The Right To Protest And Dissent: A Comparative Study Of India And South Asian Democracy
Livi Riba, Amity Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, Uttar Pradesh
ABSTRACT
Protest and dissent is paradoxically one of the most constitutionally protected civil liberties in South Asia, in some form or another, in the founding documents of essentially every South Asian democracy, but at the same time one of the most heavily policed and often stifled civil rights. The paper conducts comparative doctrinal analysis of the right to protest in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal and explores how the constitutional rights to assembly and expression relate to various restrictions and statutory laws, the public order laws of the colonial era, anti-terror laws and executive emergency powers. The paper starts by creating a conceptual structure between protest and disorder, and by considering the right to protest as a rights composite made up of speech, assembly, movement, and more recently, access to digital platforms. It then proceeds to do a detailed doctrinal analysis of Indian Constitutional jurisprudence and charts the course from the early public forum recognition to the principles of proportionality in Anuradha Bhasin to the containment logic in Amit Sahni. The study is extended comparatively with the laws regarding Islamabad Public Order and Peaceful Assembly Act, 2024, Bangladesh's quota-reform uprising of 2024, Aragalaya movement in Sri Lanka in 2022 and its judicial vindication in 2025, and the Gen-Z protests in Nepal in September 2025 over the ban on social media. Four cross-cutting patterns emerge from the comparative analysis: a colonial legacy of restrictive statutory architecture; an inclination of judges to use sympathetic rhetoric and deferential outcomes; the rise of "infrastructural suppression," which now dominates as the prime mechanism for control via shutdown of the internet and platforms; and emergency powers as the most vulnerable fault line where constitutional protection is most easily breached. The paper argues that the right to protest in the region of South Asia is not as well protected as the words of the constitutional guarantees, but rather how willing political, judicial and civil- societal institutions are to open up executive discretion to meaningful and timely judicial and public scrutiny; and calls for regional judicial, statutory and institutional reform accordingly.
Keywords: Right to Protest, Dissent, Article 19, Freedom of Assembly, South Asia, Public Order, Internet Shutdown, Proportionality.
