Santwana Bhattacharya

His account of what followed was rather charming. Sonia, he said, told him to call the editors and proprietors for tea, explain the peril to law and order, and encourage them to exercise restraint themselves. Priya-da’s conclusion was delivered with a smile: “Soniaji is a democrat. She would never ask me to wield the stick.” Whether you are reassured or not, inside stories did not always not mesh well with the propagandised image of extra-constitutional tyranny.

Something strange and poignant resonates as one takes this brief walk along the edges of history two days after the historian Sumit Sarkar left us. In 1939, a year before he was born, the Haripura Congress had brought the everyday life of ordinary, rural Indians to the visual vocabulary of the national movement. In that setting, Nandalal Bose’s hand-painted motifs of village life filled the pandals—art as politics, not as decoration. The people were installed as participants.

Till the agitation was ended with a soft bat, it tried old ‘protest management’ techniques. Barricades, shut metro stations, suspended internet, water cannons. But that playbook turned out to be a couple of decades out of date. Today’s protesters grew up online. If the internet is shut, they switch on Bluetooth-based mesh-messaging—if a road’s blocked, someone’s phone already has another route. Every baton charge gets filmed and shared before the officer swinging it has even walked away.