Special Section: July 20, 2026

I too am a Cockroach

By Shalini Masih & Ashok Nagpal

 

It was the hot month of May in the capital state of India when, during a court hearing, the Chief Justice of India described unemployed young people as cockroaches and parasites of society. He later said that he had been misunderstood, but his words had already left the room, and by then they were no longer his.

Within a day a movement called Cockroach Janta Party was founded, a parody of the ruling one. Soon there were hundreds of thousands of sign-ups, people in cockroach costumes doing street clean-ups, a sit-in at Jantar Mantar that ran thirty-six days through the hottest month in Delhi. And a slogan gained life and began to float as much in the streets as in the ether of social media: Main Bhi Cockroach / I too am a Cockroach.

This slogan was a psychic event.

A state that cannot feed its young, whose examinations leak and whose promised jobs do not arrive, has an intolerable knowledge about itself: it is the parasite, living on the labour and hope of the people it fails, consuming the very rot it has created in society. That you are the infestation that plagues your society is not an easy knowledge to hold. It is evacuated into the very people it describes. You are the parasites. Psychoanalysis would see the work of projective identification here (Klein, 1946), that precise, and also mysterious, mechanism by which a system rids itself of its own unbearable contents by lodging them in the bodies of those least able to refuse delivery. As clinicians, we know that once the projection lands, the recipient has, classically, two routes. Introject it: take the designation in, become the creature, live as the thing you were called. Or return it: throw the insult back, retaliate, enter the field of enemies where you now become the villain the projector needed. Both routes complete the loop of projection identification. Both confirm that the content was real and had to go somewhere.

There is, however, a third route, and it is the one Wilfred Bion (1962) described in a good-enough container that receives raw beta-elements, bears it, and transforms it into something that can be thought and, crucially, played with. “I too am a Cockroach” is this work of containment. The projection was neither introjected nor ejected but transformed. Rage, on the protest sites (Jantar Mantar), was visibly being converted into acts of cleaning up the streets, spoken poetry, songs, care toward fellow protestors who were different and had been taught to hate each other by the state. The tyrannical, paranoid state does not know how to metabolise play. This work of transforming attack into play is the political act.

Franz Kafka gave us the first route, the introjection, in its purest form, and Eric Santner (2006) gave that form a name: creaturely life where the creature is not the animal but it is what a human becomes under a sovereign authority that has lost its capacity to signify but kept its capacity to designate, summoned by a law it cannot read, held in a jurisdiction that will neither release it nor say what it stands accused of.

In Kafka’s widely read work The Metamorphosis (1915/2014), Gregor Samsa wakes as ungeziefer. This label works through erasure. Gregor loses speech, then the room, then recognition itself, until what remains can be swept out. He swallows the projection whole. Creaturely life is introjection completed, and it isolates absolutely: he is the only cockroach in the world.

In the Cockroach Movement of India, this runs backwards. The label was imposed from above, taken up. What was meant to injure by isolation actually led to congregation, pluralisation as opposed to polarisation. Vermin do not have comrades; they have infestations.

In its older stratum, ungeziefer means the unclean animal “unfit for sacrifice” (Santner, 2006; Bernofsky, in Kafka, 1915/2014). Not merely worthless but unofferable, with no standing at the altar, excluded from the economy of the sacred so completely, it cannot even be given away. This is held in juxtaposition with satyagraha; once it is seen without the Gandhian heritage that wraps it, satyagraha is a technique of self-offering, offering oneself (Gandhi, 1928). Making the body available as the thing placed before power, which power must either receive and confront its gluttony or reject and confront its arrogance. The Cockroach Movement took up the name of the unofferable and proceeded by offering itself. They went down to Yamuna, that most filthy yet most revered river, and scrubbed the mother goddess’s body.

We witnessed this played out in the body of Sonam Wangchuk, an award-winning scientist who is also a humble engineer from the small state of Ladakh in the northernmost part of India. Wangchuk sat on hunger strike. On the twenty-first day, the state-sponsored police carried him to a hospital. His fast was the offering. The state did not refuse it by argument and did not accept it either. It removed the offering and reclassified the sacrifice as a “case.” A fasting body made unfit for sacrifice. In other words, a container declining to contain is an evacuator, part of a paranoid system, in this case the paranoid state.

Gandhi’s method was identification downward (Erikson, 1969): the latrine cleaning, wearing a loincloth, the third-class carriage. It was also a sadhana, an ascetic discipline of the body—fasting, spinning, silence. The young have a sadhana of irony: the daily, undramatic practice of holding the name lightly enough that it loses it power to humiliate and firmly enough that it cannot be taken back. Gandhi’s method did not have that. Further, the young Cockroaches do not descend. They have no elsewhere. The name was thrown from the highest bench in the country, and the only question was what to do with a name one cannot return. And it is worth noticing whom the movement lists on its own pages among those who came before: not the Mahatma but Ambedkar (1945).

At the end of July, the education minister resigned and the protestors went home. In August, they decided not to become a political party. Play emerged as declaration (Winnicott, 1971): a party that is the parody of a party declares itself precisely by declining to become one, a refusal of the villain-stance in both directions, not to occupy one and not to require one. Late in August, saying the promises had not been kept, the protestors called a march for the fifth of September, to be led by the families of students who had died over the leaked medical entrance paper. The bereaved at the front. The offering in its most unbearable form. 

The march was called off. The Supreme Court quashed every criminal case from the July days, across the country, and directed the government to compensate the families within three months. A victory. Charges that would have rotted for a decade as punishment without verdict are gone. Interestingly, the bench was headed by the same Chief Justice. The very mouth that labelled became the mouth that absolved. Nothing else connects the May remark to the September relief except the person who made both. Invoking Article 142, the Court’s power to do complete justice, he said that that order set no precedent. A discretionary reservoir of grace, not a citizen’s right. Nothing was established. A power reached down, lifted the sentence, and reserved the capacity to pass it again.

