Let me begin with a confession. When some Youth Congress workers entered the AI summit venue and staged their protest, my first reaction was that they should have chosen a different site. I also believed that while there is palpable anguish among many Indians regarding the American deal, such a dramatic intervention risked appearing misdirected. Yet, reflection has a way of unsettling first impressions. Writing more than 48 hours later, I am persuaded that the familiar anxiety about India’s “international image” being damaged is overstated. More importantly, as someone who has long engaged with the study of protest movements, I believe the choice of the protest site must be understood not as a lapse in judgement but as a calculated act of political communication; an attempt to amplify a dissenting idea by inserting it into a space of maximum visibility.Movements and protests do not operate in a vacuum; they emerge within what scholars describe as a field of power structured by opportunities, constraints, and symbolic hierarchies. Protest, therefore, is not merely about expressing anger. It is about making claims in ways that compel recognition. When dissenters choose a site like an international summit, they are not simply seeking attention in a sensationalist sense. They are intervening in a carefully choreographed spectacle of consensus. Elite gatherings are designed to project inevitability — the sense that decisions have already been made by those entitled to make them. A protest at such a venue disrupts this script and introduces contingency where certainty was being performed.AdvertisementAlso Read | Tavleen Singh writes: We need to be wary about getting too carried away by success of AI Impact SummitThe history of contentious politics demonstrates that the effectiveness of protest often depends on its capacity to transform ordinary spaces into arenas of contestation. Streets, universities, legislative buildings, and global forums acquire political meaning because movements repeatedly convert them into stages for claim-making. In this sense, space becomes a language. By entering the summit venue, the protesters were not only opposing a specific policy; they were contesting the very idea that such decisions should unfold insulated from public scrutiny. Their action suggested that questions about national interest, sovereignty, or economic alignment cannot be confined to closed rooms, however prestigious those rooms may be.Another dimension that must be considered is the performative nature of protest because protests communicate through symbols, gestures, and dramatic acts that condense complex grievances into visible forms. The shirtless protest, stripped of sensational commentary, can be read as a metaphorical device, an attempt to signify vulnerability, dispossession, or the stripping away of protective narratives surrounding the deal. Political communication often relies on such stark imagery because it travels faster than policy documents or parliamentary speeches. In a media-saturated age, movements must compete for attention within a crowded public sphere. Dramatic performance becomes a means of breaking through indifference.Critics often argue that such acts embarrass the nation before an international audience. This argument, however, rests on a fragile understanding of democracy. A nation’s reputation is not built on the absence of dissent but on the robustness of its institutions and the openness of its public sphere. Democracies derive legitimacy precisely from their ability to accommodate protest without resorting to repression. Indeed, many countries that are today regarded as stable democracies carry histories marked by intense, disruptive movements that challenged entrenched arrangements. To equate protest with national humiliation is to privilege order over justice and optics over substance, and of course, opacity over transparency.AdvertisementIt is also important to recognise that movements calculate their actions in relation to what might be called the economy of attention. In an era where information circulates rapidly but unevenly, the visibility of an issue often determines whether it enters public debate at all. A protest in an obscure location may satisfy the moral impulse to resist, but it rarely alters the broader conversation. By contrast, a protest at a high-profile event forces journalists, policymakers, and citizens to confront the issue, even if only to condemn the method. In doing so, it shifts the terrain from silence to argument, and argument, however uncomfortable, is the lifeblood of democratic politics.Further, protests at elite venues expose the distance between decision-makers and those affected by their decisions. They dramatise the asymmetry of power that often characterises contemporary governance, where policies with far-reaching consequences are negotiated among a narrow circle of actors. By physically breaching the boundaries of such spaces, protesters symbolically assert the presence of the excluded. They remind the powerful that the governed are not passive recipients but active participants in the political community.There is also a pedagogical dimension to such acts. Moments of disruption compel society to ask questions it might otherwise avoid: What is the deal about? Who benefits from it? Who bears the risks? Why are sections of the population anxious? Even those who disapprove of the protest are drawn into discussing the underlying issue. In this sense, the protest succeeds not by securing immediate concessions but by expanding the scope of public deliberation. It converts a technical or diplomatic matter into a subject of democratic scrutiny.One must also reflect on the deeper discomfort that dissent generates in societies marked by growing centralisation of authority. When power becomes accustomed to compliance, even minor disruptions appear intolerable. The invocation of national image becomes a rhetorical device to delegitimise protest without engaging its substance. Yet a confident polity should not fear moments of discord; on the contrary, such moments signal that citizens remain invested in the collective future rather than resigned to decisions taken in their name.Seen through this lens, the protest at the summit was not an aberration but part of a long tradition of contentious politics through which democratic societies renew themselves. It was an attempt, however imperfect, to insert an alternative voice into a conversation dominated by state and corporate actors. Whether one agrees with the protesters’ position is a separate matter. The more important question is whether we are willing to acknowledge the legitimacy of dissent as a democratic practice.you may likeIf democracy is reduced to periodic elections and ritual affirmations of unity, it risks becoming hollow. Its vitality lies in the continuous negotiation between authority and opposition, between order and disruption. Protests, especially those that challenge the sanctity of elite spaces, serve as reminders that sovereignty ultimately resides with the people. They disrupt the illusion that governance can proceed indefinitely without accountability.Therefore, the real issue is not whether the protest tarnished India’s image, but whether it compelled us to engage with the anxieties that produced it. In the final analysis, the measure of a democracy is not the absence of protest at international summits, but the presence of a citizenry willing to speak even when the setting is inconvenient. Silence may preserve appearances, but dissent preserves freedom.The writer is Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha), Rashtriya Janata Dal