Protest

Dalit musicians offer a radical imagination of music that breaks open the binaries of the sonic while adopting multiple genres, technologies, and emerging soundscapes.

In recent times, the right to speech, expression and the right to protest have been constantly undermined. An attack on these rights runs contrary to the spirit of civilised democracy. We need to exercise these rights within the Constitution’s conditions and the government is duty-bound to provide these conditions.

The peaceful indefinite sit-in by Muslim women at Shaheen Bagh has become the epicentre of nationwide protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act–National Population Register–National Register of Citizens, as the protestors have brought to the fore a protest performative that is to be comprehended beyond the physical protest site. As a people’s protest in the true sense, it contests the state’s excessive urge to define and dominate, and flags pressing concerns vis-à-vis discrimination in the face of a consumerism-driven argument of inconvenience. In doing so, the protestors help us understand resistance as an expression of belonging and citizenship as a participatory tool, rather than a status granted by the state on the basis of select documents.

The kisan long march, which took place in March 2018, is the most noteworthy agitation by farmers in Maharashtra in recent times. However, beyond the demands of complete loan waivers and fair prices for farm produce, the march is the manifestation of deep-seated and burgeoning structural problems within the agricultural sector that successive governments have failed to address.

Waiting is so much a part of everydayness, including waiting for peace, waiting for your loved ones to come home, waiting for curfew to end, waiting for the army to go home. Between silence and waiting one can create a narrative of the Kashmir conflict. Unlike the Holocaust or partition, which have the gigantism of epic memories, the sadness of Kashmir is forged, crafted out of thousands of little memories, unwritten diaries merging quietly together. It is this alchemy of memories that is struggling against government policy, which sanitises violence and erases memory to create this strange machine that moves from violence to violence in facile amnesia.