This apparently gracious pardon left the sovereign exactly where it was and restored the vertical axis the horizontal swarm had briefly dissolved. To be pardoned is to be confirmed as one who could have been condemned. Winnicott’s (1969) insights help us here. An object that survives destruction without retaliating and without collapsing becomes usable. An object that manages destruction, that neither retaliates nor survives but administers, remains an object to be managed in return. The Court did not survive the cockroaches but learned to process them.

It was the second unbidden pardon of the summer. The first came in July from the Prime Minister, for the expletives, offered in his late mother’s name. Both arrived from above, unprompted. Both restored the vertical. The strongman’s mysticism, grace descending from a single seat, is radically opposed to the mysticism of bhakti movement, where the divine is met sideways, in the crowd.

Additionally, the police were permitted fresh cases against 2,873 named individuals said to have criminal antecedents, who were present at the sit-in. The swarm is being sorted as we write this. Some are declared bona fide young people with futures and lifted out. Others are separated and handed back. Splitting in its institutional form: between the good cockroach and the bad cockroach, the clean herd and the impure animal, the oldest move in the sacrificial economy. Unclean remains unofferable. The movement’s slogan, Main Bhi Cockroach / I too am a Cockroach, claimed that the designation was shared and therefore unusable. The recent court order, however, accepts that from most and refuses it from 2,873, and in doing so restores precisely the paranoid-schizoid arrangement the slogan had suspended. Some cockroaches, it turns out, are fit for sacrifice. The rest are still what the word originally meant.

We have known moments like this in our consulting rooms, where the political returns as the intimate. A patient who arrives as vermin in their own eyes, plagued with a sense of feeling unwanted and bringing along a heavy deadness. It is as if they carry a sentence passed early, by a parent or a system, with the structure of law: unappealable, unexplained, already served. They do not ask the therapist to overturn it but perhaps, without explicitly saying so, they are asking, What does one do with a name one cannot give back?

One may notice in oneself two temptations surging. The first is to confirm the designation by treating it as a symptom to be cleared (“You are not vermin; let us establish this”), which sounds like kindness but lands as a second sentence, because it tells them their experience of themselves was an error. The other is to find the designation interesting, to make a poetics of their degradation while they go on living in it. Both are failures of containment. While one evacuates the projection back, the other swallows it as aesthetic.

What Winnicott offers is the object that survives and becomes usable. The analytic equivalent of Main Bhi Cockroach / I too am a Cockroach is not the interpretation that lifts the label. It is the moment the label can be owned without either therapist or patient flinching or making it beautiful. Michael Eigen (1999) would say the truth that shatters is the same truth that nourishes. The work is to remain present while it does both.

What we keep returning to is the smallness of the reversal. The name still stands, issued from the bench, and the bench has now shown it can throw the name and take it back without explaining either. What changed in May was only the direction the word travelled, the number of people saying it, and who was permitted to say it first. That is not what a court can grant or withdraw, which is why it survives this order and would have survived a worse one.

It is a fairly exact description of what we do in the room. As therapist, we are not engaged in the work of removing the sentence. We cannot remove it, and the patient who believes we can has not yet met us. The recovery lies in the restoration of the right to pronounce it, to take it on and play with it. To say the worst name they were ever given, in the first person, in the plural, and find they are still there.

The Father

By Priyanka Kapoor

 

On July 20, 2026, a middle-aged sweeper at Hauz Khas metro station walks up to a group of teenage school girls and says theatrically, “We are with you.” The girls giggle to themselves and head toward the women’s compartment of the train. The man, with a broom in his hand, goes back to looking at his phone, at the storm of reels about the ongoing student protests in Delhi. The food stalls inside the station bustle with a charge of something is about to happen. At an interval of about every ten minutes, the words students, police, and protest can be heard among those stopping to getting their lunch packed. Baristas, sitting down to eat their own lunch, plug in their earphones and look at their screens as if they were catching updates on the India-Pakistan cricket match. Many among the passersby listen to their social media on full volume with their ear close to the speaker, occasionally looking up and around with distinct suspicion as they try to guess whether the other prescribes to their view. 

Outside the INA station, autowallahs hailing from the sewage-seeped borders of Delhi speak with the accuracy of ground reporters as they point at the police barricade, anger bubbling up with a refrain of helplessness learned over many years. Office workers from government buildings with fancy facades gather near the tea stalls and peer at the waves of incoming protestors near the chowk with a haunted look in their eyes. At a red light, a Zomato delivery boy alternates between his Instagram feed and Google Maps as beads of sweat drip down onto his phone. He is staring at a clip about a public-toilet caretaker who has been living, cooking, and sleeping inside a public restroom in Connaught Place for several years. 

On the news that night, an anchor with a big bindi repeats the phrase “Gen Z” like it’s a piece of gum stuck at the back of her throat. She drones on about the irreverence of the younger generations and “outsider” influence. Later, there is more uproar about “talking to your elders” and “respecting our culture”—which makes for a most interesting, if not rare, method of facing dissent. It takes me back to 2015 in North West Delhi when my friend’s neighbor, a woman in her fifties, advised her to resolve her situation with her father, who had been temporarily jailed a fortnight before on charges of domestic violence, because at the end of the day, he was her father. 

A similar kind of domesticity seeps into Indian politics, and full-grown adults fighting at the margins are reduced to Peter Pans against the towering figure of the father who cannot be questioned.

 The ruler as father is a myth as old as time. In many urban households across Delhi and India, that carry the legacy of their feudal roots, the word of the patriarch is a matter of family prestige and value. In my own household, if one expresses dissent against the father / father figure, elder women in the family often hold an intervention and ask you to apologize in order to keep up the status quo. The modus operandi of the current Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) regime in India is an extension of the same sentiment, despite its genesis being the RSS brotherhood. Perhaps this is the reason why the Mohan Bhagwat–led Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) disagrees and distances itself from the Modi-led BJP. It is no coincidence that Bhagwat, during his controversial NYC address on August 29, rejected the “politics of self-interest” and directed this toward the Indian Prime Minister. By doing this, it is almost as if Bhagwat is signaling a Freudian ending for Narendra Modi.

