Jallianwala Bagh, Tiananmen Square, Tahrir Square, Boat Club, Jantar Mantar, Singhu Border, Ram Lila Grounds, Matka Chowk – and the unpaved 10-metre-long, three-and-a-half-feet-wide footpath outside Panjab University’s vice chancellor’s office. Sprawling over almost 550 acres, the Panjab University is also a humongous garden where scores of gardeners hoe the earth, plant flowering bushes, prune tree branches, level uneven patches and dig up the earth on a regular basis. Nothing about any of these is reportable activity, not even when they hoe the earth near the vice chancellor’s office, plant flowering bushes near the vice chancellor’s office, prune tree branches near the vice chancellor’s office, or dig up earth routinely near the vice chancellor’s office.That’s a lot of ‘vice chancellor’ you had to read about stuff that didn’t involve any reportable activity.Except that earlier this week, the vice chancellor made it eminently reportable.It’s a different matter that we now have a media that hardly ever reports the reportable, unless it is a group of Muslims performing the most unreportable of activities: saying prayers by the roadside, or in a mall. So, it did not report much about this almost abstruse academic action of the university authorities. Someday, I hope, some bright minds on the campus will catch this fleeting moment of despair, hope, rage and determination in the university’s spatial history and take it up as a subject of pedantic research, but till then, please make do with this story. It’s a little piece of unpaved footpath, just outside the barricading gates, beyond which sits the vice-chancellor of Panjab University – slightly more protected than the resident of 10, Downing Street where your cab reaches the front door. On the night of June 27, a score of workers, a JCB machine and a tractor trolley or two were pressed into service to dig up a few square feet of the unpaved footpath. It is a patch where students demanding that the authorities should reconsider a particular decision, often come and sit, placards in hand, intermittently raising slogans like ‘University Authorities, Hosh Mein Aao.’ I have also heard more revolutionary stuff like ‘Dhakka-shahi Nahi Chalegi‘ or ‘University Parshasan Murdabad‘, clearly stuff that sends those sitting in plush offices beyond the barricades into spasms of horror and mortal danger.Police presence at the protest site. Photo: Special arrangementAfter 141 years of existence, the Panjab University authorities deduced that a clear and present danger emanated from that 10-metre-long stretch of unpaved pavement where a bunch of 20 students often hang out with placards – their numbers at times rising to the dangerous level of 40 or even 42. So, finding wisdom in the ancient idiomatic equivalent of the Diophantine equation – involving bamboo sticks, flute, music and the axiomatic absence of ordering tones in succession and temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity, more pithily crafted in Hindi as “Na Rahega Baans Na Bajegi Bansuri” strategy, the vice chancellor brought in the heavy artillery: tractor trolleys, JCB earth mover machine, scores of hands attached to bodies of underpaid contractual labourers with sunken cheeks and protruding ribs, and a determination not very different from the Peterloo of 1819.The site of protest is always a very political space. Space and place are central to any protest. Demonstrations at or occupying public sites have historically been an act of revolution, a duty most patriotic. The various ‘Occupy’ movements have effectively questioned the legitimacy of authorities, expanding the outer margins of democracy. The dug-up pavement where Panjab University students gathered to protest. Photo: Special arrangementIt is sad that a day after the earth-digging-protest-busting academic exercise, I was able to find many students strolling on the campus of Panjab University who were reasonably well aware of the Battle of Waterloo, but few had heard of Peterloo. About four years after the Battle of Waterloo, the more famous battle in Belgium where Napoleon was defeated, public conversation in Britain was overtaken by the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ after cavalry charged into crowds of thousands on August 16, 1819 for protesting reforms in parliamentary representation. Students of history still read about ex-soldier-turned-cloth worker John Lees, who fought in the Battle of Waterloo and was fatally injured in the attack in Peterloo. “At Waterloo, there was man to man but here, in Peterloo, it was downright murder,” he said before dying of his wounds three weeks later. For years, that site of protests and massacre by the army was marked by a blue plaque, denoting the ‘place where the military dispersed an assembly.’ In 2007, persistent demand forced the town council to replace it with a red plaque denoting ‘a peaceful rally attacked by armed cavalry’. In 2019, marking the 200th anniversary of the massacre, the Manchester City Council inaugurated a new Peterloo Memorial, designed by the very political artist Jeremy Deller, featuring 11 concentric circles of local stone engraving the names of the dead and the places they came from.The site of any protest is a permanent spatial footprint of people’s grievances, aspirations, wishes, and disappointments. Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar (1919), Sharpeville massacre protests (1960), Soweto uprising in apartheid South Africa (1976), farmers’ siege of Boat Club, Delhi (1988), the lone man standing before the tanks in Tiananmen Square (1988), the crowds in Egypt’s Tahrir Square (2011), the Nirbhaya Protests at India Gate (2012) – these are all markers of the march of politics and public consciousness. The anti-nuclear arms movement, right from the 1950s onward, through the 1980s and 1990s, saw how the Nevada Test Site became a centre of protests, turning the Nevada Desert Experience’s resistance into a metaphor for such protests and inspired others like the American Peace Test, the Global Anti-Nuclear Alliance (GANA), the National Association of Radiation Survivors, the International Alliance of Atomic Veterans, and Abolition 2000.The Nevada Test Site, which witnessed over 900 nuclear bomb detonations between 1951 and 1992, also became the source for the dramatic worldwide call to end nuclear testing, eventually pushing for a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Ken Butigan’s Pilgrimage Through a Burning World, which tells the story of the nonviolent protest movement focussed on the Nevada test site, convincingly underlines how the site of the protest against nuclear testing is as important as the site for nuclear testing. The physical spaces that these protestors hogged and gathered in, became historical, archival, and in many cases, memorial. In a few cases, they became metaphors. Ever heard of the Sis Ganj Sahib? That’s a metaphor for righteousness, constructed by a guru who infused the spirit of martyrdom that remains strong even after centuries. The history of an entire lineup of Akali morchas is a history of protests that became metaphors.Tiananmen Square. Photo: hibino/Flickr CC BY 2.0It’s probably well-nigh impossible to stage a protest in Tiananmen Square anymore, but we know what Tiananmen Square stands for across the world now: a lone man standing before a tank, a spirit of indefatigability. No one protests anymore at Delhi’s Boat Club, but there was a time it was a metaphor for protest. Two generations down the line, that metaphor has lost its meaning.Machinations have been going on for some time now to banish the cries for justice gathering at the iconic Jantar Mantar to some other place in the capital, far away from the regime’s new showpiece triangular Parliament.In Chandigarh, Punjab’s farmers and trade unionists have made peace with the loss of their protest site. Now, they stick to the margins of the City Beautiful after they were shooed away from the iconic Matka Chowk some years back. The couple of dozen iterations of Bharti Kisan Union are now contented with crying hoarse into a microphone next to the cremation grounds in Chandigarh where the regime has been kind enough to install a tap spewing running water. It took months of suffering by millions of people, a year plus of siege to India’s national capital, hundreds of deaths, an endless volley of accusations, too many stab-in-the-back machinations, an immense amount of resources and the world’s largest protest gathering to turn Singhu or Tikri into a metaphor for protest. It also took, just like Panjab University authorities, digging of roads with earth-mover JCB machines to try and stop the farmers from marching on to Delhi for Singhu to become a metaphor.From Tiananmen to Jantar Mantar to Matka Chowk to the Singhu-Tikri border of Delhi, the politics of the site of protest needs imagination, honesty, humility, suffering, pain, intelligence and commitment. The street has always beckoned the justice seeker, the challenger of the status quo. The footpath has sheltered truth seekers all over the world for centuries.No wonder, the march of modernity has been focused on snatching away the street, shoving us off the footpath.It’s a little-studied aspect of marketing strategies but the fact is that while streets, bazaars and roads were always potential sites of protest – think of the massacre of Khudai Khidmatgars of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in 1930 in Peshawar’s Qissa Khwani Bazaar, that has striking parallels to Jallianwala Bagh massacre – the new bazaars in the form of sprawling shopping malls from Chandigarh to Gurgaon have no potential as a protest site.In his classic 1963 tome, “The Making of the English Working Class,” E.P. Thompson underlines how protest spaces are intrinsic to intense concentration of political activity in villages and townships where commercial activity takes place. In a mall, this space to meet to discuss ways to rebel or mount a physical protest has vanished. One expected Panjab University to encourage research on this aspect of malls, much like David Guterson studied “The Mall of America” in his enduring essay that unpacked the surfaces entrenched throughout the mall, both physically and psychologically. Speaking at the protest by university student activists on June 28, 2023, Dr Pyara Lal Garg, a well-known health and education activist, said he expected the university to actually run courses on how to mount successful protests about public causes. “Who else will take up that task?” he asked. At 75, he nurtures a utopian optimism, inspiring students one-third his age.The right to meet is contemporaneous with the right to free discussion. A university is nothing if it does not do everything in its power to not just guarantee but to proactively nurture students’ right to free expression, but this one right necessarily implies the other – the right to meet. The right to meet is meaningless without a place to meet, a public space. Even skipping a reference to the debate about the Leeds of 1844, it is pertinent to recall Joshua Hobson who, when dealing with the contested question of who controlled the meaning and uses of public space, made it clear that all that the protestors had was the marketplace.The buildings belong to the university. The rooms, the labs and the playgrounds belong to the university. They have a designated purpose. The shops, the constructed premises, and the offices belong to either the authorities or some private individuals. Per Jahren and Tongbo Sui’s History of Concrete (2018), while describing the important role that concrete played in human society’s