Roses Among Thorns: The Many Solidarities Of Diverse Protests

“Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?”

— Tupac Shakur

That afternoon, when the Prime Minister announced the government’s decision to  repeal the three farm laws, I stumbled upon a garden on the way to the protest site at Tikri. I saw the concrete blocks that were once used to keep the farmers out of the capital. They lay on the side as reminders of the might of the state. But flowers. They were a different sight. They offered hope. Like the two protests—Shaheen Bagh and the farmers’ agitition. One was uprooted. The other continues. But both are about hope. For a better, brighter world.

Autumn in a city where a grey sky hangs above us perpetually is not a season for flowers. But the branches told a story. Like displaced people, the flowers had been there. In spring, they will bloom again. Bhola Ram, a farmer from Haryana, said these gardens reminded them of the pind. They had come for the long haul. They planted flowers alongside the highway and built these temporary homes. They had been out in the open during the harsh winters. Many died. Many were arrested. He said the flowers were in the memory of the dep­arted. “They mean there is beauty.”  

That’s hope in our Orwellian present. A dystopia that is not adopted but enforced and imposed like a wall. Remem­ber the trenches that were dug, the nails that were laid out, the water cannons, the tear gas, the bat­ons, the barricades. To keep the farmers out of the nati­onal capital. But even in this city of smog, flowers bloom. On our terraces. In the presidential garden. At the protest sites. In defiance. A garden is a conquest. A garden teaches us how to live.  

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The function of eponyms is profound. It was in 1949 that British writer George Orwell outlined a future where surveillance and propaganda are used by a global despotic power to control the people of Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was a prophecy. Of a dark future. But Orwell, the wri­ter, also planted roses. Rebecca Solnit, an Ameri­can author, writes in Orwell’s Roses about life’s contradictions. Roses do not bloom in a hurried way. Roses gather their strength from thorns. Beauty is resistance. Orwell said people have a right to roses too. Perhaps, the Mughal Gardens (they might rename it too!) could be about imperialism. But these little gardens were about happiness and hope. Bougainvillea plants and per­­i­wi­nkles and roses. They didn’t aim for these gardens to be beautiful. These were places of thinking about the troublesome things in the past, the present and the future. If war has an opposition, gardens might sometimes be it, and people have found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks and gardens, says Solnit.  

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They symbolise our own ephemerality and end­urance. In the elegiac landscape of these protests, where there are shrine-like walls dedicated to the dead, the flowers are a symbol of life. I found out the names of the flowers. Madagascar periwinkle, Catharanthus roseus, commonly known as bright eyes. That made me smile. I find faith in flowers that line the concrete of these protest sites that have witnessed so much violence over the months. The farmers’ protest has strengthened the idea of imp­erfect solidarities. These plants and trees are a gift to posterity. They outlive good or evil, actions and reactions. Orwell had planted five fruit trees, seven rose and two gooseberry trees in 1936. The rose bushes survived for decades.

***

I sometimes wonder why I go to protest sites. Perhaps, it is also to find hope, to see young people out there, to see collective action, to see communities forming. Hope, not optimism, as Solnit would say.

Is hope a compass? I once asked fishermen on a trawler if they ever felt lost. They said they carried a compass. In the desert, the compass held that promise of finding a way out amidst the mirages. A poet told me they mourn in metaphors. I wanted to tell her we speak in metaphors. Mirages are optical ill­usions. Democracy, freedom, liberty, equality and justice. Words on a billboard in a desert. Protests are like compass. Navi­gatio­nal symbols. Out of this dystopia. Out of our lives monitored by ‘thought police’—thinkpol—as Orw­ell had once imagined. All imagination is real. To the point that unicorns have bodies of horses.  

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The repeal of the contentious farm laws have been looked at from many angles like electoral gains, a victory over attempts to corporatise agriculture, this and that. In his nationally-televised address, Modi said the farm laws were meant to strengthen small farmers. “But despite several att­empts to explain the benefits to the farmers, we have failed. On the occasion of Guru Parab, the government has decided to repeal the three farm laws,” he added.

But there is another way to look at these. With hope. With love. “Nowadays, trendy librarians, wanting to be important, say, Knowledge is power. I know better. Knowledge is love,” writes Eliza­beth McCracken in The Giant’s House. I reiterate. Knowledge is love.