In Totem and Taboo, Freud introduces the idea of the primal father that serves as the genesis-myth of democratic fraternity. The father, all-powerful, incestuous and hedonistic, keeps all the women to himself and becomes a symbol of excess. To defeat his monopoly, the brothers band together and kill the father—thereby curtailing his excessive attitude. The son that kills him becomes the ideal father (or the substitute father) and his prime function becomes the installation of inhibitions and taboos, so that the primal father must remain a cautionary tale among the fraternity of brothers who have now formed a democracy. 

For both RSS and BJP, the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, is the primal father, with his scandals that continue to be news for many party spokespersons even today. In his death, celebrated in the vision of Hindu Rashtra, the brothers resound the “true” freedom (many Hindutva leaders count the years of Indian Independence starting from 2014) from secularism and the excess of modern liberalism that Nehru stood for. 

The recent protests in Delhi, however, turned this myth-narrative on its head—signaling a second symbolic death of the tyrant father. At the protest site, I overheard a middle-aged man respond to an independent journalist with an anecdote about his long-standing loyalty to RSS-BJP, which had been broken because “paani ab sar se upar jaa chuka hai.” The lament all around, particularly from former BJP and RSS supporters at the protest, seemed to be aimed at the overt censorship and excessive corruption of the Modi regime, which deflates the idea of a free-speech democracy that is necessary for the cogs of global capitalism. 

With the protest, a pressure valve has been lifted. The release feels psychosomatic rather than purely ideological. People curse at the prime minister with a compulsive need that feels most natural in the aftermath of the repressive censorship, as if one were merely returning to a language that has fallen out of practice. Protest becomes the site of third space, and all the creativity banned inside the BJP-surveilled university classrooms comes out in a remarkable and diverse spectacle of dissent, previously only seen on satirical online pages. 

Before going to a crowded place, it is generally advised to learn about all the possible exits in case of a stampede. On July 20, near the Jantar Mantar protest site, I pointed toward a big blue building housing a State Bank and asked my cousin to meet me at its gate, in case of our separation. Within thirty minutes, the police installed a barricade and closed off that area with no explanation or warning. Eventually, the barricades began closing in and volunteers began to warn the protestors about the alleged electric nature of the barriers. “Don’t touch them,” they howled with marked urgency. “Don’t stand here,” a policeman commanded me as I eyed another exit. As the maze began to close in, a row of riot policemen with polished gear began to announce over the chant of the protestors: “Beware of the anti-social elements.” As the scene became more claustrophobic before my eyes, I found it to be a fitting metaphor for the current flow of Indian politics and how power is exerted upon the age-old altar of fear. 

Right-wing politics across the world has the same motto: Beware of the “other.” This warning is more than just the old-school “divide and rule” that was pertinent in Indian history in the context of the British Raj; it plants the need for a father that must maintain a bar of purity by constantly eliminating the “other.” In India, politics of purity has a deeply entrenched caste-based history, and it is no surprise that many IT cell handles publicized the Reservation Hatao campaign in the aftermath of the protest to introduce a widespread sense of the “other.” 

But can the tyrant father survive after his symbolic death? Perhaps a better question to ask would be: Can we break the cycle of installing a “father” altogether? 

The Novel Path of Cockroaches

By Neil Altman & Shifa Haq

 

For some years the people of India have been suffering in the grip of a dictatorial power that has shown itself capable of ordering lethal violence in the process of repressing people who protest or otherwise resist the imposition of its will upon the country. To a great extent, the Indian people, like people under other such regimes all around the world, have gone with the program as best they could. Nonetheless, the collective memory of how the people of the subcontinent rose up and freed themselves from the yoke of violently imposed British oppression only a few decades ago persisted, along with the centuries-old co-existence, often peaceful, with people of diverse cultures, ethnicities, and faiths. The cultivation of intellectual life, in both spiritual and scientific contexts, has thrived in Indian soil and universities and at the feet of Indian gurus and imams. Thus, it makes sense that when the government of India announced the dates and locations of the examinations required for admittance to the upper echelon, hundreds of thousands of Indian applicants showed up. 

This year, however, rumors that the content of these examinations had been somehow leaked led to the cancellation of the long-awaited examinations. Long-suppressed frustration and rage were unleashed all around the country, not only with respect to the examinations, but also as an expression of feelings of unfair exclusion from educational and employment opportunities. Mistrust of the government and other power structures runs rampant in any case. The apathy of the ruling class was made palpable in the words of the Chief Justice of India who likened Indian youth to cockroaches, a nation-wide pestilence. Picking up on this casually flung insult—which seemed to capture the contempt and disregard with which the authorities, perhaps the adult world at large, viewed the young people in the streets—one of their leaders, Abhishek Dipke, coined a term for the newly emerging youth movement to counter the dysfunctional traditional political parties: “Cockroach Janta,” or cockroach people, cockroach nation. Millions of young people poured into the streets. Clashes with police ensued. Feelings of having nothing to lose took over. This was the trigger that set off unprecedented rage and outrage. 

Frantz Fanon, a Martinican psychiatrist, broke with Freud by emphasizing interpersonal relations rather than the drives and defenses which Freud had put at the center of psychic life and psychic development. Reflecting on the depressive feelings he observed among his countrymen in Martinique, Fanon concluded that Martinicans commonly identified with the denigrated images of themselves which they saw in the eyes of the French colonists. What had appeared as mental illness, such as depression, was reformulated as internalization of a denigrated image of themselves. In this way, Fanon appropriated Ferenczi’s concept of “identification with the aggressor,” thereby inaugurating post-colonial theory. One of Fanon’s books was entitled The Wretched of the Earth, but it might as well have been called The Evolution of People who Are Made to Feel Like Cockroaches. 

