I made a trip recently, on a warm Friday morning, on May 29, to the Gautam Buddha Nagar District Prison in Luksar, a neighbourhood in Kasna village in Greater Noida. I had an appointment with a friend, a sometime student, who is in prison. Her name is Srishti Gupta, she is 28 years old, she is an artist. She has several FIRs filed against her (and her colleagues) numbered 163, 164, 165 and 169. Some of these are filed by Noida Police personnel, and some by people working in the management of different Noida factories. The charges against Srishti include the following sections of the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita – 191(1) for rioting, 191(2) for rioting, collective liability when violence is used by an unlawful assembly, 115(2) for voluntarily causing hurt, 121(2) which is voluntarily causing grievous hurt to a public servant to deter them from performing their duties, 125(a) which is rash or negligent acts that endanger human life or personal safety and result in hurt, 351(3) for criminal Intimidation, in which subsection (3) deals with aggravated threats, such as threats to cause death, grievous hurt, or to destroy property by fire, and 352 for intentional insult with intent to provoke a breach of the peace. She is accused of being present when violent acts were committed on April 11 and of conspiring to provoke workers into undertaking violent acts, including arson, on April 13 – although she had already been arrested on the evening of April 11.A view of the Gautam Buddha Nagar District Prison. Photo: Shuddhabrata Sengupta.Srishti Gupta is sleight of build, has a ready smile that flashes across her face whenever she feels at ease, and has sparkling, thoughtful eyes. When I met her across the wide mesh of the ‘mulaqat’ barrier she appeared, wearing a mustard coloured t-shirt, slacks, and a thin dupatta, along with several of her co-prisoners. She was closely shadowed by a policewoman who leaned on her shoulder, catching on to every word exchanged between her and me in the 15 minutes allotted to me and her other visitors to talk with her. Not so much was said. But in the little that she could say she indicated that she was in good health and spirits, that the jail staff is not mistreating her, that she is able to paint and draw and has access to art materials (which I supplemented by giving her a sketchbook, a box of colour pencils and a notebook), and that she is reading a lot of Premchand’s novels by borrowing them from the prison library. She also told me that she was making portraits of her fellow inmates in the women’s prison, and that she was also conducting art workshops for the women and their children. At this point, the jail staff latching on to every word, entered the conversation, and told me that Srishti was a very good artist, and that she had even encouraged her own daughter to attend the workshops that she was conducting. There was a moment of warmth and cheer. Srishti could not stop smiling. It made my day. Srishti is a person of remarkable intelligence, and is an artist committed to exploring the relationship between art and life. She is not the kind of artist who feels comfortable or fulfilled holed up, in solitude, in a studio. She is often out in the streets, mingling with people of all walks of life, doing workshops with children in working class areas, volunteering at informal schools, libraries for children and young people, and at women’s health awareness camps. Looking through her Instagram page (where she goes as ‘Srishtimax’) one can see her enormous creative energy and joy, expressing itself in all sorts of ways, with all sorts of people. There are portraits and poetry, delicacy and deliberation, short moving images and the impressions of a curious, questing mind. There are pictures of her inscribing words and figures with coloured chalk on the asphalt surface of streets. There is a shot of her walking with women workers. Sometimes the words talk about Palestine, (she made a beautiful embroidered album with the words of Palestinian children about their dreams and aspirations) sometimes there is a measure of necessary rage about the oppressive laws that imprison dissenters, sometimes quiet expressions of solidarity with the struggle to live a life of decency and dignity in the sprawling industrial suburbs of Delhi. Sometimes you can see her in a white cube gallery, standing next to her work with a kind of diffident grace that is rare to come by in a time when self-aggrandisement seems to be the self-presentational mode demanded of young artists. She is always poised, always inviting the present and the future with her presence.PrisonMy previous prison visits have been to see another friend, Umar Khalid, inmate number 267010, of Jail Number 2 in Tihar Prison (which by the way, is a five-star facility, in comparison, if one were making comparisons, to Luksar Jail). In writing about my visit to Tihar, in 2022, I had said:“If you have a friend in prison because they refused to acquiesce to the bitter denial of freedom and dignity in the country that is currently underway, please go and see them. Make it a part of your routine. Don’t put it off till some other