***

That afternoon at Tikri border where I found the mini gardens, I also found these temporary houses. They looked like what I would have built as a child. Innocent and brave. Winter wasn’t bleak when they started to build these temporary homes. The structures were minimalist. These were no palaces. These were spaces where rooms didn’t have borders. The talisman that hung on the door outside was a photo of a young Bhagat Singh. The flyover that snaked its way forward was symbolic of deve­lop­ment. Underneath, the protest lived and mutated. The yellow and the blue tarpaulin that covered the mini structures stood out. The landscape had been marked with little plants. There was no jubilation. Here, in a row of these makeshift dwellings, the plants demonstrated the persisting memory of home. That’s what they are fighting for. For land, for rights, for beauty.  

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Joy is intrinsic to politics. An essay can contain many thoughts, many contradictions, many associations. Solnit shows how totalitarianism destr­oys consciousness, experience, life lived with the full human instrument. Beauty and gardening are acts of resistance, she says. Like Solnit, I like the “rhizomatic” writing method which connects to other images, stories and thoughts. A protest consists of many stories. The street is democracy’s greatest arena where battles are staged and gardens are made. 

***

Hope is not delusional. Many might argue that decisions should be based on rational expectations about what governments can achieve. But there is space for hope in politics. Political hope is hope for social justice. Its character is political. And the protests and the eventual ann­ouncement by the PM about the rollback also signify hope’s ‘return’ to politics. And that also means that hope for social justice will bec­ome part of collective action, of politics itself, of conversations. Hope is a necessary form of social inq­uiry. Hope is important for justice. And social justice is an ambi­tious project in times when there is a growing need to maintain the status of democracy along with fundamental civil and human rights.

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Conservatism, a word that has gained much traction, presents a rather bleak view of human nature, that we are individualists. But the protests in the recent past have shown that we are social beings who believe in communities. Much has been said about the ecosystem of these protests. I remember Surjit Kaur, a far­mer from Punjab, who was making rotis in the evening. They were a bunch of women who were staying in the tractor-trolleys at Tikri border. “You got to get used to the hard life. And res­ist,” she had said.

I met a poet who called himself Zakhmi, and said the protests and the pain of the farmers inspired him to write a poem. The 71-year-old farmer had come to show his support.  “It hurts my body and soul to see the suffering of the farmers. I am also a farmer,” he said. I remember the light bulbs inside the trolleys. It was dark and you could see women and men sitting around a fire, trying to cook. A lan­gar was there every 100 metres or so. That’s how it shaped up—the pind.

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There was an open air gym, a library and a community centre. There was even a newspaper cal­led the Trolley Times started by the farmers. In the first edition, there was a story called Sweater by Jaswinder Kaur. A woman called Bibi had star­ted to knit a sweater; every day she would knit a little and hoped to finish it in 10 days. She wan­ted to knit many sweaters that winter. When she heard the announcement that if any women wan­ted to join the protests, they should sign up at the local gurudwara. Bibi dropped her knitting and headed to the gurudwara. Her family said she had asthma but Bibi joined the protests anyway.

There was another story about a martyr called Gurmail Kaur by Sangeet Toor, featured in the first edition. It was the story of 80-year-old Gurmail who packed her small bag in Gharchaon village in Sangrur and set out, saying she was ready to die at the protests. On December 8, she died of heart att­ack at a toll plaza on NH7.  The sites at Singhu and Tikri are full of protest aesthetics, including the visual, material, textual and performative eleme­nts of protest like images, symbols, graffiti, clot­h­es, art, forms of rhetoric, slang, humour and slo­gans and performances like Shaheen Bagh.

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***

The great power of non-violent uprisings was evident in the Shaheen Bagh protests.  What can be more direct than an encampment of several hundred people or a march of tens of thousands? Often, that doesn’t mean the consequences will be direct. Hope and love can’t be measured. Solnit writes that every action shifts the world’s balance. “It’s very important to say that hope is not optim­i­sm. Optimism is a sense that everything’s going to be fine no matter what we do. Hope is someth­ing completely different. The kind of activist hope I believe in is that, although we don’t know what will happen, that uncertainty still means there’s grounds for intervening even without being sure of the outcome,” she writes in a column for the Guardian.  

