The cancellation of an initiative by Reclaim the Night Women Trans Queer United on August 14, 2026, in Kolkata raises questions that extend beyond particular film screenings: what counts as a threat to public order and whether feminist movements can be politically independent of the state.Reclaiming the nightOn August 14, 2024, the night in West Bengal acquired a political meaning it had not carried before. Following the rape and murder of a postgraduate doctor at R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital on August 9, thousands of women, trans and queer people came out onto the streets. The mobilisation was remarkable not merely for its scale but also for its decentralised and spontaneous form. It was largely autonomous of established political organisations and centred on a deceptively simple demand: women should be able to inhabit the night without fear.The significance of that night lay in its refusal to accept the conventional grammar of women’s safety. Women are often told that safety requires restrictions: do not go out late, do not walk alone, do not enter particular neighbourhoods, do not take certain forms of transport, do not dress in particular ways, do not trust strangers. The August 14 mobilisation reversed the propositions. The answer to an unsafe night was not withdrawal from the night itself but collective occupation of it.The Reclaim the Night Women Trans Queer United, a collective platform of women, trans and queer people emerged after the 2024 mobilisation. It has been commemorating the night since then. In 2025, its programme continued through the night at Ranu Chhaya Mancha. This year, the collective planned a gathering at Jadavpur 8B on August 14, from 7 pm onwards.Protesters raising slogans against the cancellation of the August 14 event and the erosion of freedoms in India. Photo: Reclaim the Night Women Trans Queer United.The proposed programme included songs, theatre, performances, speeches and film screenings. Among the films there were Anand Patwardhan’s Ram Ke Naam and Gopal Menon’s Hey Ram. An intimation had been submitted to the police. But on the night of August 13, the Lalbazar Police Headquarters cancelled the programme via mail.As a convenor of the platform and organiser of the event, I went through a series of telephone conversations with officials from Lalbazar and Jadavpur police stations preceding the cancellation. We were repeatedly asked what we intended to do and were particularly questioned about the screening of Ram Ke Naam and Hey Ram. At one point, an officer suggested that showing the film at that time, before Independence Day, could create a law-and-order problem.We argued that we hardly wished to disrupt law and order and even if we had any such intention, we lacked the strength, being minuscule in number. They said they were not the ones who will create commotion. But others will.Then why not prevent them instead of bargaining with us?They also said that the films might anger a community. If it is the Hindus that they meant, one must ask, why would films that convey the message that one should not use a Hindu god’s name to commit rape and murder, and thereby desecrate him, offend the community? We did ask. They had no answers to offer.When ‘public order’ becomes an anticipatory vetoA political critique of Hindutva is not identical to hostility towards Hindus. A critique of religious majoritarianism is not necessarily a critique of religious believers. The distinction is central to any serious discussion of Indian secularism and free expression. To collapse these categories is to make criticism of political ideology practically impossible.Protesters symbolically tying cloths around their mouths to signify the loss of freedom of speech and expression. Photo: Reclaim the Night Women Trans Queer United.A feminist politics that confines itself to sexual violence while refusing to examine communalism, majoritarianism and the political construction of vulnerable bodies remains incomplete. Patwardhan’s documentary allows the organisers to place gendered violence within a longer history of political mobilisation around religion, community and nation. The police objection to its screening, moreover, inadvertently demonstrates the continuing political sensitivity of precisely that history.There is a familiar pattern in the regulation of contentious speech in India. The state need not necessarily declare an idea illegal. It can instead invoke the possibility that someone else may react violently to it. If a peaceful gathering is prohibited because an unidentified group might object to it, the burden shifts. The potential aggressor becomes, effectively, the arbiter of permissible speech. This produces what may be called an anticipatory veto.If potential anger is sufficient justification for prior restriction, the consequence is not social peace but the gradual shrinking of the permissible public sphere. Films about Partition can provoke anger. Films about caste can provoke anger. Films about Kashmir, communal violence, the Emergency or state repression can provoke anger. Feminist films can anger misogynists; queer films can anger homophobes. Are we supposed not to show any of them?Who gets to occupy the public space?There is an additional irony to the episode.At approximately the same time, BJP MLA Agnimitra Paul has been associated with a night-time flyover-crossing programme intended to demonstrate women’s freedom and safety at night. We all know that celebrities and ministers enjoy professional security services. Whether they are safe at night was never the question.So when women occupy public space as part of an officially sanctioned or party-associated spectacle, their presence can be celebrated as evidence of women’s freedom. When women occupy public space autonomously, to commemorate a protest movement and to articulate political positions that may be critical of the government, that same public presence can be reframed as a potential law-and-order problem.A protester wearing a banner with the Preamble of Indian Constitution, asserting their rights and liberties. Photo: Reclaim the Night Women Trans Queer United.This is where the feminist question becomes inseparable from the question of political power. Who decides whether a nocturnal gathering is a celebration of women’s empowerment or a threat to public order?The political achievement of the 2024 night marches was precisely that they were not simply demonstrations of protected womanhood. They were demonstrations of autonomous citizenship.We, however, immediately arranged for a protest demonstration instead of the commemoration on the same day and time. We felt that our constitutional right to freedom of speech and opinion was being disrupted. We will now seek judicial intervention so that we can show the same films afterwards.Communalism, caste, patriarchy, majoritarianism, state power and masculinist political cultures are all part of that larger structure. In communal conflicts, women’s bodies frequently become symbolic territories of the community. Violence against women is not merely individual violence; it can become a way of attacking the imagined honour or identity of an entire community.This is something feminist scholarship on communalism has examined extensively. We have always upheld it and will continue to do so in the coming days. If feminism needs to remain relevant in today’s India, it has to be anti-fascist at the same time.Satabdi Das is convenor of Reclaim the Night Women Trans Queer United.