The silence of the ‘lambs’

“The king’s farms have dried up.” That was all Amitabh Bachchan, the grand patriarch of Indian cinema, managed to offer his eighty million followers on X in late July 2026. 

Outside his fortified Mumbai residence, two days prior, police had unleashed batons and tear gas on hundreds of student protesters. Meanwhile in the capital New Delhi, thousands of young men and women slept on the baking concrete of Jantar Mantar, demanding the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the education minister, after the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test—the sacred entrance exam for two million aspiring medical students—was once again compromised by widespread paper leaks. 

Bachchan offered a single, cryptic sentence. Perhaps it was a profound literary metaphor. Perhaps it was the rambling of an aging actor. To the young citizens facing the barrel of state power, the ambiguity was indistinguishable from silence. 

The response from the Cockroach Janta Party, the irreverent youth movement spearheading the anti-NEET demonstrations, was swift and razor-sharp. “So, you are not resigning, are you sir?”

The exchange ricocheted across South Asia’s digital landscape, but the underlying fury was never truly about just Amitabh Bachchan et al. It was about a generational contract that has thoroughly disintegrated. Every modern crisis in the developing world is now waged across two battlefields. 

The first is fought on the road, where tear gas stings the eyes and police batons fracture bones. The second unfolds on glowing glass screens, where anxious protesters repeatedly refresh the feeds of actors, athletes, influencers and pop stars, waiting for those with vast mega-phones to acknowledge what the youth are risking their lives—and their economic futures—to achieve. 

The same bitter question echoes from the streets of Delhi to the streets of Dhaka, Colombo, Islamabad and Kathmandu: where are the icons who built their empires on the devotion of the young?

The expectation is not unreasonable, but it is routinely crushed. In India, the current unrest is the most formidable political challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government since his third-term victory in 2024. The Cockroach Janta Party itself was born out of deep systemic frustration after a magistrate casually likened unemployed youth to insect pests. 

Strategist Abhijeet Dipke weaponised the insult, turning it into a badge of pride for millions of educated, job-starved young citizens. When the integrity of the NEET was shattered, it signified the death of meritocracy for families relying on education as their sole engine of upward mobility. 

Yet, while a handful of figures like Huma Qureshi and Prakash Raj expressed solidarity, the titans of Bollywood largely retreated into the shadows. Actor Rajkummar Rao briefly offered sympathy to the students before facing immediate online harassment for past participation in pro-government campaign videos. 

“I am under immense pressure,” he confessed in a fleeting reply, before deleting the comment entirely. His erasure neatly captured the cowed reality of India’s cultural elite.

Moral cowardice 

If Indian celebrities demonstrate the cowardice of self-preservation, Bangladesh provides a far darker case study in how silence can rot into active betrayal. 

During the July 2024 uprising, led by Students Against Discrimination, young citizens marched to dismantle discriminatory government job quotas reinstated by Sheikh Hasina’s regime. As the body count mounted, protesters begged the nation’s beloved filmmakers and musicians to lend their voices to the cause. 

Many chose to post pictures of their lavish lifestyle endorsements while bullet-ridden bodies filled social media feeds. The true horror of their indifference emerged months after Hasina fled the country in August 2024. 

A leaked transcript from a private WhatsApp group titled Alo Ashbei—meaning "Light Will Come"—revealed prominent actors, directors, and ruling-party apparatchiks casually discussing strategies to crush the student movement. 

Actress Aruna Biswas notoriously suggested that hot water will do the trick against teenage demonstrators. Even sports heroes, once viewed as apolitical gods, have been dragged from their pedestals. Shakib Al Hasan, long revered as the greatest cricketer in Bangladesh's history and immortalised in regional rhymes as the soul of the nation, incinerated his legacy in a single afternoon. 

In August 2024, as security forces were shooting four-year-old bystanders in the streets, Shakib’s wife published a serene family photo on Instagram from Toronto with the caption, “A well spent day in Toronto.” Shakib, who had conveniently secured a parliamentary seat six months earlier in a sham, uncontested election, was smiling broadly. 

To a traumatised public, the image became a permanent symbol of the ruling class’s grotesque detachment from the suffering of those who built their fame.

Further west, Pakistan demonstrates the structural machinery that forces cultural figures into submissive silence. When former prime minister Imran Khan was removed from power in 2022, high-profile actors and pop stars openly championed his cause, riding the wave of his immense popularity among the country's youth. 

Yet, following Khan’s arrest in August 2023 and his subsequent imprisonment in Adiala jail, that vocal support vanished. As his party attempts to mobilize nationwide protests to mark the third anniversary of his incarceration in August 2026, the silence from Pakistan's cultural elite is deafening. 

Stars such as Mahira Khan and Saba Qamar have adopted a stance of rigid neutrality. In a state where broadcast bans are instantaneous, tax audits are weaponised, and the security apparatus operates with unchecked impunity, silence is survival.

Changing landscape

The fundamental miscalculation made by the entertainment and athletic elites across South Asia is the belief that social media operates by the old rules of corporate public relations. In the pre-digital era, an actor could maintain an aura of benevolent neutrality, floating above the messy realities of state oppression while accumulating wealth and adulation. 

Today, silence is not a blank canvas; it is an active political stance. Deleted comments survive indefinitely through screenshots. Past endorsements are exhumed within seconds. The digital architecture that allowed these icons to scale their popularity to unprecedented heights is the very apparatus that now exposes their ideological emptiness.

The crisis of the South Asian youth icon is ultimately a structural conflict between short-term financial interest and long-term moral legitimacy. Creative industries across the subcontinent operate at the mercy of state machinery. Governments control filming permits, broadcast licenses, tax exemptions, and corporate sponsorships. 

To cross the state is to invite financial ruin or judicial harassment. It is entirely rational for a middle-aged actor or a wealthy cricketer to calculate that keeping quiet protects their asset portfolio.

What these icons fail to grasp, however, is that their currency was never merely their acting range or athletic skill; it was the emotional devotion of the young. By prioritising state favor over moral courage, they have severed the root that nourished their prestige. 

South Asia’s Gen Z is fighting for basic survival, meritocracy, and freedom from authoritarian overreach. They no longer require multi-millionaire brand ambassadors to validate their struggles, but they will certainly remember who abandoned them when the batons began to fall. The kings may keep their farms, but they have permanently lost their kingdom.

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