***

“... We hoisted homemade signs and cried out,  Whose streets? Our streets? No justice, no peace!” —Daniel Johnson in Absence of Sparrows, dedica­ted to his slain journalist friend James Foley Paper stars made the night less dreadful. It was on the eve of Christmas that we mapped our way to Shaheen Bagh. On the way, we spoke about Jes­us Christ. At midnight, Jesus would be born again. In his lifetime, he would be betrayed and crucified. He would then be resurrected. A blue tarpaulin sheet was hung and under it, women were sitting determined not to return home until the state assured them they wouldn’t be home­less.  

It started on December 15, 2019. It was uprooted on March 24, 2020. The Shaheen Bagh protest that was led by Muslim women who adopted the non-violent sit-in protest model against the passage of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) on December 11, 2019, and police violence against students of Jamia Millia Islamia who were opposing the act’s provisions.  

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Everything is an association. In my notebook called “protest diary”, I had scribbled a line from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, “My homeland is not a suitcase and I am no traveller.” Delhi, they say, is nine cities. Everyone is a migrant here. They said the women sat there through the nights and days, reciting  poems of resistance, listening to songs of revolution and resisting the cold and the State. They sang lullabies for their infants who they brought with them in the bitter, brutal cold. But the women said they weren’t going to insulate their children from dissent.  

It was a highway they blocked. People elsewhere talked about traffic disruption. They talked about that during the farmers’ protest too. But the site of a protest matters. These women knew that. The farmers know that. The protesters at the Occupy movement that began with Occupy Wall Street on September 17, 2011, knew that. The international socio-political movement that sought to advance “real democracy” around the world was inspired by Arab Spring and the Spanish Indignados Move­ment and the 2010 anti-austerity protests.  

On January 25, home minister Amit Shah ann­ounced that the people of Delhi should vote for “no Shaheen Bagh”. Every morning, I would rec­eive a message from a woman I met in Shaheen Bagh. “We are still here,” she would write. I rem­ember the day the women floated paper boats with Faiz’s poetry written on them. They even ext­ended an invitation to PM Modi for tea. The hashtag trending was #tumkabaaoge.

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There were so many mod­els the Shaheen Bagh protest followed. One was “people’s microphone”, wh­­ich circumvents the ref­usal to allow for electronic voice amplification and has been used often in such protests where crowds repeat the snippets of a particular speaker in an expanding circle. “Inquilab”, “Halla Bol” and “Azadi” reverberated.

I see the little stone I picked up on my first night at the pro­test. I brought it as a keepsake. The women called themselves birds. Shah­een also means non-migratory falcon. That’s Wik­i­pedia info. I was looking for meanings. Hom­e­land, law, the “othering”, the violence, the many associations.   

Noorunissa, a 75-year-old led me through the maze of lanes in the area. She told me she wasn’t afraid of the cold. She was one of the “dadis” of Shaheen Bagh. In those days, the mood was profoundly bleak. Hope had settled in the creases of their faces. They knew the dan­gers that come along with dissent. Hope meant they could make history. They did. Just like the farmers. Hena Ahmed, one of the wom­en who had been at the sit-in protest ever since it started, said they had watched the agitation of the Jats and the Gujjars for reservation. She told me if they were to protest in one of the many alleys of Shaheen Bagh, a lower-income neighbourhood on the border between Delhi and Noida, nobody would have noticed.  

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These women, who are first-time protesters, had left home to camp outside. They welcomed everyone. They served tea. They even gave bla­n­kets. Many would say these are comfortable pro­tests with “tasty food” but I spent days and nights at the sites. It was cold. And it was tough. Experience is evidence. Almost a decade ago, I attended the meetings of Occupy the Hood. I was in Philadelphia at the time. To be at a protest, to witness it and to chronicle it is an act of faith. I am a journalist. I am also a citizen. Like the Occupy movement, which was about inequality largely, the Shaheen Bagh protests were about the larger idea of secularism, discrimination and identity. These were horizontal protests where there were no hie­rarchies or leaders. These were not unorganised though.  

With Occupy Gateway in Mumbai, you saw protest movements are interconnected in ways that they inspire each other. The Occupy Move­ment with its many sub-movements like Occupy the Hood, Occupy the Dream, convinced mass media to run stories on social inequality and dir­ect democracy. That we remember it still matters.  

