Jantar Mantar’s Morning-After Blues, and What to Do About It

A historic protest that rode in laughing defiantly on the back of a cockroach meme won this moment. Democracy found its voice through Gen Z’s disarming language of irreverence and blistering truth – a voice to reclaim its story and reboot the rotten relationship between citizen and state. Gotta switch the terms of this rishta, they said to the state with a cute smile, wearing their jeans and a tank top – the future is not about you uncle, it’s about us, and get on a call to us now! Because ghosting is for dates not for the state.

Anyone who went to Jantar Mantar returned heady, buzzed and transformed, at the bold, sassy, insta-rude, humorous takedowns of power. It was as we say in Delhi, full-on masti and ‘besti’ (be-izzati).

Yes, they, and we, have won for now. In their sharp, sizzling critique of the system and its godi media enablers. In their ability to see through the BS of the past twelve years, to take the best camera angle selfies with one hand while holding up a ‘mitroon, f*&^ you’ poster with the other. They used cuss words and named sex positions after politicians, grinning while ripping the Teflon off the big scary untouchable state, with posters saying ‘Kuchu Puchu Maan Bhi Jao’ on the one and ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ on the flipside.

Let nothing take away from this gloriously warm shining beam of a moment. Breathe deeply the air of plain-speak, even if your lungs rattle at the unfamiliar crispness of it. Bathe in the sunshine. Hope.

Of course, we also need to be prepared for the heartbreak of pushback and truth-time. It’s come and it’s coming more. So, I write this inspired by all the freshness and honesty of the protest. I write reluctantly, because I don’t want to lose my smile and dent my happy balloon, or yours. But the spirit of the moment demands honesty. Why not? Nothing is perfect nor should be untouchable in this morning after the night before.

I have read lots of moving commentary about the protest and loved it. But I baulk at the description that this was an all-Indian-happy-party, in which Hindus and Muslims participated together and as equals, along with all castes and creeds. Because the state and the BJP do not see it that way and it is time to reflect on what the movement needs to do about this.

We know that Muslims were present at the protests, including the heart-stoppingly articulate Mohammad Irfan, who has gone viral, and the less famous but equally amazing Muskaan urf Falak.

But let it also be acknowledged that most Muslims have participated with those special little nodules of fear pulsating in their hearts that only Indian Muslims have learnt to accommodate in their bodies. They were generally well-masked (thank you, Covid, for this handy surveillance-avoidance accessory) because they knew their participation might extract a far greater cost from them than from Hindu protesters.

Irfan and Muskan are examples of the fact that where there is a slice of India, there will always be Indian Muslims. But lest we get all glowingly OTT about the idea of inclusive India getting restored, we need to understand the unequal consequences.

The CJP-led movement was unmistakably broad-based in its appeal and  one of the reasons its (largely Hindu and NEET-focused) public leadership threw the BJP off-balance was because neither the Modi formula that “troublemakers can be recognised by their clothes” or Amit Shah’s “urban Naxals” charge could be deployed as a propaganda weapon against them. The fact that Jantar Mantar was populated largely by constituencies that the BJP counts among its social base – and which resoundingly chanted Vande Mataram and Bharat Mata ki Jai also meant that the state – after initially and instinctively unleashing brute force on July 20 – shifted its focus to political recoverability.

Also read: Do We Now Have Something to Rely On?

The BJP knows it cannot pack off the Jantar Mantar leadership to 6-7 years in jail without bail the way it has done to the Bhima Koregaon activists or Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam. But it can and will do the next best thing: find ways, post facto, to subject Muslims to targeted harassment.

In the political and Big Media imagination, Muslims occupy a completely different space. Can you imagine them getting away with risqué posters aimed at the ruling party? Muslims were not at Jantar Mantar as organisers, leaders or agenda-setters – they were there as regular folk, for all the regular reasons, i.e., pissed off at the authoritarian, unaccountable ways of this government, as parents of NEET and JEE kids, as citizens performing a duty and there to breathe without feeling that special Muslim fear in this one corner of India.

We know that ‘Muslim’ neighbourhoods – Nizamuddin, Okhla, Old Delhi were actively being surveilled by the police.  WhatsApp messages have done the rounds, warning Muslim citizens to be extra careful while visiting Jantar Mantar. One message simply said: “Muslims, please stay invisible in these protests.” Not sure what the hell that means, but I think that means leave hijabs and caps at home, maybe speak less Urdu? And do not be heard saying Assalamu Alaikum anywhere near a police barricade.

These ‘precautions’ now seem justified. See the BJP Delhi Insta account painting a target on the backs of only Muslims protesters. Title: Araajakta Phailatey Huey: Yeh Chehre Yaad Rahenge (Spreading anarchy: We will remember these faces). A shudder of fear runs through me as I recall the wave of terror unleashed after Shaheen Bagh, when, barring a handful of activists, only Muslims got arrested.