To be a cockroach is to have been “thrown between sky and water with empty heads and empty eyes” (Fanon, p. 209). To be a cockroach is to become aware of the material conditions which might make one remember concern for dignity and livability, then to be moved to follow novel trails and harness the power of aggregation and cooperation to live together in radical equality. The Cockroach Janta has gone past the silent plague of the manic defense of a national culture—a fascist revivalism of the Hindu golden age—to connect to the objective struggles of today, exposing and willingly entering the affective injuries of being poor, unemployed, rootless, stateless, and despairing. The image of the cockroach, to expand on Fanon, is a drawbridge which allowed unconscious dreamwork to gather scattered energy into a robust, muscular action against the sense of decay as though to make a vigorous ecological intervention, emphasizing that lowlife is still life. While perhaps not consciously anti-caste from the beginning, the movement subverts the Brahmanic logic of the political class as well the dominant social relations that make it seem as if only some lives matter. 

In Frantz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the main character, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning to find that he has metamorphosed into a cockroach. Samsa, a Jewish man in Czechoslovakia (like Kafka), might well have felt like a cockroach, a filthy pest that human beings avoid. Or like the Indians who were issued “crawling orders” by General Dyer, following the massacre of the Jallianwala Bagh, orders that required Indians to crawl on all fours when passing through certain streets. The same humiliation, the same reduction of human dignity, was felt by “untouchables” who were for centuries segregated and confined to avoid even accidental contact with upper-caste Hindus. Humiliation reveals surplus recognition of one person at the cost of someone else who bears the reduction and rejection. But, while the lone figure of Gregor Samsa perishes in his reduction, the protestors on the streets of India lodge their rejection of this rejection loudly and openly, choosing presence over disappearance (Guru, 2009; Parekh, 2019). 

What does psychoanalysis contribute to the activism of Abhishekh Dipte? When he heard that the Chief Justice of India had called the students cockroaches, we don’t assume that he could have articulated verbally or otherwise that they had exposed how the authorities were undermining the self-esteem, the very humanity, of the young people of India who were protesting. Instead, what came across was that the Chief Justice had made a fool of himself, and that it would become a matter of psychic survival for the protestors to disavow their own government. This is how psychoanalysis works: at its best, it makes things happen, while the ostensible actors (patients, analysts, activists) are transformed in ways they feel intuitively but cannot articulate except, perhaps, in retrospect. 

Here we can see that politics and psychoanalysis intertwine in the psychic logic of substitutability (Butler, 2021). The disgust and the destructiveness of the ruling political class find substitution in the image of a roach; the same image, through yet another substitution, evolves as an unconscious character, galvanizing the unruly politics of the youth. By holding on to derision and failure instead of disavowing it, the cockroach nation undercuts triumphalism to contact reality. So often the ethnocentrism of the West theorizes the moral and political life of the rest of the world from on high. The students’ protests in India call for a shift in direction of theorization of psychic life of power to include imaginative unconscious processes that go beyond the dichotomy of good and evil / enemy and ally / love and hate that had been the staple of political psychology. They remind us that violent dictatorships often fail to account for the fact that all interactions, between individuals, or between large or small groups, involve people with more or less divergent perspectives. Dictatorial regimes rely on violence to crush differences. Sometimes people accept, even welcome, being ordered to fall in line, as Erich Fromm demonstrated in his epochal Escape from Freedom.  But ultimately difference asserts itself; no one can enforce uniformity indefinitely—violence breeds rebellion, in recurring cycles. Vulnerability and death claim us all, sooner or later. 

In recent times, several youth-led movements and protests have flooded the streets the world over, questioning the silence and complicity of generations in positions of power. As psychoanalysts we find ourselves contemplating the relation between activism and imaginative resistance as a form of social dreaming. We think psychoanalysis has a lot to say about the political voices, and these questions and positions, that are kept outside the frame of conversations. It is time to imagine a socially and politically engaged psychoanalysis relevant for the new generation. The protest movements are telling us that east and west, north and south, we care about other people, no matter how distant they may seem, because we are all in the same boat, with the same storms headed our way. Can activism be our new method of relationality? A way to create a home for our grief for ongoing loss of an egalitarian world? The embodied persistence of civil disobedience, its insistence on solidarity and connection, may be the new location of eros. 

Hum Ladenge Saathi

By Pratiksha Chakravarty

 

The 20^th of July, 2026, was a sad day in India, a day when unarmed student protestors demanded the resignation of the education minister after twenty-one students had committed suicide because of a NEET exam leak. The students peacefully marched toward parliament after thirty days of sit-in protest at Jantar Mantar, and were met with nail-studded batons, stones, smoke grenades, electric shock devices, and pellet guns, injuring several unarmed citizens in the middle of the capital city of Delhi. 

Having witnessed this police and state brutality, thousands of people across India took to the streets to protest and show solidarity with the victims of the crackdown. Like many others, I logged off work early on a Monday evening to attend an artists’ collective event in my city, affirming the message: they stood for our future, and we stand for their dignity.

Paash wrote a beautiful poem, “Hum Ladenge Saathi,” which was recited by the more than two hundred people present at the gathering. There were songs, poems, plays, rap music, contemporary comedy and satire, all to share the collective grief of the constant suppression of any voices of dissent by the right-winged Hindutva regime over the last twelve years. The oppression of minorities through the transgender bill, CAA-NRC laws, and Farmer laws are tales of their time, leading to protestors being arrested under the draconian UAPA Act. (Two such examples of political prisoners are Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, who have been rotting in Indian jails for the past six years without a trial.)

It was an outdoor event, and it began raining as monsoons had just hit the subcontinent a week back. People continued chanting: Jai Jai Jai Bhim (Glory to Dr. B. R. Ambedkar); Manu-vaad ki chhaati par, Birsa-Phule-Ambedkar (standing strong/triumphant against the regressive social order dictated by Manusmriti); Dharmendra Pradhan stifa do (The education minister must resign). As the downpour continued lashing, the music got louder, the chants got louder, the claps got louder. I turned toward the crowd and saw the wet eyes of women who had endured online abuse and rape/death threats by the army of trolls funded by the ruling government; I saw Muslim men who had been mocked and assaulted by the Indian nationalists asking them to leave the country and go to Pakistan merely for keeping a beard or wearing a skullcap; I tapped my feet as a beautiful drag queen performed her heart out to a song of resistance. The sky turned dark, the rain slowed; some of us stayed back, had a chat, and then left for the day. 