time. This time that is passing will never return. They need you, now. You need them. Don’t let them feel that they are uncared for, forgotten. They are the keepers of all our consciences.” I did not know then that I would have to follow my own instructions, less than four years later, to meet Srishti for 15 minutes on that Friday in Luksar Jail. To get to Luksar from Delhi, you have to cross the lingering residue of water that used to be a river called the Yamuna, and then take the highway that skirts that sometime river towards Agra, through the acronym turned township called Noida (and then, its ‘Greater’ iteration). You drive past the never ending bleakness of Noida’s industrial belt, punctuated in places by characterless glass and steel high-rises that house ‘Information Technology’. Elsewhere, it is old fashioned factories making old fashioned things – fabrics, machine tools, motor parts, and the flotsam and jetsam of daily life. And then, suddenly, you take a road that branches off the main highway near a village called Kasna, and you find yourself following the course of a high pink wall adorned by barbed wire, interrupted by turrets. This is the prison. It isn’t far from the factory. Driving, I run through the procedure in my head. I have made a booking for a ‘ticket’. I have sent in scans of my Aadhaar card. I am carrying a passport-sized photograph and my deceased father’s name. I stood in line, inked my thumb impression and waited for my name and Srishti’s name to be called. I arrived. My companion is one of Srishti’s comrades. One of those not yet arrested. The path to enter the Gautam Buddha Nagar District Prison. Photo: Shuddhabrata Sengupta.Together, we enter the jail compound and first, buy provisions from the designated prison store – vegetables, biscuits, pickles, underwear, tooth brushes. These are to be given to Srishti and her prison-mates, the people we are visiting. These provisions are deposited into a burlap bag. A list is made, itemising everything, and it is cross-checked in an anteroom, where the provisions are unloaded onto the floor, counted, and then re-packed and left in a heap of other burlap bags, waiting to be delivered to the assigned prisoners. This ritual is a lifeline for the prisoners. The food in the prison is so bad, that the jail administration realises it is best to let prisoners and their families look after at least some of the nutritional needs of the prisoners, at least some of the time. Hence the ‘store’. and the purchase of vegetables to be cooked by prisoners in the prison kitchen for their own consumption. My companion says, “At least this way, they can get some salad.” Provisions unloaded, the wait begins. The drive to the prison still fills your mind’s eye as you wait your turn to ‘visit’. If buildings could sit staring at nothing with vacant eyes, they would be the factories, and the prison, of Noida. It is here, in quarters with names like Ecotech and NSEZ that the workers of Noida toil long hours to contribute more than 10% of Uttar Pradesh’s GDP. This makes Noida the largest contributor, amongst all the state’s districts, in the ‘growth story’ of the otherwise derelict, moribund and malgoverned state of Uttar Pradesh. This growth is underwritten by abysmal wages, which hardly anyone ever talks about, until they have to. The minimum wages in Noida have not been revised over the last ten years. And that is maybe why the prison is so full of people. A lot of them simply wanted better wages, and a little dignity.One of the ‘bail dismissal orders’ (for FIR 164) while quoting the argument of Srishti’s advocates actually refers to the gross illegality with which workers are treated in Noida. It says:“The state authority (office of deputy labour commissioner sector 3 Noida district Gautam Buddha Nagar) has accepted that the contractors supplying workers under section 12 of contract workers act 1970 have violated the conditions of license by not providing bonus, minimum wages, double rate overtime payment due to which industrial unrest prevails in Gautam Buddha Nagar. Despite that the contractors have shown insensitivity and the labour laws are not being followed and the contractors do not have any interest in the public order peace. The additional labour commissioner Gautam Buddha Nagar has cancelled the licenses of around 25 contract firms for violating the conditions of granting license under contract labour act 1970. The owners of the industrial areas situated in Gautam Buddha Nagar and at their behest the licensed contractors failed to revise the minimum wage between 2019 and 2024. Due to lack of sensitivity and generosity and stubbornness the industrial unrest spread.”Clearly, the judge is here referring to the fact that the workers unrest in Noida can be attributed to a variety of structural causes. Taking this further, it would be logical to argue that workers did not need to be ‘goaded’ or ‘coaxed’ into unrest. They were at the very end of their patience, and no ‘conspiracy’ was so necessary to lead them on a path of struggle. After much strife and struggle the minimum wages were increased, minimally. In the process, more than 300 workers were arrested, of