These women transformed the national political conversation. Despite the fact that there could be violence and detentions, the women dared the state. Like Noorunissa, who was old and frail. She told me Shaheen Bagh once was a wasteland. She saw the neighbourhood come up. She told me she had witnessed the horror of sectarian politics, like the Moradabad riots of 1989 and the Babri Masjid demolition. “My heart has become strong,” she said. I underlined it in the notebook. “They are calling us terrorists. Why can’t they talk to us?”

I remember the poster of Bilkis Bano, the 82-year-old grandmother from Shaheen Bagh with her kohl-lined eyes. She had been camping at Shaheen Bagh since the first week.  

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I remember meeting Tarannum Begum, who was among the first four women who came out of their homes when the police beat up students at the Jamia Millia Islamia University. She walked out of her home in Batla House and three more women joined in. They reached the highway at 11.30 am on December 14. For three nights, they camped in the open. They lit a fire to keep themselves warm. Someone got a wooden chowki and they made a makeshift stage. Others joined in. Young men volunteered to help out.  

Mattresses, tarpaulin and halogen lights follo­wed. A mic arrived, langars were set up. Singers, rappers, leaders and poets joined in to talk about the idea of India. In a country where the current government has returned with a thumping maj­ority and majoritarian is what we hear often as the base of many arguments, this protest rejected the idea that there is “no alternative.” People­hood was the idea here.  

I remember the afternoon when they flew balloons in the skies. 1,111 red balloons with mess­ages for home minister Amit Shah went up in the air. The protesters had submitted an application to Delhi Police, asking them for permission to let 5,000 protesters from Shaheen Bagh march to Shah’s residence. Among them was Maryam Khan who had wrapped a dupatta dyed in the shades of green, saffron and white and wore bangles of the same colours. She held a Tricolour in her hand. She had got the dupatta dyed on Janu­ary 26, 2020.

Asma Khatun, 90, Bilkis Bano, 82, Sarvari, 75, and Noorunissa, 75, had lined up in front the barricades. I remember the night in February in Ali­garh when the internet had been cut off. It was 11 pm. It was the Aligarh Old City with its serpentine alleys. I had gone to speak to the women at the Shah Jamal protests. They said the women came from very poor households. The police had torn off their tents. They sat in the cold with polythene sheets wrapped around their bodies. They had started a protest outside the police station in Upper Fort, demanding that their right to peaceful protest and a tent. Violence followed.

Mobile internet services remained suspended in Aligarh and parts of the city were manned by a large number of security personnel. I remember the little bonfires in the distance, the green wall of the graveyard and the women. A poster of B.R. Ambedkar billowed in the wind at night.  Around 150 people had been detained in Aligarh. The pol­ice had allegedly lathicharged protesters in Upp­er Court and Shah Jamal.

Local Hindi newspapers ran editorials calling the protest “politically motivated” and “violent” and the unnamed FIRs that the police filed made them sad. It was on February 23 that the police raided the protest site at Shah Jamal locality, whi­ch consists of labourers, rickshaw pullers and small-scale entrepreneurs. But the women stayed on. The North-East Delhi riots happened. The Jafrabad protest site was emptied out. But the women returned despite the violence.  

***

The women of Shaheen Bagh and other such protests believed that it was worth doing something. That was hope. And hope finds its footing in the past. There are stories about how people won sometimes. These coalitions are important. They change the culture and the conversation in ways that impacts the future. It is all these stran­gers coming together to demonstrate, to agitate, to build these relationships. In a post-pandemic world that made us lonely beings, this is a beautiful way to be.  

We live in another world dictated by the economy of likes. We are lonely people of this world. Together, we make that lonely crowd. An apartment building is a matrix. Every window is a flo­ating island chained to a wall. There is a gen­­e­­­r­­alised separation. It would be an oxymoron to think that a virtual community is a community. That I found in the streets. Like this piece, this apartment block made of staples could be rhizomatic. The protests are rhizomatic. There were no singular heroes. No singular agendas.  

There is an antidote to the “lonely crowd” fut­ure. The imperfect similarities. The communes. In a word where metaverse is a possibility in our lifetime, we are no longer isolated by commo­dity fetishism. And there is that old line from an old, short story.  

“Remember the roses.” 

(This appeared in the print edition as "Roses Among Thorns")

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