The State has its enemies, the enemies have each other

I sit by my window at that hour when darkness yields to the certainty of the sun. My knees and back hurt as I answer what I hope is my last distress call of the day.

“My plan for Saturday was to stay at home and read a book,” a volunteer tells me on her way home after making sure our own have reached theirs.

The youth of the country is at war, and the war has come inside our houses. Our parents have stopped asking where we go and begun asking where it hurts. Relatives, who renounced their minds to a 76-year-old demagogue drunk on the incense of his own worship, call us dishonourable for demanding answers.

We fight the police and the paramilitary forces who take their annoyance out on our bodies, then a media with a lung full of poison, stamping us Dimagi Naxals, anti-nationals, Pakistan-funded and whatever else its air-conditioned hate circus can dream up.

We fight lawyers’ fees, FIRs, bail dates, savings meant for a house, professional circles where keeping your head down is safer than voicing your opinion. We fight to build lives we have hardly begun. I have an inbox full of rape and death threats from Sanghi goons who want to make examples of those who speak over the ear-splitting jingoism of andhbhakti. They call in the wee hours to see if my voice shakes. It does. We fight them too.

When I joined Meghnad and Rajiv at the Protest Support Initiative, we knew the months ahead would be difficult. “I was not prepared to have another person’s safety rest in my hands”, I told a volunteer providing medical aid in the detention camp. “I think we learnt it the hard way because no one else was coming to take over and we couldn’t have left anyone behind,” she replied.

Writing to Angela Davis as she awaited trial in prison, James Baldwin pronounced the stakes of solidarity: 'For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.'

I think of the NEET protests in July, when gig workers made their eighth trip of the day, ferrying food sent by our strangers-in-arms hundreds of kilometres away. These are the ‘foreign agents’ feeding a bunch of kids fighting the fascists. A boy, barely 20, stood with a packet of aloo bhujiya insisting passers-by take a handful. He didn’t have much money; everyone had everything but there was no bhujiya. So he got that.

I think of Anoopa, offering a care package and funds from Bangalore, and Rayan in Hong Kong, helping spread the word, raise donations and counter false narratives from behind a screen. The geography of this movement has always exceeded the city. It includes those in the streets and those who make it possible for them to remain there.

The surveillance cameras will not show you this. They would rather you believe we are a good-for-nothing lot, tethered to our devices, gathered only to cause trouble. Their Meta glasses and high-tech gear, which by the way go gloriously blind when women are being raped, can record bodies packed one after the other in a fight to exercise a democratic right. But their viewfinders are too small to capture the compassion and ingenuity that keeps this fight alive.

And after all this we fight the great national gaslight that insists we are imagining things. That 'sab changa si'.

A protester was accused of ‘stretching the truth’ about her detention at her brother’s lunch table. Whose truth was she stretching? Hers, or theirs, who bend their knee to a faint-hearted emperor of nothing?

What does it do to a person to live through something and then argue over whether it happened at all? To watch the evidence circulate and yet be told by the messiahs of mass delusion who watch Republic TV that you manufactured and politicised what happened?

You can repeat your story, show the evidence and point to your injuries only so many times. When a lie demands more labour than the truth ever should, you become a full-time prosecutor in the case of your own life.

So, when Rahul Gandhi walked the Barakhamba Road with the ‘Chalo Dilli’ march, it felt like a window had opened in a room full of smoke. For the past four months, I and so many of my kind have fought for our lived experience to register and instead watched it being picked apart by people who were nowhere near what happened. We have forgotten what a full night of sleep feels like. Fear and fury have eaten into us, and the fatigue feels like a reason to give up and go home. For one epochal moment, he pulled us out of that disorienting spiral.

If I am admiring the Leader of the Opposition for doing his job, it tells you everything about the hour we live in. I am reminded of Bertolt Brecht in The Threepenny Opera: ‘First comes the grub, then comes the morality.’

I do not have the luxury of doing an autopsy on Rahul Gandhi’s conscience before acknowledging that his actions have helped us. It’s perverse to demand that people who are paying for their dissent with their livelihoods, safety and peace of mind must first establish the moral purity of a politician who has chosen to listen to them.

Trolls calling me a paid ‘Khangressi’ can learn basic spelling. To the ‘apoliticals’ and ‘neutrals’ insisting he is doing it for the votes and the love of the chair, I ask: what exactly is the scandal here? That a politician discovered that speaking of the suffering of people might be politically useful?

And if I am saying this publicly, it is because I want the LoP to hear the rest of it, too. We will remember that he showed up and treated our demands as worthy of a response. But solidarity must continue after the cameras move on and the moment loses its political usefulness. We will keep asking him to do more, holding him accountable when he fails us. The stakes are too high for gratitude to become a gag order. He should expect nothing less from those whose right to question power he is defending.

The youth of this country do not owe their silence or their unquestioning loyalty to anyone. We only owe ourselves the freedom to demand a better future without choosing between our safety and conscience.

As I put these final words down, the first light is breaking across the sky. I step onto my balcony to the sound of Shreya Ghoshal’s voice from a Bluetooth speaker playing in the flat next door, ‘Woh subah hami se aayegi’.

For once, I want the country to believe this.