less than justice.On 5 August a massive rally composed of hundreds of thousands of citizens defied the curfew and managed to cross the barricades and enter the capital. The police was given orders to shoot at sight. Confronted by the massive procession, the security forces retreated and crowds marched to the residence of the prime minister. She was given 45 minutes by her security staff to flee to safety. The protestors stormed the National Parliament and the residence of the PM who had fled to India. The government collapsed.Such was the anger against the Awami League that crowds vandalized statues of the founder of Bangladesh Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, looted his home in Dhaka that had been converted into a museum, and defaced posters of Sheikh Hasina on public buildings. They destroyed the cult that had been built up around the founders of Bangladesh. They changed the narrative of a country that had begun its life as a democracy, but which was rapidly transformed into autocracy. This was a significant symbolic act because till then the penalties for questioning the cult of the founder were extremely high.In Sri Lanka state coercion followed the course of the protest. News about a mass rally to demand the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, started gaining traction among a sizeable proportion of citizens. The rally was initially to be held on 3 April, but on the night of 31 March a rally that had started as a peaceful demonstration against shortages of essential items, extended electricity cuts, and soaring costs of living was transformed into a massive assembly. Hundreds of people who heard about the protest, or watched it on their television joined in, raising the numbers of protestors to tens of thousands. Crowds chanted slogans embodying great and irresolvable anger against the government.On July 9, 2022 a huge procession wended its way to the Presidential house a short distance away. Security forces guarding the palace called for adequate reinforcements and used tear gas and water cannons to dissuade the procession from entering the premises. Despite the onslaught thousands of people marched to the presidential palace and occupied it to demand that Gotabaya step down. The president was not home. The physical occupation of an opulent palace signified immense public anger over the misuse of public money by leaders.The occupation was one of the most spectacular events beamed across the world by the social media and television. Young people danced in the corridors, bands played festivetunes, and others splashed in the pool with one man soaping himself luxuriously as onlookers cheered. TV screens showed Mr Kaluthantri relaxing in the majestic bed of the President on which was spread the Presidential flag. He took away the flag so that the president would not be able to function without his symbol of power. And crowds took away mementoes from bed sheets to books.On July 13, 2022 President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his family fled to the Maldives amid escalating protests, and onwards on 14 July to Singapore and then Thailand. He officially submitted his resignation via e-mail to the Speaker of the Sri Lankan Parliament. This was the first time a sitting President of Sri Lanka had resigned in the middle of his term. Gotabaya’s elder brother and patriarch of the clan, Mahinda Rajapaksa was forced to quit as Prime Minister in May, after an attack on the main protest site in the capital by his supporters led to the outbreak of violence throughout the island. The third brother, former finance minister Basil Rajapaksa also resigned from his parliamentary seat and tried unsuccessfully to leave the island. The protests had led to the mass resignations of the Rajapaksa clan that was immensely popular at one time because it had come down heavily on the Tamils who demanded regional autonomy.On July 15, 2022, Ranil Wickremesinghe an opposition leader was sworn in as the acting ninth President for the remaining time of the presidential tenure. He officially assumed office on July 21, 2022. Wickremesinghe, six times former Prime Minister from the United National Party, set about rebuilding the economy, and according to reports protecting the Rajapaksa family. He, reportedly, staved off the international demand for investigation of human rights violations by the government.Sri Lanka President Ranil Wickremesinghe with IMF officials in Colombo. Photo: Twitter/@RW_UNP.The occupation of the presidential palace, which lasted for five days, had been called off by the leaders on 14 July 2022. They announced a peaceful withdrawal from the palace, the Presidential Secretariat and the Prime Minister’s office, and committed to the continuation of protest by other means. Hours after the election of the new President, on July 22 the military was deployed to clear the crowds at Galle Face. Dozens of soldiers swooped down on the site, dismantling tents and other belongings of the demonstrators. This was surprising because Wickremesinghe was regarded as a moderate political veteran. Now he used the Prevention of Terrorism Act to target human rights activists, journalists, and lawyers critical of the government. This led to widespread condemnation from scholars across the world and international organisations including Amnesty International. They demanded a moratorium on the use of the Act. He also used emergency regulations