In Praise of Protest

DISTANCE MAKES THE heart grow fonder and the mind clearer. I haven’t been in Delhi for most of last year, and there are many parts and feels of the city that I miss. While reading Olivia Laing’s recent masterpiece Everybody: A Book about Freedom (2021), where she writes about the body as a burden and a source of power, I realise that other than the friends and family, nooks and crannies that I, at times, think about, I also miss public protests. It is not a constant longing for sure, it is simply a want to be a part of something bigger than one’s self. Delhi is India’s crucible for foment; people have poured onto her streets seeking justice for women, minorities and the oppressed, and to pursue accountability from those in power. What would a capital city be without a protest square? It would be a parliament without a debate. Laing writes how at the age of nine she realised that “bodies on the streets were how you changed the world.” Like her, I too crave for that collective moment of hope, which can only happen with a crowd.

The utterance of the term ‘public protest’ inevitably leads to two responses, those who support it and those who scorn it. Over the last few years, Delhi has been the site of a few pivotal protests, such as the anti-CAA one at Shaheen Bagh and the farmer’s agitation at Delhi’s borders. And these same events are seen through opposing and antagonistic viewpoints. As the American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler writes in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) the same movement will be considered by some as “anti-democratic” and a terrorist act, and by others as a “popular effort to realize a more inclusive democracy.” It all depends on who you speak to and of which ideological bent. Butler’s thesis is that acting together challenges reigning political and social notions.

The thing about protests is that you need to be in them to know them. It is like swimming. Water is alien to me, so the idea of moving and being unable to step on land baffles me. Those who’ve seen a protest only from television screens and newspaper clippings, don’t know them at all. You need to have tread the land with strangers to know that is a radical act of hope. Taking to the street establishes a citizen’s “right to appear”. It visiblises grievances and defiance, camaraderie and cohesion. Being a part of a protest elevates an individual to a citizen. You consolidate because of a common belief. A gathering transforms individual angst into public rebellion. Occupying a public space with our bodies is to demand a future that is different from what those in positions of power promote.

The idea of freedom unites protests. The anti-377 protests were about being able to love freely. The anti-CAA protests were about being a citizen of this country freely and without discrimination. As Laing writes, “From feminism to gay liberation to the civil rights movement, the struggles of the last century were at heart about the right to be free of oppression based on the kind of body you inhabited: able to live where you please, work where you pleased… .” Laing makes the argument that to be truly free is not to be judged by the body one inhabits. Our bodies after all are not just ours in isolation, rather they carry social markings and identities. To protest is to strive for a world where one’s body is not targeted by policies because of one’s name or dress or address or sexuality or religion.

THERE ARE, OF COURSE, all kinds of protests. And they all move one (or don’t) to varying degrees. In my 20 years in Delhi, I’ve been part of protests that have uplifted me and those that didn’t. The ones that peeved me appeared half-hearted, and worst of all, non-inclusive. Some protests never succeeded in breaching Delhi’s class divide, the page-three type raised their own podium and the Nizamuddin Basti its own, which defeated the point of a common gathering.

The protests that buoyed me are the ones where people across ages and classes and backgrounds and professions and genders came together, over issues that might not affect them directly. They rose up instead because of our shared humanity against a perceived wrong. The ones I am glad to have been a part of included the protest in support of Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2016 (regarding the sedition case) and the anti-CAA one at Jama Masjid. The 2016 one was powerful because I marched alongside my mother (an alumna of JNU). The crowd that day was students and professors, parents and children. My mother knew as many people as I did that afternoon. And it is the inter-generational aspect—the grey hair walking alongside the platinum streaks—that I now hold dear. As my friend PK said recounting that day, “When you see a mother walking with a daughter, you see how dissent is passed from one generation to another, and this is how fundamentals that animate any democracy survive and thrive.”

While Shaheen Bagh might have been the epicentre of the anti-CAA protests, smaller offshoots sprang up across the city. We’d heard there was to be a march in Old Delhi. We missed the march, but by the time we reached the crowd had arrived at the steps of Jama Masjid. Soon, every inch of the 69 steps leading up to the main arch was hidden by people; men on one side and women on the other. Solemnity and silence prevailed that night, as people lit each other’s candles under Delhi’s January night sky, and stared into the neon lights of Meena Bazaar. I remember these two protests especially for the kinship they fostered, the ‘I’ and the ‘they’ became a ‘we’ as we sat or walked together.

