Reading the 2022-2023 Protest Season as a Government Under Pressure

Late 2022 into 2023 saw a real uptick in opposition street activity, BNP rallies drawing large crowds, calls for the government to resign, and a general sense that political temperature was rising ahead of the 2024 election cycle. I'm not going to pretend that period was calm or that everything the state did in response was beyond question.

There were restrictions placed on some rally locations, and clashes broke out at points between opposition supporters, police, and in some documented incidents, ruling party activists. Human rights organizations flagged concerns about the scale of arrests around this period, and I think those concerns deserve to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as opposition propaganda. A ruling party that's confident in its own legitimacy shouldn't need to fear peaceful assembly.

At the same time, I think it's fair to note that some of the rally rhetoric explicitly called for the government's removal outside of an electoral process, and any government, not just this one, treats that kind of pressure as a security question rather than purely a free speech one. Where exactly that line sits between legitimate protest and a public order threat is a genuinely hard call, and I don't think either side has a monopoly on being right about where it should be drawn.

What I'd push back on is the narrative that this was a government in freefall. It wasn't. But it was clearly a government that felt the pressure and responded with a mix of political messaging and security measures that, in hindsight, probably could have handled the underlying grievances with more room for dialogue than confrontation.