Like many others of my generation, I have spent an enormous amount of time at Jantar Mantar. Particularly when activist Medha Patkar was on hunger strike, using her body as a tool to protest against the submergence of 40,000 homes and the drowning of villages as a consequence of the dam on the Narmada river. While she deprived her body of food at Jantar Mantar, there would be songs and candles lit, and we would meet and engage with the villagers of Nimad ki ghati, Kamalu jiji, Ashish bhai and so many others. Many public intellectuals like Sumit Chakravartty, Gargi Chakravartty, Kuldip Nayar, Justice Rajendra Sachar, students, activists and journalists would come almost daily in solidarity and sit on the cotton rug by Medha’s side. This was a meeting ground for all of us who believed in expressing solidarity with those who were being dispossessed and displaced by the state, in the name of ‘development.’ We even had a poetry session with poets, singers and artists sharing their poems and songs.When the state chose to pick up Medha, it was at the dead of the night. They came stealthily to remove her and when I managed to sneak a visit to her room at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) with letters of support from across the country and some salt – saindhav ka namak (rock salt) – she informed me that the doctors had respected her wishes to continue her hunger strike inside the confines of the hospital.Also read: Who Answers to Us?: The Jantar Mantar Protests and India’s Missing Idea of AccountabilityJantar Mantar was the epitome of democracy where one could see people call politicians of every hue names with impunity. It was India at her noisy, colourful, chaotic best. Today at the same Jantar Mantar, one witnesses scenes that make one’s stomach churn. The students who are protesting against their exam papers being leaked with obvious high-level collusion and their precarious, even bleak future with rising levels of unemployment, are being subjected to unspeakable violence. To see their bleeding heads and shoulders and to see a 19-year-old Sohail Lochab, who will surely lose his eye, and a 28-year-old sports journalist with as many as 30 pellets lodged inside his body after being hit on July 20 while covering the Cockroach Janta Party’s “Chalo Sansad” march is truly horrifying. This is unprecedented and has never happened before at Jantar Mantar, the site of umpteen protests. To watch a police official slap a woman – who is just standing there – is something that is so horrific and speaks volumes for the respect this regime has for women. Worse, the police lathis, one is told, “have nails” and the batons have the ability to stun with an “electric shock.”A student with the tricolour flag draped around his shoulders at Jantar Mantar, Photo: Sagari Chhabra. Several additional Rapid Action Force (RAF) and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) contingents have been called. Some plainclothes cops and goons have also been let loose on the students, who are unarmed and defenceless, while their aggressors are armed to the teeth. These aggressors do not have name plates, so how is one to identify who is violating human rights? What we are watching is a complete violation of human rights and the breakdown of democratic values, all the while as India tries to project itself as a “vishwa guru (world master).” This has destroyed the fabric of a nation that gave birth to M.K. Gandhi and the moral underpinnings of ahimsa and satyagraha in the freedom struggle, as well as the activist movements rooted in Gandhian values afterwards. The Narmada Bachao Andolan was one of the many movements that have demonstrated at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar.It is heartbreaking that some “godi media” journalists have also been attacked. They should be allowed to do their work; but there is something like a civil war at work, when people are set up against each other and taught to hate. There has been a consistent rise of hate speech, lynchings and people being asked to identify with their religious identity instead of a secular one. What is at stake is the very foundation of India – its secular, democratic basis, which our constitutional founding fathers and mothers worked to build.Also read: A Supreme Court Metro Station Closed to Prevent Protests Is a Symbol of India’s Undeclared EmergencyThe fact that the Chief Justice of India refused to examine the videos evidencing police brutality, saying he had no time to waste, makes me think, with a pang of conscience, of a time when Justice P.N. Bhagwati and Justice V.K. Krishna Iyer took up public interest litigation cases as a matter of top priority. It was not so long ago.India is turning 80 next year; it is but a short span for a nation, yet we were poor and still had such a strong moral fibre. Today, we are rich – we do boast of billionaires – while our students are being beaten and crushed, and that spine is being crushed deliberately and systematically. It is being crushed by destroying the free press; it is not able to have even a press conference with the prime minister; the minorities have been under siege, many who protested against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) are lying in jail; and now the students are being beaten – savagely, ruthlessly and brutally – for protesting against exam leaks and a lack of jobs. Even a PhD holder who was frying pakoras for a living had her cart forcibly removed, so what is the future?My visit on Friday, July 24, at around 5 pm, to Jantar Mantar saw so much josh (spirit) in the crowd. There were innumerable people: students and older people, even a man in a wheelchair with his leg in plaster and a photo of Bhagat Singh. There were women in burkhas and it was wonderful to see Muslim women participating. There were so many innovative handmade signs: a woman in a handloom kurta with ‘Satyameva Jayate,’ a student with the tricolour flag draped around his shoulders and even some humorous ones. A man in a wheelchair with his leg in plaster and a photo of Bhagat Singh at Jantar Mantar, Photo: Sagari Chhabra.But the state was at work to dissipate energies, for to get to the pandal from where the speakers spoke, there was only one metal gate, so a long serpentine queue had formed. To protest is becoming an exercise in patience as well during July’s sweltering heat. However, paper fans to keep oneself cool were circulating among the crowd. I made it a point to talk to the police and inspected their huge lathis. Today, they had no nails and I did not see any pellet guns or tasers. A cop told me they had been briefed not to hit, but one does not know when and if they emerge.What the students have succeeded in doing is breaking the silence. It is the silence that has changed the India we knew, which was never a perfect republic but a work in terrific progress. The machinery to silence – the police, the Enforcement Directorate and its cohorts – created an uneasy silence; the breaking of which is the success of the students.What lies ahead are multiple issues and no easy answers. As billionaires built 36-storey houses, the poor watched and waited and saw even the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and the right to food rolled back. However, what the regime must now understand is that it cannot silence a billion voices and the students have shown the way.Protesters at Jantar Mantar, Photo: Sagari Chhabra.I just saw an amazing film, Adamya, directed by Ranjan Ghosh. The film is directorially brilliant but it left me so disturbed. The protagonist is on the run after an attempt to shoot a politician who has allowed nine tribals to be shot at and killed in his constituency. The tribals were protesting against their lands being forcibly taken away. I do not advocate violence; the spray of salt of the Dandi march is still on my lips and Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj is a seminal text. However, every member of the political class should see Adamya, for the vanquished simply do not forget. Unless we allow dissent and seriously engage with the poor and the marginalised, is this then going to be our future? For India to win, it needs to speak and eat. No one can gag a billion mouths, now!Sagari Chhabra is an award-winning writer and filmmaker.