#OccupyGateway and the Dreams of Resistance

Sunday, January 5, 2020
By 10.30pm, my head was throbbing. For more than two hours, I had been reading messages that offered terrifying glimpses of an attack on JNU in Delhi. The timeline would later show that the violence began at 3.45pm, when masked men gathered at Periyar Hostel. Most of us started getting alerts around 7.30pm when JNUSU head Aishe Ghosh was brutally assaulted. Ghosh was beaten with rods, kicked and dragged behind a car by a group of 20-30 people. A photograph of her, with blood streaming down her dirt-smeared face and someone holding a bandage to her head, seemed to be everywhere.

We’d later learn that while some of us were trying to make sense of the reports we were getting — masked men and women who were allegedly from ABVP entering JNU; acid being thrown on students; aforementioned vandals tearing hostels apart; teachers and their partners being chased by mobs; entry and exit routes to JNU blocked by Delhi Police; electricity being cut off so that vandals could go on a rampage in the dark; reporters being attacked if they tried to approach the university — while all this was happening, JNU’s administration was busy filing a complaint. Sounds prompt, right? Records show that at 8.45pm on January 5, Delhi Police registered an FIR on the basis of a complaint filed by JNU’s admin, booking Ghosh and 19 others of attacking security guards.

The armed mob that attacked JNU ran riot till 9pm at least. Their slogans included “Goli maaron saalon ko” (Shoot the bastards) and they felt no compunction yelling it out for press cameras to record. Delhi Police — 700 policemen, no less — showed up at JNU eventually, not so much to tackle the vandals as to ensure the gates remained closed so that no one could get in or out.

At 10.30pm, I shut my computer and stepped out for a walk. Outside, my shiny neighbourhood was still full of happy glitter and bright lights. No one had taken Christmas decorations off and people on the street were laughing, hailing autos and generally going about their life. At Carter Road bandstand, a group of young men with guitars were singing old Bollywood songs. Everything seemed still. It was low tide and not a leaf moved. My head was still pounding as I wondered what was it about Sundays that brought right-wing thugs to universities (the violence at Jamia Milia Islamia had erupted on a Sunday too) and whether I would have been able to show up at JNU had I been in Delhi right now. That was when I got the message about a candlelight meeting at the Gateway of India at midnight, to show solidarity with JNU and its students.

You could say Gateway, built to commemorate the arrival of George V in 1911, was an odd spot to have a postcolonial protest that is fighting against Indian identity being flattened to an undiverse, homogenous, orange splatter. But Gateway is more than a symbol of subjugation by a foreign power. It’s one of those symbols of colonial authority that postcolonial Mumbai has been able to wholly reclaim. This is where Indians from around the country gather daily, placing their wonder and joy in the foreground and the colonial monument in the background (literally. Just think of the pictures taken at Gateway). It’s also a site of multiple terror attacks, the most famous being the three-day long terror attack that began on 26th November, 2008. As someone in the crowd would say later, this is where the protest and the present generation of students are located — between the tyranny of authoritarianism inherited from colonisation and anxieties rooted in the violence of communalism and terrorism. (History students. Gotta love ’em.)

Monday January 6, 2020
By the time I reached Gateway, there was already a crowd of about 100 people. Most were sitting on the pavement, holding candles or phone torches. More and more joined in with every minute, and none of them were bystanders. It was low tide at Apollo Bunder and the air was heavy. Occasionally, a little breeze would ruffle the stillness and blow out candles that were diligently re-lit.

[image error]Gateway of India, Jan 6, 1.36am

At about 1am, all you heard was the click of a few hundred people snapping their fingers to a slow but steady beat. They were snapping because many were holding candles, which left only one hand free. They were also snapping because people were standing up to recite poetry and sing songs, but there was no microphone. Mumbai isn’t a city used to protesting and this particular protest had little by way of organisation at this point. People had simply shown up and were now straining to hear what was being said. Rather than drown out speakers with applause, the protesters snapped their fingers to the beat of the words they heard; collective rage contained and articulated in the rhythmic clicks.

Songs rose up from this swelling crowd — “Hum Honge Kaamyaab”, “Hum Dekhenge” — that admittedly couldn’t hold a tune, but damned if they weren’t going to add their voices to the cacophony. People stood up to read out poems, many of them original. “It’s like a protest-themed open mic night,” someone said, “only the stuff is good.” “And there’s no mic,” said someone else drily.