But this is not about this event alone. It is about the solidarity and connection that event represents. 

Three years ago, after the Hamas attack on 7^th October, the world witnessed a genocide unfold. I used to wonder how it was possible that Hitler and Nazi Germany carried out the Holocaust in the middle of Europe and nobody stopped them. Sadly, I have the answer to that now. After watching famine-ridden kids being blown to pieces while getting humanitarian aid, the world did nothing. We held meetings—the UN, NATO, UNICEF, Amnesty International, and the International Court of Justice— all of them in suits and ties, in air-conditioned meeting rooms with talking points, hours of discussions and votes among Harvard and Cambridge alumni, conclusions and reports published in Al Jazeera, MSNBC, BBC, etc. All of this could not stop the active conflict, displacement crises, and killings of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank. The mockery of international law was not funny anymore, was it? Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red. 

In Indian context, the grief was undervalued. To a country that has been waging a war against Islam for over a decade, Palestine immediately became an issue not to be spoken about. People who approved of the assaults and lynchings of the Indian Muslims by the saffron-clad Hindutva terror groups quickly chose the side of Israel, as they were drunk on hatred for Muslims, no matter where. While there were protests happening every week all over Europe and the US, we Indians could not come out and share the grief of one of the biggest human rights violations and ethnic cleansings in history, which we watched streaming in 4K resolution on our little smartphones. 

As the rain got stronger that day, I could not wait for a bus, so I booked a cab to get back home. While I waited for the cab to arrive, I read an article headlined 2026 Minab school attack and AI describing the killing of 120 Iranian school children by Americans and the use of AI to carry out this operation. The article described how an AI-powered system had bombed the school in Minab, not once but twice. My cab arrived; I shared my boarding one-time password and thanked my stars I was being driven by an actual human being and not AI (yet). 

The rain had stopped by then, and my single body’s nervous system was failing to take in any more bad news of the world. What a privilege it was to keep my phone aside and roll down the windows to get some air. I added a stop at the nearby bookshop to pick up a gift for a five-year-old girl in my apartment building; it was her birthday the day before, and she knew I could read and write fluent Hindi, so she had asked me to get a good Hindi storybook for her. As I got back in my cab with the nicely wrapped gift, I was reminded of the thousands of young children in Palestine. This wasn’t sudden—it never is. They have been lingering around my thoughts for the last three years, thoughts full of pain and grief. I am not a mother myself, but I am an aunt, and an elder sister to a brother with Down syndrome. I know children. They don’t start wars; they carry school bags and lunch boxes. They do not draw borders; they draw the sun in the corner of the sky behind the hills. They do not choose sides; they hold their parents’ hands and dream of becoming doctors, artists, athletes. No child anywhere in the world should grow up knowing the sound of bombs before the sound of lullabies. No child should fear the sky, no matter their nationality, religion, or geography. Children only know love and compassion—it is the world that teaches them otherwise. 

Even though in India, we do not have very many collective groups to express solidarity or share our grief after watching the beheaded children of Palestine; even though we are powerless sitting in a country whose Prime Minister calls the Zionist state of Israel our  “fatherland”; even though we are ordinary citizens in a country with hundreds of problems of our own—the least we can do as humans of this shared planet is to express that if we had the power in a hypothetical world, we would not allow innocent children to be killed in a genocide. I refuse to live in a world where I get to enjoy freedom and safety at the expense of a mother who is forced to look for pieces of her children in the rubble of her flattened home so she can bury them with some dignity. I refuse to leave behind a world where it is less shameful and risky to celebrate death than to fight for life. As Toni Morrison said, “If you are free, you need to free somebody else.” Speaking out about Palestine and the brutal occupation may have reached a fatigue. The constant bombardment of information does make one insensitive and even numb to the atrocities. But the war crimes have been ongoing even after a declared ceasefire on paper. The test is to keep humanity and empathy alive even as trillions of dollars are being spent to make us feel numb. 

Discussions with like-minded people, reading books on resistance, helping with fundraising, engaging with online content in order to fight an algorithm that only wants to sell us the latest trad-wife trend, and regulating and centering my own mind to keep speaking out against injustice and oppression—these are some things that have helped me get through times that are criminally painful and troubling. One human being is not designed to carry the emotional responsibility of every tragedy on Earth; therefore, I care deeply, I help wherever possible, but I do not allow myself to confuse constant exposure to suffering with personal moral failure. Just as water only reflects the sky when it settles, the human mind only reveals clarity when it becomes quiet. Every feeling of grief, anger, and despair can become a force for change if directed correctly. 

Back in the cab, I was stuck at a traffic signal with a long line of cars. The rain began again, but I kept my window rolled down. Five seconds later, I saw a baby wave at me from a passing car, giggling and cooing. I just had to wave back. I smiled and recalled Ruskin Bond’s quote: “and when all the wars are done, a butterfly will still be beautiful.”

My People

By Lakshmi

 

It was Saturday morning when I got the message: Hey, we’re planning to go to the protest tomorrow. There’s a bunch of us. Do you want to come? I did. I felt strongly about what was happening in the nation. Many young students had taken their lives after their futures were jeopardised by an exam paper leak. They had spent years preparing for the centralised medical seat exam only for their efforts to be in vain. This was not the first time this had happened. But people had had enough. There was no denying that it was time to raise our voices so there could be change. I wanted to be a part of this.

But there was also fear. The fear of being openly critical of the government in a country where speaking out earned you the label of “anti-national.” People who had raised their voices had gone through trolling, defamation, and straight-up abuse. They were identified through photos and videos that had been posted online. Social media had helped get the masses together, but it also made them easy targets. 