that granted additional power to law enforcement, and to restrict freedom of movement and expression through all means including social media blackouts.Mr Kaluthantri of the Presidential flag fame surrendered and spent 21 days in custody on charges of desecrating the presidential flag. I have no regrets, he said, I did it for the country and the people. He acknowledged that the protests succeeded in removing the President but did not change the public culture of politics. But this was the first time in the history of the island state that the serving head of state had resigned mid-term and was compelled to leave the country.In India, a predominantly student movement marched in solidarity with fellow citizens who were in danger of being disenfranchised by the CAA and the NRC, holding the national flag in one hand, and copies of the Constitution in the other. They walked peacefully, and assembled peacefully in public spaces. They held up posters of three revolutionary leaders- Bhagat Singh, Gandhi and Ambedkar. Their objective was not to question the legitimacy of the state, their project was to challenge an unjust law. They put into practice the Gandhian dictum that the people have the political competence to question unjust laws, and that we have the moral capacity to show solidarity for our own people. They read out the Preamble of the Constitution of India and transformed it into a profound political document. Now the carrying of a pocket book edition of the Constitution of India has become a rite of citizenship.In Shaheen Bagh a residential locality in South Delhi, a spectacular sit-in by hundreds of Muslim women, some of them elderly grandmothers in the freezing winter of Delhi made headlines the world over. Thousands gathered on New Year’s Eve to sing the national anthem. This was their own protest against divisiveness. On 19 January the demonstrators observed two minutes silence in memory of Hindus who had been forced out of the Kashmir Valley. On Republic Day three women hoisted the Indian flag. Murals, posters, and installations transformed an empty urban space into a political site as political satirists, poets and even enthusiastic children performed on a makeshift stage. Other people set up snack and soft drink kiosks to serve the protestors.” Sikhs came from Punjab and set up community kitchens to cook for them. Gurudwaras opened their doors. This was a magnificent display of solidarity. However, retribution was not far behind. Individuals fired at the crowd and BJP leaders made provocative speeches. The result could have been predicted, the outbreak of communal riots in North-East Delhi in the last half of February 2020 for which students and the Muslim community was blamed. This put a sudden end to popular protest. In March 2020 the pandemic swept the country pushing people into their homes and stripping public spaces of any vestige of protest.These protest movements erupted in countries that use draconian legislation to curb freedoms, particularly the freedom to protest. Autocrats have cast a pall of fear over citizens who have inherited a history of protest against authoritarianism. The outcomes were different. Gotabaya returned to his country after 52 days, and is now housed in government provided accommodation. The Presidential elections of 2024 brought good news with a left winger Anura Kumara Dassanayake (NPP) coming to power and formally breaking the hold of the Rajapaksa family. The country is however caught in a vice like grip by IMF conditionalities. We have to see how the new president negotiates economic hardship of the people. The 2022 protests were based on distrust of established political parties and the need for a new leadership. This was their achievement.In Bangladesh the students masterminded the setting up of an interim government under the Nobel Laureate Mohammed Yunus, and are informal members of the government. They insist that the politics of the day should follow the demands of politics on the street, particularly the reimagining of Bangladesh II. We still have to see the results of the general elections slated to be held in 2026, whether the message of the student uprising- that the current lot of politicians cannot be trusted, influences the electorate.The outcome in India has been disappointing. After four years the CAA was implemented on the first day of the holy Ramzan in 2024. A crack-down by the police had left the residents of Shaheen Bagh fearful. The police occupied the university Jamia Milia and prevented the entry of outsiders, and public spaces where meetings used to be held closed off.Shaheen Bagh on March 10. Photo: Twitter/@UmarKhalidJNUImplicationsAll three protest movements occurred because the government of the day cynically and repeatedly disregarded conventions of the moral economy of constitutional democracy: fraternity in the case of India, abdication of responsibility for the wellbeing of the people in Sri Lanka, and discrimination in Bangladesh. The protests held several messages that reiterated and reinforced the basic principles of constitutional democracy.Take the fundamental axiom of democracy; citizenship. Engin Isin writes that citizenship is practiced not only by exercising rights but also by claiming them. In South Asia where autocrats had or have come to rule, the only way that citizens can reclaim their right is through protests. The act of protesting in arid, barricaded and dreary spaces