 (It’s true. I have no video skills. But look! Protests have made me a YouTuber. #FauxMillennial)

That the crowd was growing in size became obvious when those at one end could no longer hear slogans raised by a protester on the opposite side. So those in the middle became ‘repeaters’. Each line was repeated, like the passing of a baton, and finally chanted loudly by everyone. In this way, every word and every poem became an anthem. The gent above was fabulous (evidently), but I think the one who has stayed with me is this young man from Kashmir, who wrote his poem while making his way to this protest.

At the time, no one knew how long this protest would continue and few would have anticipated that there was enough rage to inspire what came to be named #OccupyGateway. Around 2.30am, a few people stood up to leave. You could tell “Monday morning” was hovering like a thought cloud over parts of the crowd and the protest seemed to have hit a lull. It sounded quiet for the first time since midnight.

At this point, former student leader Umar Khalid, who had been quietly standing at the back, stepped out of the shadows with a call to azadi, a chant that is now both famous and infamous. Khalid was greeted like a rockstar, but even before the bulk of the crowd realised who had started the chant, there was something in the call that fired everyone up. For the next few minutes, the night was filled with loud and determined calls to freedom.

No one noticed that beyond the waterfront, the tide was changing.

Now that I look back on that night, perhaps the most powerful and moving part was how we listened to each other and rallied around one another. It’s not that there weren’t any celebrities in that crowd; there were. Still, the ones who shone were those whom few recognised. We weren’t following anyone or looking up to someone higher on the social hierarchy for direction. We were all equal, attentive and collected.

Every few minutes, someone would stand up and urge those present to not speak to the media because it’s distorting what protesters say. It’s an … interesting sentiment to toss into a crowd that had at least 15 journalists (probably more) in it. Mainstream media in used to people fighting for its attention. It’s complacent in the belief that everyone wants coverage and needs the press to sustain itself and reach others. Here, however, was a protest that was saying it would rely on social media and messaging — the same platforms used with fantastic success by those who want to spread misinformation — and reject news media. As it turned out, the protest would ultimately be compromised by a biased media outlet, just as had been feared on the first night.

I left the protest with friends at around 2.45am. There were a few hundred people at the spot when we left and it didn’t look like they were going to leave anytime soon. While some of us slept, others stayed at Gateway and decided they weren’t leaving. They were going to #OccupyGateway. Organisers got organised, demands were listed (security for students; rollback of CAA and the Transgender Persons Act; no NRC; end lockdown in Kashmir, and more), messages were sent out. When Monday morning dawned on Mumbai, a bona fide protest movement was underway.

At around noon, when I returned to Gateway, it wasn’t as crowded as last night, but there were more than 100 people hanging out in horrible, humid weather. At one corner, by the barricades, there were cartons of water and students sat in a huddle, painting placards. “Do RSS types wear tikas?” someone asked, pen in hand. “Check Google,” said the person next to them, and they did. People came to drop off power banks, scarves, medicines. Bananas, vada pav and sandwiches were circulated. I noticed video journalists, armed with microphones and flanked by camerapersons, stood a short distance away from the main crowd and snagged people who were leaving or joining the protest for bytes.

Like at night, the crowd grew steadily, humming like a hive around the core that sat on the pavement. Bright dupattas, glinting sunglasses and flashes of orange from bottles of Glucon-D; people wearing everything from shorts to burqas, skull caps to floppy hats. A woman in a yellow sari more dazzling than the sun stood up to speak about how trans people face systematic violence from law enforcement and explained how the CAA-NRC combo is likely to disenfranchise them. “Some of you were fortunate enough to be born women. Some of us have truly laboured to earn the privilege of femininity. It shouldn’t cost us our nationality,” she said. An old man — peaked cap below which was a fringe of white hair; glasses that were so thick (or so scratched?) that you couldn’t really see his eyes; a striped, full-sleeved shirt; grey pants — stood up and started dancing while chants of azadi chirruped with furious joy all around him. He twirled and twirled, hands raised, not to the heavens as the dervish’s but to the crowd around him; smiling the whole time and encouraging everyone to stay loud, to not wilt, to keep beat with his defiant joy.

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