And then there was the fact of being physically present in a crowd itself. As a woman, I had to be on guard whenever I stepped outside. I couldn’t guarantee my own safety and it didn’t matter whether it was day or night, what I was wearing, or who I was with. It also didn’t help that the police force seemed to be instigating violence rather than trying to quash it. They had used lathis and tear gas against the tens of thousands who wanted to have a peaceful march. 

All these things swirled around in my mind. It had been more than a month since this uproar started, and it didn’t look like there would be a resolution soon. There was barely any acknowledgement from the government even though people were gathering in hordes in New Delhi, the nation’s capital. There were also gatherings in different cities, such as mine, to show that even those who couldn’t make it to the capital were in solidarity with the cause. Still there was no indication of any sort of resolution.

But this was a landmark event that woke the nation up. Before this, there was an atmosphere of sheer complacency amongst the people. We had seen the public shaming of the few who rose to speak up against the system. We were convinced that it would be impossible to stop the corruption. Now, finally, there was enough momentum to bring the oppressed and frustrated citizens out of their homes and on to the streets. I had to go.

As I finally convinced myself, my phone blew up with more messages: It’s done. He’s resigned! I really couldn’t believe it. After so many days of strife, the main demand of the protestors was being accepted by the government. The education minister had resigned! He had even posted his resignation letter on X. It left a lot out; he hadn’t really acknowledged the actual corruption in the system or taken any responsibility for it. But it seemed like the people finally had a say in the world’s largest democracy!

I watched videos of celebrations all around the country. It had seemed impossible. Tears of joy streamed down my face as I got in touch with my friends, saying, “There is hope for change! There is hope for this country!”

I found out that there would be a celebratory gathering in my city. It was to be held in the same place that our protests were happening. I texted my friend who had asked me to join her group in the morning and shared the details of the event. Her response shocked me. “It’s going to put the whole protest in a negative light if we continue to do it,” she said. “The government has agreed to all the demands made by the people. The education minister has resigned.”

I tried to rationalise her response, but I could feel anger bubbling up in me. What did she mean by “negative light”? Why was she disowning the very thing she had wanted to be part of a few hours ago? Was this resolution enough that we should go back to that state of complacency? Should we not be able to acknowledge and celebrate this historic moment? 

I realised that I hadn’t been really hopeful myself that anything would come out of this. I didn’t believe that those in power were going to listen to the people. I thought that they assumed the movement would die on its own over time. But they were wrong. People of all ages and backgrounds had shown up to protest. The least I could do was go and celebrate with those who were brave enough to stand up without all these doubts holding them back. 

And so I ended up going to the event filled with nervousness. As much as I’d seen on social media, I still didn’t know what it would actually be like in real life. I started to hear the roar of the crowd as I got closer. I passed by many police buses and even vehicles with huge water cannons parked on the side of the road. In front of me I saw police personnel standing all around the perimeter of the park. 

I walked past them and before I knew it I was part of a sea of people. I looked around to see men, women, and children of all ages. Some sat, some stood, some held up posters. They all faced a stage that had been set up by the organisers. People were yelling out slogans from the stage and the crowd chanted them back in unison. Cries of “Jai Bhim!” and “Inquilab zindabad!” echoed throughout. Immediately, all my trepidation melted away. These were all people just like me. They weren’t a crowd. They were individuals who felt as much as I felt. They were brave and patriotic. They wanted the best for all of us. For the nation.

I sat down on the ground in front of the stage next to a young boy and his mother who made space for me. They offered me water and peanuts as time went on. An unspoken bond developed between us. We were mesmerised by what was unfolding around us.  

Dozens of protestors had come to showcase their dissent through speech, dance, song, and even rap. The variety in their impassioned performances and speeches made me realise what our country truly is. They were from different states, spoke different languages, and represented different religions and castes. Our “unity in diversity” was on proud display. It was clear how much these people loved India. They just wanted to demand the rights that have been guaranteed to us in our constitution. 

We were united as a people not because we had a common oppressor. We were united as human beings with hope. There was no space here for any of the labels that were so often used to divide us. We wanted our democracy back!

The Spaces Between Us

By Gunjan Chandak Khemka

 

The other night, I was making my way to a protest in my city, in support of the Cockroach Janata Party protests in New Delhi. I had to park the car 2.5 kilometers away, as parking closer to the protest site would have been challenging. It was a hot, sultry evening, and I walked at a brisk pace, stepping over uneven patches of the footpath and jumping over leftover puddles from the rain. In some places, the footpath was blocked by cars and I had to sidestep onto the road. Some parts of the sidewalk were occupied by tea and food stalls that hit me with a gust of heat as I passed by. The garbage bins near them were overflowing. Crossing little by-lanes, I made it to the last stretch of the walk. Here, the footpath had been hijacked by street vendors, trying to earn a living in the best way they knew how. This expanse with shops on both sides, vendors calling out to grab your attention, and the bright white lights affixed to these temporary stalls felt suffocating to me. As if the busyness of this section was crushing. I stumbled out of an opening onto the streets. I could breathe again. 

A portion of the road opposite a bus depot had been blocked off by police barricades on two sides as the designated protest site, where the protestors were expressing their dissent against the government regarding leaks of the national medical entrance examination. The place was crawling with people in uniform. We, the protestors, occupied this public road, but were surrounded by the panopticon-like gaze of the ever-present authority.

The spaces I walked through were chaotic, crowded, and brimming with the little interactions of daily life. Walking in India is both a necessity and a privilege, depending on your socioeconomic location. The act of not-walking becomes associated with capitalist aspiration for wealth and consumption. The walk to the kirana (neighbourhood) store becomes replaced by ten-minute deliveries through smartphone applications. Going to the mall is a family outing—invoking desire, jealousy, and discontent—surrounded by the glitzy shops and their (un)affordable products. 