that were once alive with soap box orators, sit-downs, assemblies, demonstrations, flags, buntings, posters, and bands, demands great courage. The protestors know that security forces will clamp down on them. They are not sure whether the judiciary will protect them. Still citizens have the courage to reclaim rights for themselves and for their fellow citizens. This is performative citizenship at its best.According to Isin performative citizenship signifies both a struggle (making rights claims) and what that struggle performatively brings into being (the right to claim rights). Resistance in autocracies is not so much about new rights, though demands might erupt during the course of the struggle. Protestors ask for what they have already been granted by constitutions. They are asking for what is their due. They come for their rights because they inhabit the world of the moral economy of constitutional democracy. The constitution is supposed to protect them; they now protect the constitution.The assertion of a right to compel the president to leave office as in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, the right to protest against discrimination and for justice as in Bangladesh, and the right to protest against a law that might strip fellow citizens of their right to citizenship as in India, is derived from the language of constitutional democracy. The right to dismiss a government, the right not to be discriminated against, and the right to solidarity is the property of a democratic political community constituted by the Constitution. These protests remind us that via the social contract citizens owe obligations not only to the state but also to their fellow citizens.Two, we see over the course of the struggle the evolution of a sophisticated political language. In Bangladesh students began their protest with denunciation of reservations but subsequently became the authors of a new language of justice. They compelled the judiciary to modify the quota system, demanded the dismissal of Sheikh Hasina, and reconceptualized the way politics should be conducted in the country: Bangladesh II. Nusrat Sabina Chowdhry writes that it was the Chhatra Janata or the student people who emerged as the key agent of political change. “Joined together, these words signify both political hope and boundless potential, at once embodying the paradoxes and possibilities of the people, the mobs, and the masses”Student protests certainly provided an alternative to political parties that had been tarnished by allegations of corruption and plutocracy. This has been established in the case of the recent presidential elections in Sri Lanka where voters elected a left wing president, an act that spoke of complete distrust in parties that had held power.In Bangladesh after Sheikh Hasina fled, students celebrated, but unfortunately violence took over as some sections of the protestors torched several buildings. A major celebratory assembly at a national monument the Shaheed Minar was met by police brutality. Yet students guarded Hindu temples against fundamentalist organizations, took the initiative to form an interim government, are part of this government, and hold fast to their demands for a new society and a new polity.In India, student protests against the CAA generated a new and gentle democratic language of citizenship. As political performance these protests were remarkably creative and imaginative. Students offered flowers to flummoxed police personnel, and newspapers carried the photograph of a young woman holding up a gentle admonishing finger to the police. The walls of the public space where people and women of Shaheen Bagh sat for ninety days were decorated with novel art forms, little children painted the national flag on their cheeks, and procession and meetings resounded with slogans proclaiming solidarity with our Muslim fellow citizens.Three, these protests have reinforced the virtue of solidarity or fraternity, The prime objective of an autocrat is to rupture a civic virtue that lies at the heart of democracy, i.e., solidarity. Solidarity connects individuals and groups who pursue different conceptions of the good on the basis of citizenship, and allows for the creation of a politically explosive category called ‘the people’. This is particularly significant for South Asia where constitutions were meant to create a delicate balance between different ethnic groups. The founders of the Indian Constitution writing against the backdrop of the horrors of the Partition, knew that without solidarity we remain in the Hobbesian state of nature, condemned to being a part of an random assortment of self-interested individuals. It is this social balance that has been wrecked by autocrats in South Asia. Instead of following the dictum of justice that all must share in the burdens and the benefits of a community, autocrats give precedence to the ethnic majority. It happened in Sri Lanka that led to civil war, and it has led in India to rampant majoritarianism.In Sri Lanka every segment of society was united in the struggle, students, parents, trade unions, medical professionals and people from different spheres of life. Demonstrations continued day and night, with the crowds swelling in the evening as families, students, priests, nuns, clerics and monks participated in the protests. Driven by the rallying cry of GotaGoHome three communities, Sinhala, Tamil and Muslims came together