whom approximately 138, including two minors, still remain imprisoned. An unskilled worker in Noida who used to get a little less than Rs 11,000 a month, now gets a little more than Rs 13,000. Rent, in the most abject one room tenements in Noida can cost up to Rs 6,000 per month. Rising prices of food, transport and basic necessitates leave very little in hand. Workers, most of them contract workers with no security of tenure, fall into spirals of debt to make ends meet. Life has neither substance, nor dignity. To many, ‘outside’ is as much a prison as ‘andar’, inside. The high wall separating the prison from the factory may as well not exist. These are ‘acche-din’ – the ‘good days’ – that the regime emblazons along with the faces of its satraps, on so many intersections, on the way to the prison, to the factory. On April 11, two months ago, Srishti Gupta joined some of her friends and visited different locations in Noida and Greater Noida to express solidarity with protesting Industrial workers, the people in search of a slight raise in the minimum wage.That evening, just after sunset, while returning from a sit in outside the Motherson Factory, after an afternoon spent doing drawings on the hot asphalt of the streets of NSEZ (Noida Special Economic Zone), Srishti was arrested along with three of her friends (Akriti Chaudhary, a theatre activist, Manisha, a factory worker, and Rupesh Roy, an activist interested in labour questions) near the Botanical Garden Metro Station by a posse of Uttar Pradesh Policemen in plainclothes. Since then, Srishti and her other friends have been in the Gautam Buddha Nagar District Jail in greater Noida. Two months have passed. Three bail applications have been dismissed by the additional sessions judges of the Noida district court. Courts are in recess now. It looks as if Srishti and her friends will stay ‘inside’ for the foreseeable future. Srishti had the presence of mind to do a ‘live recording’ of the arrest, which she uploaded on to the Mazdoor Bigul Instagram page, even as the arrest was underway. This video, which is time-stamped, shows two things, the UP Police personnel conducting the arrest are in plainclothes, they do not wear identifying badges, there are no women present, they use coercive force to drag Srishti and her companions physically from the metro station to a police jeep waiting on the road outside and that it is clearly after sunset. All these factors mean that the arrest is completely illegal. No woman can be arrested without the presence of policewomen, and no woman can be arrested after sunset. The video is a compelling testament to the complete illegality of the Uttar Pradesh Police’s actions. But apart from the video, which was seen by many, even as she was arrested, Srishti also presented a detailed deposition on the manner of arrest and subsequent events in a sworn affidavit in court. This document must be read. Here is an excerpt. That on 11 April 2026, I was detained by police personnel along with Akriti Choudhary, Manisha Chauhan, and Rupesh Roy from Botanical Garden Metro Station, Noida. At the time of detention, no female police personnel were present, and the detention was carried out entirely by male police officers. We were not shown any arrest warrant, detention memo, or written order and the grounds of detention were not disclosed to us. Neither our family members nor persons known to us were informed regarding our whereabouts despite enquiries being made outside Phase-II Police Station.3. During transportation, we repeatedly asked where we were being taken, however no information was provided to us. We were transported between multiple locations without being informed whether we were being taken to any official police station, chowki, or authorized detention facility, causing fear and apprehension regarding our safety.4. That while we were inside the police vehicle, Akriti Choudhary attempted to record a video on her mobile phone to seek assistance as we were frightened and unaware of where we were being taken. Upon seeing this, male police personnel forcibly attempted to snatch her phone. When I intervened and tried to stop the police personnel from taking her phone, one male constable pulled my hair and forcefully pushed me. Throughout the incident, no female police personnel were present, and we remained frightened for our safety. That during the same course of detention and transportation, I continuously objected to the forcible detention and attempted to make a video seeking help. 5. To prevent that the male officers snatched my phone and seized it there and then. A video recording also exists wherein I can be heard stating “Inhone mera phone cheen liya hai” (“They have snatched away my phone”), which was recorded while my illegal detention and transportation towards the police vehicle. The said video clearly reflects that my mobile phone had already been forcibly taken away from me by police personnel during custody itself, later during the night of 11 April 2026, we were taken to a location near Galgotias University. We were not informed whether the said place was an official police chowki or authorized detention facility.6. 7. 