We consume our public spaces: commodifying and privatizing them, encroaching upon them, and surveilling them, as they shrink further. Development becomes synonymous with concretization, and green spaces become an afterthought. As I stood there with the other protestors, I could feel the muggy air. My breathing felt laboured, as if it was weighed down by the gaze of the police officials. 

Where do we meet the other, if I am boxed in on both sides by barricades and anticipating an attack? This public space is enveloped in persecutory anxiety; difference becomes intolerable and splitting replaces ambivalence (Klein, 1946; Diamond, 2014). Destruction, disruption, and death follow. The monetization of public spaces corrodes the “potential space” (Winnicott, 1967) for the individual to meet with the other, creating an absence of shared cultural experience. I use culture here to mean traditional heritage and shared rituals but also the culture of interaction, of listening, of playing, of dreaming together. The space becomes an enactment of the “doer-done to” dynamics (Benjamin, 2017), where authority demands submission in the absence of a mutual recognition, and thirdness collapses. Instead of moments of meeting, we have moments of attack and isolation. 

There is an idea of the country I should have: the good roads, clean air, good health and education facilities, job security, open spaces, and contentment. But I am being constantly told that because of someone—the migrant, the Muslim, the Dalit, the feminist, the liberal, and so on—it cannot be realized. That someone becomes the hated other—and we forget that the same someone also desires the same country. Politics abhors conversation; it desires loud, brash slogans. Someone is killed for drinking water off the wrong tap, someone is lynched for eating the wrong meat, someone is abused because of their last name. We exist within silos while dumbing down progress to empty economic indicators. Perhaps, we are unable to face our own monsters, anxiously protecting this bubble from bursting. While actively pursuing a collective nationalist inclusion, we continue to silence the exclusions we have turned our eyes away from. 

As I stood outside a circle of protestors singing “Vande Mataram” (India’s national song), I noticed myself humming along. It was as if a muscle memory had been triggered, and I knew the song without realising I knew it. It was the knowledge of no conscious knowledge. I noticed another group sitting down in a circle, while there were two people on the side, eating out of a tiffin. Someone was using a book as a hand fan. It felt like a creative sharing of a sticky, hot, alert night, under the shadow of persecution. Like fragments of community persisting against the current political grain, just like the stubborn, muggy heat refusing to give way to a cool night. 

Part of me was scared. I knew about the violence perpetrated by authorities in New Delhi. It encased my body like that stubborn layer of fat which refused to go away: invisible in its visibility. The night before, we had explained the protest to our kids, when my eight-year-old daughter asked us about it. Today, my ten-year-old son asked my partner and me to be safe and not get hurt. I wondered, what was their fantasy of a public space—of a gathering of friends and strangers?   

My mind wandered to summer holidays in school when we spent evenings at a park next to the Arabian Sea. We ran around, sweaty and drenched, giddy with happiness. Sometimes, we saved money and bought cold flavoured milk to drink. Tired of running around, we sat at the edge of the mound, watching the rolling green below and the sea clashing against the shore. The endless comings and goings of the water, carrying the dreams of young kids, watching the setting sun paint the sky in orange-purple hues. 

A memory that enveloped me in its warm embrace—a feeling of being free, a feeling of belonging, a feeling of connection. Maybe something about being at the protest site made me feel similarly. I was with my partner, and we were there among strangers—like all of us together made the sea clashing against the barricade-shore. 

Today, if you can afford it, you take holidays to experience nature. If you live in a gated community, you have manicured gardens. The few public gardens become the last vestiges, threatened with being mowed under at any time in the name of development. Was I grieving for lost open, green spaces, or was I grieving for open, accessible public spaces to reflect in, to converse within, to negotiate under, to debate with, and to experience together what it means to be living within a shared culture? 

I wonder what happens when there is no environmental container to hold these feelings—a space within which you share the experience of being somewhere with the other. Without this container, the world becomes an unsafe, predatory storm, offering no shelter. Growing up without this space turns us to our devices, the screens we never take our eyes away from. Our fantasies about the world we imagine eat into the absence of real spaces to connect within. When there is no safe way to know the other, our heightened fear turns into hatred of the other. There is an inner urgency to reach first, because the world eats up the weak. This lost public space is the (un)intended manipulation of an autocratic force, squeezing out politics from the public and making it a gated affair. This diminishes the ways in which dialogue and listening can happen over diverse opinions. 

We left after some time and soon found ourselves walking toward a subway station. A cool breeze wafted our way, inviting us in. We walked down the stairs to find ourselves amidst a crowd making its way through the city at night: Perhaps, to their homes. Perhaps, to meet friends. Perhaps, to a job. Perhaps, to a shop. All moving in sync with the moving train. 

I closed my eyes for a second as I leaned against my partner to support myself, standing in the subway. The image of the guns on the officers outside the subway station flashed across my mind. I remembered the feeling of hugging my children and longed to be home.

As we drove back home, our friend messaged. She was on her way to the protest site when she heard of the cops pushing people against the barricade and coercing them to vacate the area. She had decided to not go. 

What belonged to all of us for those moments, now stood empty. 

To borrow from Cohen, it felt like the cracks had let the light in . . .

Maybe that is my fantasy, my hope.

Waking Up to the Protest

By Katyayani Singh & Pratyakshi

 

 

(I)

THE PROTESTOR: 20th July, 2026

 

The night before, there was restlessness and fear churning in me, so much that I started bleeding—spotting, to be precise. When your cortisol levels are high, it disrupts your hormones, which can lead to this unusual bleeding. Each year, it seems, I acquire a new psychosomatic symptom, a new way in which my body tells me something I am experiencing before I know what I am experiencing. It makes me wonder whether I am becoming more neglectful of my body or more attuned to it.

The restlessness and fear came out of endless scrolling on social media. I couldn’t stop myself. Every third post brought me “safety manuals” explaining how to go incognito at the protest, how to know what to do in a stampede, how to respond if the police used violence, etc. I kept asking myself, am I prepared enough? How will I exit if they barricade the entire protest site? Will I be detained? 