development, also underlines how the construction of ever more buildings left fewer ‘public’ spaces that were meant for all sections of society to use.What do people have? They have the road, the street, the bazaar, and the 10-metre-long unpaved footpath near the vice chancellor’s office at Panjab University. The university elites know that; hence the hurdles in collective action. Digging up the exact spot was the only form of ‘non-violent’ repression that could hamper the ability to meet and speak. It seemed straight from the playbook that the regime followed when it laid massive spikes on the national highway in Delhi, aimed at puncturing wheels of farmers’ tractor-trolleys, a move that reminded one of the fierce opposition to the then newest device of control, barbed wire, invented by Thomas Malham in 1830. Alan KrellThe Devil’s Rope: A Cultural History of Barbed WireReaktion Books (February 2002)Not only did barbed wire change how the West or its cattle ranching evolved, but it also helped tame any protestors. The innumerable pictures of Jews incarcerated in concentration camps behind barbed wires and the proclivity of regimes everywhere to generously fling concertina wire coils across roads and pathways to frustrate any crowds from advancing towards protest sites underline a mindset that feels threatened by a bunch of slogan-shouting band of men and women who think independently. No wonder, Alan Krell titled his 2004 book about the cultural history of barbed wire as The Devil’s Rope.Anyone who is acquainted with “Barbed Wire and Cucumber Sandwiches” – Dr Colin Shindler’s astonishing story of the controversial 1970 cricket tour of apartheid South Africa – framed in a landscape of turbulent social history – knows how demonstrators, striking workers and students had to fight to find a place to protest, a space to unionise, a spot to raise their voice from.Finding, identifying, occupying, gathering and doing all of this repeatedly led to the institutionalisation of places of protest. It is a pious societal activity akin to constructing common assets for publicly-dedicated crowds. By insisting and persisting in their demand to mount a protest and fight for that little piece of space in front of the vice-chancellor’s office, the inspired bunch of Panjab University students are proving one of Hobson’s more important points: That the debates must spill off the page and into action that really mattered. Words and language uttered in a space, associated with a place, achieve intended results.Before the Panjab University’s authorities brought in earth-moving machinery and dug up the footpath, it was just a “space” — a rather abstract physical area, a stretch you pass by. The university’s action turned it into a “place,” akin to a stage on which drama can be enacted. The students did the right thing by turning the little mounds of earth into a subject of protest. This was a very intelligent consumption of a ‘spatial’ product generated and rendered by the university in the dark of the night. Students of architecture and philosophy know about philosopher Henri Lefebvre and postmodern geographer Edward Soja’s spatial models that talk of material and concrete or symbolic and representative. The students’ struggle to get back that 10-metre-long stretch to stand upon, or spread a mat upon, and shout ‘Vice Chancellor Down Down’ has become a workshop in political philosophy by itself. A dedicated, people-chosen physical space gives protesters agency. Those on the demand side of justice change the strategic use of the environment and turn it into a stage. They sit in open public places at the wrong time or on the wrong side or block regular movement because doing so is their way of expressing that they want a change. Who can meet where is a highly political question. The regime in Delhi wanted to settle that question by digging up the roads, hurling barbed concertina wire on the roads, and hitting protestors with lathis and water cannons. It didn’t work. The Panjab University wanted to settle that question with a JCB, a tractor-trolley and a few tons of soil dug out from that pavement outside the vice chancellor’s office. The students have frustrated that with their radical opposition. Someone dug up some earth. The students understood the politics of the site of protest. That forced the authorities to level the ground again. The students are back there, sitting on a durrie, their fists clenched, and slogans rendering the air: “University Parshasan Murdabad!”Panjab University students gathered on the pavement. Photo: Special arrangement.The Panjab University now has a site dedicated to protesting any authoritarian decisions. Sometimes, it takes years, decades or even centuries to turn a place into a metaphor for righteous struggle. The Panjab University students did it in a couple of days. Sometimes, a step seems too little because the media doesn’t find it reportable. Sometimes, it takes future chroniclers of history to point out when a revolution really began.Sometimes, it can begin with a Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor like Mohamed Bouazizi getting too angry at the state of affairs in the town of Sidi Bouzid and triggering the Arab Spring, while no one had reported that little skirmish in the bazaar. Sometimes, it can begin with a Muslim friend of mine saying a prayer in the city’s swanky mall, though no one will report that. Sometimes, it begins from a 10-metre-long unpaved pavement outside a barricaded office of a varsity don, though not many thought it news fit to print. But once it begins, it’s difficult to stop. Regimes know that; that’s why they bring out heavy machinery in the dead of the night. SP Singh is a Chandigarh-based senior journalist and anchor of a political weekly debate on television, ‘Daleel with SP Singh’.