My first march, soon after I’d moved to the capital, was the protests against the Iraq War in 2002-2003. As a “woke” (even though the descriptor was non-existent at that time) Delhi University student, one went for the protest, because everyone was going for the protest. Or because a senior who you fancied was also heading to Kasturba Gandhi Marg and this was your best chance to chat him (or her) up and bond over your wokeness. KG Marg was distant from DU in that pre-Metro era, so having schlepped halfway across the city, we did what students at that time did; we concluded the march at CP’s McDonald’s, with a Big Mac and iced coffee. The irony of eating at an American fast-food chain, while protesting American atrocities was lost on no one.

These contradictions, hypocrisies, this lightness doesn’t take away from the
legitimacy of a protest. Not everyone can be a Gandhi who wrests his entire life into a system of beliefs. At times it is sufficient to merely leave the couch and head to the street. Like Butler writes, “One important argument… is that it matters that bodies assemble and that the political meanings enacted by demonstrations are not only those that are enacted by discourse, whether written or vocalized.” Being a part of a protest wrings discourses out of the drawing room. Casting of a vote and joining a protest restores agency to the public. The assembling of people focuses attention on a cause.

Protests can quickly change as well, from a peaceful crowd demanding greater freedom, to a restive mob that damages property and endangers lives. And for every protest supporter, there will be an equal number of cynics who will claim it is “foreign funded” or a “ruse of the opposition” or the ploy of “anti-nationals” or misplaced and wide-eyed idealism. The nature of a protest is that it is about multitudes. The vast majority of protestors is certainly not morally superior to the person who has never marched on the street.

The song, the dance, the food and the drink are essential to the experience. The poetry of protests from Faiz Ahmed Faiz to Varun Grover have become the anthems of our time. Grover’s ‘Hum kagaz nahi dikhayenge’ provides the most succinct critique of the anti-NRC movement. Many of us in Delhi can recount the protests we’ve joined by the food we’ve eaten at different venues; the dosas at Jantar Mantar; the kebabs at Shaheen Bagh, the samosas at Mandir Marg police station; the nihari in Old Delhi.

As a journalist, joining a morcha is to be both participant and witness. Over the years, I’ve developed my protest buddies, those who I call when I wish to head to a dharna. By its very nature, a protest is not a solitary affair. In the winter of 2019, friends and I made our way to central Delhi, but with 20 metro stations barricaded in and around Jantar Mantar, the challenge was arriving at our destination. But soon enough on the Metro itself, we recognised fellow travellers heading in the same direction as us. Strangers became comrades, together we exited at the closest accessible station and then walked towards the police checkposts. The motley crew meant more resources, as everyone had their own ‘contacts’ and ‘leads’ about where to reach and how to reach. The most vocal of the group, a woman with a long plait, even gave the collegegoers amongst us, (and anyone else who was willing to listen) water cannon and tear gas survival tips!

Protests are also useful in dispelling naivety and in gauging the intention of the state. Those who are there know that change is incremental. No one who is marching believes that authority will be upturned overnight. A protest is an occasion where as a citizen you reckon with the force of the state. Is the woman in the helmet and in khaki going to let you pass? Is the cop with the lathi going to push back? It is a time when you realise whether the state sees you as a citizen with the right to dissent, or as a subject and slave who is subservient to power. The anatomy of a protest reveals whether the state will permit you bodily freedom—the right to assemble and cerebral freedom—the right to question.

There are all kinds of protests and all kinds of protestors. The first kind is the protest sightseer. He or she or they who goes to protests to score social media points. They can be spotted as they insist on photo bombing, as they come there to be seen more than to see. Then there is the protest traveller (which I’d like to claim to be) who insists that these are important events that need to be experienced. And then there are protest residents and protest deists; who are essentially not protestors, but revolutionaries. And of course, those who are considered revolutionaries by some are considered terrorists by others.

Singular people like Gandhi and Irom Sharmila are the protest deists, they used the fast as a weapon for freedom. They did not go to protests, they reasoned that their own bodies could be used as sites of protest. More recently, the farmers at Tikri and the women at Shaheen Bagh showed the resilience of the resident protestor; unlike the traveller who is passing through and the deist who uses their own body, the resident protestor camps on the site, for weeks and months at a time. Many consider them to be a nuisance, they disrupt traffic, they delay commutes by occupying public space. But what is an annoyance to some, is life-affirming to others.

The protest reminds us that we cannot isolate ourselves from the outside world. It affirms that freedom means asking questions and demanding answers. As Laing reminds us, “There is no escape, no possible place to hide. Either you submit to the world or you change the world.”

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