Most importantly, I was wondering: Why must violence come before someone is heard? 

When are protestors heard? Is it after police brutality? Is it once they have enough likes and followers on Instagram? Is it when famous intellectual faces attach themselves to their cause? Is it after their suffering can be turned into an aesthetic, set to a patriotic song? Perhaps all of this (aestheticisation) was an attempt to make fear visible, tolerable, and perhaps even palatable and pleasurable. 

Fear can be quite a thing.

Fear of being abandoned 

Fear of protesting for care 

Fear of being at the protest

Fear of not seeing your loved ones beside you

Fear of state

Fear of brutality

Fear that is political

Fear that is not sedated with coping skills

Fear that has no safety manual and is very much real. 

My mind and body must survive the fear with no expectations of a reward, of being heard; it is a fear in itself. 

After a sleepless night, I coordinated with a friend, and we set out for the protest. My mother asked me if I was serious about going, if I really wanted to be beaten up so badly. I had spent the night reliving these questions, and yet, when morning came, I felt blank. Eventually, I thought, “I have to show up someday. Might as well be today.” And I stepped out.

Meeting my friend became a task in itself. Our access—the metro stations and internet around the area—had been shut down. How do you reach anywhere when you are time and time again denied your mobility? We managed to meet, briefly entertaining the thought of turning back as we continued walking toward the site. On the way, we discussed the friends and acquaintances who had said they would not be joining the protest and who had recommended not going, each for their own reasons. But something that could not be ignored in our deliberation was that both of us came from marginalized backgrounds, unlike most of the people who were not joining us. We wondered if we would be abandoned by our peers if things ever got too real. Perhaps going to protest did not cut it off as real enough. Their absence became very present in our lonesome walk. 

We did not feel lonesome again once we were at the site. There were people everywhere my eyes looked; it looked real enough. There was this fantasy of legitimate protest, of the good protestor. The good protestor is peaceful but not passive. Angry but not threatening. Suffering but sophisticatedly so. They carry the right sign, say the right things, do not provoke, do not break anything, and do not frighten anyone. And the evidence of their suffering? Brutalisation of the body of a brutalised mind. Perhaps another fantasy is that the protestors’ suffering is easiest to hear once they have become victims. When hunger makes them look gaunt, when their skin is black and blue, when they have lost someone beloved, when they did all the “right” things and still went unheard. Letting one engage with the spectre of the suffering, not the suffering itself.

In reality, the protestors were up for anything, barricaded into one place. In the disorganisation of it all, some were creating content, some were recording the protest, some were provoking the police, and some were hit. Soon enough there was tear gas thrown at the state’s own citizens. A passive fear settled into me as I realised that we were, in fact, on our own, in real time. There was something about that realization that felt larger than the protest itself. I felt, perhaps for the first time, not just in my mind but in my body, what it might mean to be abandoned by the state, to be part of something when you yourself have felt small. The protest had consequences. I had prepared myself for that. But those consequences have so often already been decided by the disciplining of bodies through violence, force, coercion, and compliance. Getting our demands met? That is more rare.

(II)

THE SPECTATOR: 20th July, 2026

My first introduction to the protest was from the violence which erupted. I was not yet involved in what was happening—not a wisp of it had reached me. But 20th July, 2026, was too large an event to be contained, and soon it bled into social media. Instantly, my algorithm set reel upon reel at me, and soon it was conflicted on what to show me: critiques of the protest, the medical students who went away when they realised that this was a “bad protest,” or the people of all ages standing at the frontlines, holding their placards, pleading with the police not to beat them. Somewhere in the midst of all this, 20th July was split into two: the “good” and the “bad.” 

Social media boiled like an inferno, the discussions and comments flooding into our houses. As a spectator, placed away from the protest, it wasn’t long before my position as an outsider started blurring. Looking at the reels of people joking around, I initially responded with anger. Wasn’t this a “serious” protest? Weren’t they supposed to be marching onwards, not playing Ludo on the street?! My own fear-driven instinct to be good when positioned in front of authority was thrown by what I was looking at on the screen. Why weren’t they following any law or order? Why weren’t they truly showing their disappointment? What if the authorities didn’t consider them legitimate? There was desperation in me to straighten the protestors, to tell them what was coming across as “right” and “wrong.” The desperation hid a deep fear, that this was our country’s one chance to break the authoritarian environment and it might slip out of our hands if we weren’t the “good” protestors. 

As the panic of this “bad” protest kept getting evoked, I started engaging more with the content which echoed my own sentiments. When people on my screen questioned the identities of the people who threw stones at the police, I nodded my head along. As the news outlets like to report, who were these criminal elements? Conversations with my parents revolved around the idea of what it means to protest, especially in our country. Was Jantar Mantar, a government-sanctioned area, a legitimate site? Did this protest disrupt us enough to really shake off the fog of right-wing politics?

As my conversations grew with others around me, not just online but physically as well, it broke a little of the trance the algorithm had on me. What also helped was holding on to the hope that something will change, regardless of how it gets carried out. When the space which contains you refuses to nourish, it can lead to a zombie-like existence, a hopeless endeavour to stay alive inside what feels like death. So, seeing 20th July 2026 not getting stamped out just as any other day but acting as an ongoing recognition of the disillusionment of the people of this country, and the growing awareness of what is happening around us, it felt like I was waking up. The magnitude of the protest broke the nihilism which had earlier overtaken me. Maybe, at that moment, I had transcended the question of what I considered to be “good” and “bad.” Instead, as I continued to engage on social media with people both inside and outside of the protest, I was able to hold both positions without feeling the paranoiac defense to look at it as one kind of a single protest in an attempt to soothe myself. This allowed me to stay with the questions of whose pain was really put forward and whose wasn’t. Was this a more integrated approach, or was it a denial of what some people argue went wrong with the protest? These are unclear questions to me, and still I hold them dear. To question and to disrupt is the very reason the movement had occurred. To negate it all felt….