Where there is power, there is resistance…Resistance has no single locus, no one great refusal. [It] is…dispersed across society, appearing wherever power is exercised.’ That’s Michel Foucault, French philosopher and political scientist, in his 1978 work on the history of sexuality.
Perhaps this is a useful way of looking at the resistance movements mushrooming in India today.
Over most of June and July, Delhi’s Jantar Mantar became a grand theatre of protest. A movement initially focused on exam paper leaks, and broadly categorised as a Gen Z protest, soon became a magnet for citizens young and old, offering their sympathy and support to possibly the most credible pushback against this authoritarian regime.
Before long, it had inspired protests in other parts of the country, in state capitals and small towns, its echoes heard far and wide. Jantar Mantar drew people from all over. They weren’t all examination aspirants, their grievances not the same but the anger was directed without exception at a government they associate with hubris, cronyism and institutional capture.
Jantar Mantar has a storied history. Farmers, students, industrial workers, government employees, environmentalists, Adivasis, women, informal workers, minorities worried about their citizenship have all brought their demands and grievances to this hallowed protest venue. They have come here under different banners at different times. At this very moment in our history, we have a multiplicity of protests across the country.
What we don’t have at this moment, though, is a common political grammar, a shared vocabulary that binds these disparate movements.
This is not necessarily a sign that resistance is weak. Maybe it is the new shape of power, possibly the crony capitalist nexus that has become its defining feature, that has altered the common citizen’s equation with power.
About the Author