8. That on 12 April 2026, we were taken to NPX Chowki where I witnessed multiple police personnel physically assaulting Rupesh Roy using fists and sticks in the presence of myself, Manisha Chauhan, and Akriti Choudhary. During the assault, threats and intimidation were simultaneously directed towards us three women and we were made to feel that we could also be subjected to similar treatment. I further witnessed police officials pressuring Rupesh Roy to sign blank papers purportedly in relation to securing the release of us three women detainees.That thereafter when we produced before the learned Magistrate under Section 151 BNSS. Proper legal representation was denied to us during the proceedings and even advocates attempting to assist us were detained without lawful grounds or warrant. Thereafter judicial custody was ordered, and we were sent to Luksar Jail.That during the subsequent period of police custody remand, I was taken by police personnel to my residence situated at Sultanpuri. Police personnel repeatedly contacted my family members and demanded their immediate presence within an unreasonably short period of time. When they failed to do so, police personnel forcibly broke open the door of the residence. During the proceedings, police personnel made statements before the landlord, neighbours, and persons in the locality describing me as a jailed detainee and attempted to portray me as a woman of bad character because I had remained in jail custody. The way these statements were made was humiliating, degrading, and intended to publicly malign and character assassinate me in front of the neighbourhood and landlord while I remained in police custody.9. That thereafter the Investigating Officer, namely Harinder Rana, placed my mobile phone inside the kitchen area of the residence and falsely projected the same as recovered evidence, even though my phone had already been seized from me on 11 April 2026 during detention itself. The alleged recovery proceedings were false and fabricated to create artificial evidence against me.10. That CCTV cameras installed at or around the residence had captured the arrival and presence of police personnel during the PCR proceedings. However, police personnel deliberately damaged and broke one of the CCTV cameras apparently to destroy material evidence relating to their conduct. We are in possession of CCTV footage showing the presence of police personnel as well as footage indicating the damaging of the CCTV equipment.11. That thereafter, on 26 April 2026 at about 11:00–12:00 noon, I was taken to an area near Sector 88, Noida, where CPI (Maoist) publication material was placed inside my bag and falsely shown as recovered through police videography conducted during custody proceedings.12. That the aforesaid circumstances disclose serious procedural irregularities and custodial misconduct, including illegal detention, violation of safeguards relating to arrest and detention of women, custodial harassment, intimidation, fabrication and planting of evidence, destruction of material evidence, coercive conduct during custody proceedings, and actions which have caused grave apprehension regarding the fairness and legality of the investigation process.13. That in view of the way the custody proceedings have been conducted till date, the aforesaid facts may kindly be taken into consideration while adjudicating upon any request seeking further police custody or remand, to ensure protection of my legal and constitutional rights and to secure the interests of justice.There are clear guidelines from the landmark Supreme Court decision in 1996 in the case commonly referred to as D.K.Basu and Ashok Johri vs. the State of West Bengal & State of Uttar Pradesh that explicitly say that if arrest procedures were improper then this fact alone can lead to dismissal of charges against the accused and disciplinary proceedings against the police personnel involved in the arrest. The arrest of Srishti Gupta, Akriti Chaudhary and Manisha Chauhan on April 11 is patently in violation of all the legal procedures to be followed while arresting women. The charges of physical coercion and intimidation that Srishti makes, which are borne out by the video she uploaded, and the deliberate effort to plant false evidence on her person that she alleges all indicate the level of perversity that the Uttar Pradesh Police has exhibited in this process. And yet, no judge has so far deemed it necessary to take this into account while adjudicating the refusal to give bail. This is in itself a scandal. Others have been arrested in the same case – they include Satyam Varma, a well known journalist and editor, Himangshu Thakur, another labour activist, Aditya Anand, an IT professional, and more recently, Yogesh Meena, a student of Delhi University, and an activist of the Disha Student Organization. Himanshu was arrested in Delhi, Satyam Varma in Lucknow, Aditya Anand in Tamil Nadu. Yogesh Meena was abducted, illegally, by the UP Police from Delhi University campus. Two of the detainees, Satyam Varma and Akriti Chaudhary have been charged under the draconian provisions of the National Security Act. All these individuals are