reportedly for the first time. This was a remarkable achievement given Sri Lanka’s troubled history of inter-ethnic strife. The catholic clergy played an important role. Priests physically stepped in front of protesters to protect them when they were attacked by the security forces. Every time protestors were arrested or faced legal threats, dozens of lawyers voluntarily appeared on their behalf before the courts, and even became human shields between the security forces and the protestors. The movement was a unique expression of unity, reconciliation of diversity and healing of the wounds inflicted on psyches during the civil war in Sri Lanka. Inter-group suspicion, deeply entrenched and polarized view points, and societal fissures were subsumed. Over a short period, the demand for the resignation of the President evolved into a demand for equitable distribution of resources.In India university students showed us that we should by virtue of our membership in a political community take up causes that adversely affect fellow citizens. Young people were not demonstrating for themselves, they were demonstrating for the rights of citizenship for their fellow citizens, the Muslim community, they were struggling to preserve the sanctity of the constitution that does not allow the grant of citizenship on the basis of religion, and they were showing us that politics need not involve brute force. An alternative politics can be gentle and civil, peaceful and joyful with a touch of poetry that reminds us of earlier struggles. For autocrats who believe that they have suppressed dissent, and that there can be no alternative narrative of politics these spectacular and courageous protests come as a shock.Four, protestors transform the public land on which they assemble into a site for struggle. The struggle imprints space with the fundamental understanding that politics is contestation. What is not contested is not politics. Resistance is about redefining politics but also about creating an alternative political narrative and forging a different sort of politics based on solidarity. The act of entering a public space carries a message, this is what I stand for-my fellow citizens, my political community, my country. From a random collection of individual citizens, the people become a collective determined to realize the promises of their constitution. They become ‘the people’ a phrase which is normally used by elected governments to legitimize their diktats. What is significant is that all these three acts of resistance demanded that the government, the old and the new, make life livable for the citizens.Finally each movement throws up a number of questions that attract the attention of scholars and social activists. What inspires women and men to leave their homes and their workplaces and occupy public spaces for months on end? Demonstrators observe silence together, they sing in tandem, they give and listen to speeches, they clarify issues that have impelled them to come out of their homes and occupy public land. In the process they clarify what they stand for, and from where they speak. It is perhaps because they know that the right to claim their rights was theirs and autocratic governments were stripping away these rights. They intend to re-establish the moral economy of constitutional democracy.Popular resistance might lose out against the power of the almighty state, or it might win. Without leaders and sans organization the link which connects individuals into a collective, may be purely transitional and purely ephemeral. It does not matter. The forging of a link leaves powerful imprints on the political consciousness of society, on its literature and its poetry, on its political imagination, and its power to distinguish between what is and what can be. Every protest inspires and leaves an indelible legacy.Resistance reminds us that it is possible for ordinary individuals to make history through the transformation of public space into political space and through reclaiming popular sovereignty and re-locating it in the people. These messages are not inconsequential. They bear great implications for how we defend our moral economy.Autocratic states have suppressed civil society, expelled freedom of expression from political lexicons, taken over the media and substituted monologue for dialogue. They try to strip a society of its vibrancy, its potential for challenge, and its energy. It is surprising that they have not learnt from history: when avenues for protest are closed and hatched down, politics takes to the streets. The only resort is a spontaneous political movement sans leaders, a movement that shuns political parties. Remarkably such movements disdain violence and confront the coercive apparat of the state through peaceful symbolic gestures.We fight breathlessness by fighting to breathe. We strive to articulate the constant niggling unease that our people are besieged by tyrants, by struggling for our own humanity and doing so for our fellow citizens through solidarity. We have to do this because authoritarian regimes that dispense with the moral economy of constitutional democracy leave us disoriented. Resistance on the other hand reminds us of the words of William Wordsworth who had written on the French Revolution thus, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very heaven.’Neera Chandhoke is a former professor of Political Science, University of Delhi.