We, the People of India, Will Not Surrender

Saturday, 10th October marked Mahalaya— the day that heralds the approach of Durga Pujo, Bengal’s great autumn festival commemorating the invocation of Goddess Durga before her victory over the demon Mahishasura. I watched Delhi turn itself into a hunting ground for protestors. I left campus to stand in solidarity with those demanding the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation. The protests were called after irregularities, voter disenfranchisement, and more in the Election Commission of India's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.

When we reached Dilli Haat/INA, we saw only police, buses, and paramilitary personnel—as far as the eye could see. When they began running at us with their lathis in the air, we ran too. Vendors selling bhel and ice cream warned us about detention efforts ahead, and where we could escape to safety while our phones blew up with our friends messaging us about brutality and confiscated phones. Amid the chaos, a man on a scooter stopped us and called us anti-national, trying to convince us that the most patriotic act a citizen could perform was to support the government in power unabashedly. 

When we found an injured man near the Jor Bagh highway and gave him ORS, the police had begun advancing towards us. In the blink of an eye, we were swarmed by police, and my friends were dragged away towards a detention bus. Two women constables formed a human chain around my remaining companion and me. My instinct was to apologise, because the years we spend learning to love the country also teach us to apologise in the face of the state machinery “trying to do its job”. 

We escaped when one constable looked away, and I remember running through Delhi with the humiliating clarity that we were at the risk of being detained even if we hadn’t sloganeered — we didn’t get the chance to. We ran until Delhi changed its face, until Thyagaraja Park appeared — absurdly untouched — with children playing cricket and families taking evening walks. Only kilometres away, the capital lay strewn with barricades, buses and uniforms. 

After we learned that all Ashokans had been released from their detentions and we were reunited with our detained friends, I remembered this was the beginning of Pujo, where Bengali families like mine welcome Goddess Durga back to earth, and into their homes. Back home in Kolkata, the city is illuminated in anticipation of her arrival, dhak beats coating the evening, the familiar wafting scent of bhog-er khichuri, and the enthusiasm that Durga will arrive—because evil cannot be permitted to have the final word. Yet as I returned to campus from Delhi, flinching at every barricade and red-and-blue hue, I could only wonder what it means to invoke a goddess with such fervour in a country whose democratic future is so nebulous.

On Sunday, 11th October, it was Pratipad—the first day of Pujo. I returned to Connaught Place with my friends, perhaps with a little more anger in my heart. We sang patriotic songs and invited the policemen standing above us atop the Khadi Museum to sing with us. They refused, continuing instead to instruct us to disperse, while the familiar chaos of detention swallowed more and more protesters and separated us from friends we had come to stand beside. I managed to raise a slogan for perhaps five seconds before we had to run again, and those five seconds have stayed with me because I cannot think of a more devastating indictment of a democracy than the sight of young citizens singing for their country while its representatives stand ready to silence them.

The national flag is celebrated as a symbol of freedom, but the people who invoke that freedom are treated as threats to public order. The right to protest cannot mean the right to protest only when authorities approve of the message—how absurd is it to request (and receive!) permission from the people we are protesting against! The right to vote, too, cannot mean much if citizens have reasonable grounds to fear that the integrity of electoral rolls is compromised. Allegations concerning voter exclusion deserve scrutiny and accountability. Instead, we are forced to watch our capital become a fortress.

I cannot separate this from class. The capacity to dissent is distributed as unequally as almost everything else in this country.  A good lawyer is a cost a wealthy citizen can absorb, all while missing a day of work and affording an unexplainable journey back home from some far-off detention centre. A student counting the money in her wallet must calculate whether standing up for principle might leave her unable to afford the journey back to campus. Workers who lose a day’s wages, queer people navigating a world that already treats their existence as an inconvenience, and women who have spent their lives learning to assess danger before entering a public space do not encounter the state on equal terms with those protected by wealth and proximity to power.

And what does it mean to call ourselves free when the price of exercising our freedom is borne most heavily by those who can least afford to pay it? I thought of my little sister throughout those two days, because I want her to inherit a country in which she can disagree with the government without wondering whether she will return home, a country where public institutions are accountable to ordinary people rather than insulated from them, and where democracy is understood not as a spectacle performed every few years but as a continuing struggle over who possesses power and whom that power serves.

I returned from Delhi frightened, exhausted and furious. I refuse to accept that fear should be the final authority over my political life or that silence is the price of being allowed to belong.

They can take our phones, our friends, our streets. They can try taking our voices for five seconds at a time. What they cannot do is make us believe that surrender is patriotism.

Inquilab Zindabad.

(Edited by Suryansh Jalan and Avika Mantri)