related to different degrees to a cluster of organisations and initiatives – these include the workers newspaper called Mazdoor Bigul and WhatsApp groups associated with it, an organisation of cultural workers called ‘Progressive Artists League’, the Disha Student Organization, The Hundred Flowers Organization, and a registered political party called the Revolutionary Workers Party of India (RWPI). Srishti and Akriti were both associated, particularly, with the Progressive Artists League, which has never been accused of undertaking any illegal activity.None of these organisations or initiatives are or have ever been banned. Mazdoor Bigul is a publication registered with the Registrar of Newspapers and Periodicals of India, and none of the accused have undertaken any clandestine or covert activity. They are simply being punished for their stand in support of workers protesting for a living wage in Noida. That is a stance clearly intolerable to the Uttar Pradesh government, the state’s police and lower judiciary. While each of the detenus (in what is being referred to as the ‘Noida Workers and Activists Case’) is important, and we should be paying attention to each one of them; I wish to focus in this article on Srishti’s predicament, because she is a visual artist, and I feel some responsibility towards her situation, as part of the visual arts community in Delhi. I hope that this article will make artists and citizens more responsive to her situation than has been the case so far. The case against SrishtiThere are four FIRs against Srishti – FIRs 163, 164, 165 and 169. She is named as an accused only in FIR 163 and FIR 164. Only FIRs 163 and 169 refer to the events of April 11, when Srishti was arrested. FIRs 164 and 165 refer to charges against unnamed people, crowds, and pertain to violent incidents on April 13, when Srishti and her comrades were already under arrest for two days. FIR 169 is filed 10 days after the incidents it refers to have taken place, and there is no explanation as to why this delay has occurred. No FIR, or bail dismissal order, refers to any documentary evidence for the statements about WhatsApp group messages being bandied about in court. No arrest warrant, or even an arrest memo is presented in relation to Srishti. The detention period is indicated as having started on April 12, which begs the question of what was going on from the evening of April 11, when the actual arrest took place. The only document that supports the fact of the arrest on April 11 (‘at around 7:00 pm’) is a ‘warrant of commitment on failure to find security to keep the peace’ numbered 382/2026, dated April 12, filed by the Sector 39 Noida Police, under sections 126/135/170 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita. This is a record of ‘preventive detention’ made because the defendant could not furnish a bond of Rs 50,000 as ‘guarantee’ for the fact that she would not commit ‘breach of peace’. This document is mentioned in the bail dismissal order dated May 26 for Srishti’s bail plea against FIR 164 written by Sunil Kumar, First Additional Session Judge, Gautam Buddha Nagar District. This ‘warrant’ is important because it shows the time of arrest on April 11 as being 7 pm, meaning ‘after sunset’. We know from the bail dismissal order that the judge is aware of this.Reading the bail dismissal orders, we come to know that the prosecution has named witnesses (Raju Yadav, staff and security guards of different factories) who ‘saw’ Srishti, and others, outside the Motherson factory late in the afternoon of April 11. It does not specify what Srishti was ‘doing’ when she was seen. It does not mention any speech that Srishti made (because Srishti did not make any speeches). It also declares that Srishti was a part of WhatsApp groups that were addressing the protesting workers. It does not say what Srishti ‘said’ in any of these WhatsApp groups. In the dismissal order of bail against FIR 164, we come across a witness testimony from a ‘co-accused’, a worker who was involved in the protests and has been arrested. This co-accused, a man called Abhishek, stated:“Whenever we used to meet Rupesh Roy, Aditya Anand, Shrishti Gupta, Akriti, Manisha used to be with him. Rupesh Roy and Aditya Anand told that for increasingthe salary of the employees we will have to put pressure on the company owner, only then the company owner will accept our demand…”In his further statement this ‘eyewitness’ says:“When Rupesh Roy gave Rs 40,000 to me, at that time Aditya Anand, Shrishti Gupta, Manisha and Akriti were also present. All had said that whatever money you people have got, distribute among the employees so that more and more crowd can be gathered….” Further the statement stated:“Our WhatsApp groups have been made with the name of Motherson A3, A3, A5 in which we had asked Rupesh Roy, Aditya Anand, Shrishti Gupta, Akriti, Manisha to add other workers and employees. I had made the video with my mobile…”Assuming that this ‘co-accused’ is telling the truth, then, can we take his statement at face value, as an indictment for Srishti, or for any of their comrades. Being ‘present’ with someone, raising money to contribute to a ‘strike