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[thread]
A year ago today, I was at the DY Patil stadium in Mumbai, watching U2 perform their classic album 'The Joshua Tree'. They were about 2/3rd of the way through their set when my phone pinged.
"Police firing at Jamia. Reports say one student dead, many injured."
![[thread]A year ago today, I was at the DY Patil stadium in Mumbai, watching U2 perform their classic album 'The Joshua Tree'. They were about 2/3rd of the way through their set when my phone pinged. "Police firing at Jamia. Reports say one student dead, many injured."](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EpRERJCVQAAj5T6.jpg "[thread]A year ago today, I was at the DY Patil stadium in Mumbai, watching U2 perform their classic album 'The Joshua Tree'. They were about 2/3rd of the way through their set when my phone pinged. \"Police firing at Jamia. Reports say one student dead, many injured.\"")
A year ago today, I was at the DY Patil stadium in Mumbai, watching U2 perform their classic album 'The Joshua Tree'. They were about 2/3rd of the way through their set when my phone pinged.
"Police firing at Jamia. Reports say one student dead, many injured."
It had already been a weird night. There was no booze (at a stadium gig!), the sound by the press seats was absolutely atrocious. And then Bono & frenz decided to pay tribute to India's 'women icons' by putting Gauri Lankesh, Rana Ayyub and Smriti fucking Irani in the same video.
I was feeling this low-level hum of cognitive dissonance, like I wasn't quite sure how I fit into this setting, this familiar milieu anymore. I'd felt it before like when I spent a day visiting the sickbeds of Mahul and then had to go report on some glitzy SoBo restaurant launch.
Then I got that message. I spent the next few minutes frantically looking at my phone, as a slow trickle of eye-witness accounts started filtering in on activist Twitter and journalism Whatsapp groups. The shock hit like a sledgehammer.
I'm not sure why this particular incident—of all the horrors to precede it, and those to follow—hit so hard, but it did. Maybe it was because the govt had just openly attacked 2 universities (news from AMU had also come in). Maybe it was the (wrong) reports of 1 dead student.
Or maybe it was just the extreme dissonance of watching Bono pay tribute to a fascist minister, whose government was—AT THAT EXACT MOMENT—shooting and assaulting students and peaceful protesters in the nation's capital. It was just too much. I ran out of the stadium.
I spent the next hour walking around D.Y. Patil, chain-smoking compulsively as I sorted through news and rumour, touched base with friends and journalists in Delhi, and tried to get a handle on the grief, helplessness and rage I was feeling. Eventually, the rage won out.
And it wasn't just me who felt it. An hour later, as I was in the cab home, friends and acquaintances were already organising a response. All night, phones rang and pinged across the country as people planned protests & organised medical and legal help for attacked students.
The next day I went to a small, slightly confused protest at Mumbai University, followed by a political meeting organised by Ambedkarite students. The room they'd booked was packed to over-flowing with people who had never attended a protest or a political meeting in their lives.
Within five days the small, tentative protests in Mumbai had snowballed into a massive rally, as people came out to resist not just the CAA and NRC, but also the heavy-handed state repression unleashed by the Delhi and UP police.
Bombay had a bunch of protests big and small, including one attempted protest against Republic that led to some of us being detained by the police. The inspiring, strong women of Mumbai Bagh constantly faced down harassment by police as well as internal political pressures.
Similar scenes were happening all over the country, like the sit-in at Park Circus in Kolkata. But we were lucky enough to be in a non-BJP state. Delhi and UP were battlegrounds—every day was a battle against arbitrary detentions, police brutality, relentless hate & propaganda.
We all know what came next. But what I choose to remember is the spark that the Delhi police and their bigot masters accidentally lit on this day last year, and how we responded. People with no political experience—artists, bankers, film-makers—learnt how to organise overnight.
Some friends organised their colleagues and acquaintances to come to the protests, planning, cajoling, bringing in the numbers. Others became links between their different networks, passing information, contacts, advice between those on the ground and those who wanted to help.
Instead of being led to despair, they let this fascist government politicise them. Against all odds and under tremendous threats, they stood up to a regime that has violence as its core value. Even when the state unleashed a pogrom, they were out there helping or coordinating.
The pandemic did what this government didn't, and now some of those friends face repression, jail, or worse as the government tries to crush any and all dissenters. But as the farmer protests show, that spark won't be extinguished so easily.
For many people, last year's protests were their first taste of the power, hope and sheer joy of mass mobilisation. And those who had been fighting these fascists for years were reminded that they were not alone, that not everyone was happy with passivity in the face of evil.
That's what I choose to remember anyway. It wasn't the perfect movement, far from it. And it may not be enough to shake this regime's vicelike grasp on electoral power. But even against hopeless odds people resisted and continue to resist. As long as that is true, there is hope.
To sum up: fuck Hindutva fascists, fuck their enablers, and fuck Bono. [/thread]
[addendum] this is not to erase the facts of what happened elsewhere, especially Assam where both the protests and the repression started in earnest before all this happened. Just reliving those few rollercoaster months that now seem so long ago.