An elderly anti-CAA protestor gestures as she addresses Supreme Court-appointed interlocutors at Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi, Thursday, February 20, 2020. Photo: PTI

Now smell the ‘religious’ stench of the first wave of police visits, detentions, arrests and FIRs during Jantar Mantar and after. Start with Junaid Malik, a mere volunteer, who arranged food and water, and ask why a character so utterly peripheral to the ‘meaning’ of the protest, who neither led it nor gave rousing slogans from its stage, attracted the tough love of the state machinery? Police lands up at his home, questions family members, detains others.

Five Muslim students get picked up near Jamia Millia Islamia while returning from Jantar Mantar. Three Muslim students in Lakhimpur district in Assam get arrested on July 23 for forming a WhatsApp group to plan a demonstration in support of the movement. A Muslim lawyer, Ariful Islam, is detained and remanded to judicial custody in Guwahati for just being a bystander near a NEET protest. All are charged under the sedition law – Section 152 of the BNS, which carries mandatory jail time, up to life.

Reports come from Goa, West Bengal and Bengaluru. In Goa and Bengaluru, kids get special police affection for holding up a ‘Free Umar and Sharjeel’ poster. Seriously? And not for saying ‘mitrooon f.. you’? West Bengal CM Suvendu Adhikari’s response to a protest called by Left student organisations was to speak disparagingly of ‘those Friday people’. “His emphasis on ‘Friday people’, followed by the selective naming of alleged offenders bearing Muslim names, gave the government’s response a clear communal framing,” reports Aparna Bhattacharya. In Bihar, AISA head Neha Bora has accused the police of singling out Muslims arrested for mistreatment.

Also read: So What Was the Politics of the Student Movement?

No. I am not missing the larger pattern of the repressive arrests and detentions of many student protesters. I am pointing to the ones that seem ‘religiously targeted’, and how messed up that is – when you are too marginal to shape a movement, but too visible to evade suspicion. First to get jail and last to get bail.

Yes, we know the playbook. We know that the motherboard of majoritarian politics goes into complete short-circuit, gets emptied of all meaning, if it’s denied ‘the Other’ to blame for everything. So, what’s it going to do with this protest powered by Gen Z, including students, working classes, the unemployed, populated by large sections of the BJPs own social base, and whose leaders have names like Abhijeet and Saurav and not Akram and Salman? Of course, it cannot do a Shaheen Bagh. But it’s got nothing else in the arsenal of its limited political imagination, so it tries to do so anyway.

The Hindu Right needs the protest to carry the fingerprint of the Muslim backed by foreign funds to restore its moral universe, in which every challenge to [Hindu] state power comes from this ‘Other.’ So, first enter George Soros. On July 24. #SorosFoundationFundsTerror begins trending on X in India, and in the early hours of July 25, Umar Khalid, imprisoned for nearly six years, who has absolutely nothing to do with the CJP movement, begins trending.

This is the Hindu Right putting its ducks in a row: find a name, find the funder, make targeted arrests, let the arrests and policing do their magic – not of uncovering a conspiracy, but of manufacturing the appearance of one. A cropped video was pushed online to give Jantar Mantar an ‘Islamic’ colour. An Aajtak report reels off the names of “upadravis” in Kolkata, all but one of whom are Muslim.

There may be some who feel that in order to avoid giving the Hindu Right any fuel and fodder, we should just go shhhhhh and make all Indian Muslims invisible. Recall how on July 24, when politician Mani Shankar Aiyar spoke of learning fearlessness from the students’ movement and of the prolonged unjust incarceration of Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam locked up for nearly six and seven years, right-wing media and X handles erupted with glee.

This right-wing pressure can and does take its toll on many of us protesting against the state. We say to Muslims (but also to Dalits, Sikhs and others who are easily ‘profiled’), welcome, but please leave your histories on the other side of the barricades. Kind of a harsh condition, especially when these histories are not incidental to the meaning and discourse of the protest – against authoritarianism, destruction of educational institutions and incarceration of students.

It is tragic and ironic that a movement can inherit a democratic grammar of resistance shaped in part by Muslim citizens (echoes of Shaheen Bagh exist in both the visual language of constitutionalism and in Aamir Aziz’s iconic anthem Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega about memory as resistance), while allowing the Muslim presence in that inheritance to disappear and be reconstructed as a risk to itself – with the BJP and the state determined to make an example of them and the movement so far, barring one or two exceptions, not loudly taking up this issue.

The remarkable Gen Z movement has seen through propaganda, called out the BS and demonstrated the guts and gumption to take on the emperor. They must now have it in them to take on the challenge posed by the blatant communalism of the BJP. Let us not become some liberal version of godi media and tell our own little half-truths, speak in general, glowing terms about the inclusive festival of democracy and enforce silence about the state’s religious profiling.

Farah Naqvi is a writer and activist who lives and works in Delhi.

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