fund’, or asking people to join a WhatsApp group – none of these are crimes. And none of these statements point to any specific thing that Srishti is alleged to have said, or done, to provoke violence. All this means that the prosecution is turning one kind of ‘presence’ (being seen by random people in front of a factory, or elsewhere) and another kind of allegation of ‘presence’ (unverified presence in a WhatsApp group) into crimes. According to this theory, one does not have to do, or say, anything incendiary. Just being, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, is itself indicative of criminality. I have read three bail dismissal orders, for FIRs 163, 164, 165 and 169, and I find that the judge, while accepting the prosecution’s theory of ‘presence as crime’ goes one step further. In each bail dismissal order is the telling line – “she (Srishti) is neither a worker of any factory, nor an employee of any company in Noida.” So being present in Noida proves that she is ‘an instigator, a provocateur, a ‘conspirator’. And so, bail is dismissed. In order to uphold punitive and investigative measures for crime committed while the defendant is in prison, and for the serious charge of being a person persuaded by the human emotion of sympathy and empathy for workers struggling for a living wage. Sympathy is a crime. Empathy, an offence. These are the misdemeanours that Srishti stands accused of in the court of the additional sessions judge in Noida. Also read: From Wage Protest to ‘Conspiracy’: How Noida Workers’ Struggle Was CriminalisedWhat an artist must doBut then, what is art if it does not engender an expansion of the imagination and the consciousness, such that, different kinds of people, and life experiences, may enter into conversation with each other. What is art if it cannot create that dialogue between different forms of labour, different modes of being and acting in, and making, the world. What if art if it does not embody the possibility of a human connection between artists and non-artists, between workers and students, between and across generations, sexes, identities and forms of belonging. What is art if it is not the means by which strangers, outsiders, and people without entitlement and authority may seek to enter spaces where meaning is made. What is art if an artist cannot stand with a worker outside a factory, listen to her story, share in her life, in her privations and her desires for a better world. An education in art is meaningless if it cannot cultivate empathy in the artist, if it cannot show the artist that she belongs, especially in those spaces where art and poetry are not ‘expected’ to appear. Srishti took her education in Shantiniketan seriously. Rabindranath Tagore built an entire epistemic and ethical foundation of the university he founded on ‘radical universality’ and empathy. By being where she is not expected to be, in a space where she is neither a worker, nor an employee, but a human connecting to the experience of other humans. In a sense, Srishti was simply applying the lessons she had learnt at Shantiniketan.She is not alone in this. All across India, in cities, towns and villages, a new generation of artists is experimenting with beautifully unusual encounters between art and life. Artists are working with marginalised communities, with women, with agriculturalists, forest-dwellers, sex-workers, industrial workers, children, prisoners, disabled people, migrants, queer folk, with Dalit-Adivasi-Bahujan people and others. Some of this work speaks in an ‘activist’ voice, some of it is more exploratory, more introspective, more tentative. It does not abjure galleries and museums, but it is not beholden to them either. It is as comfortable in a studio as it is in an informal rooftop gathering. It can tell stories, and be silent. It can speak and be silent. Srishti, like many of her contemporaries, is an activist on occasion, and an explorer of sensibilities at other times. Sometimes she is both at the same time. This new way of being an artist is something that anyone with an ear to the ground of artistic practices will be able to eavesdrop on. The signals received in doing so transmit on rare but clear frequencies.This regime that rules us cannot cope with this form of artistic flourishing. It has enacted a clear cultural policy that mandates what artists must do. According to this mandate, rather than empathise with actual human beings, artists must devote their energies to designing and building gigantic statues of dead men that cost hundreds of crores of rupees, or offer decor for the ‘thoughts’ of the regime’s leading figures. Or produce effigies to the fiction of ‘national pride’ and ‘timeless heritage’.Art by Ramkinkar Baij.This country has a tradition of artistic work that goes back to Nandalal Bose, to Chittoprasad, to Zainul Abedin, to Somenath Hore, to Ramkinkar Baij, to Swaminathan, to Amrita Shergil, and more recently, to Vivan Sundaram and Sudhir Patwardhan. This legacy embodied, to different degrees, and in different forms, a mode of engagement and dialogue with ordinary working people, their struggles, their joys and their sorrows. This is art entangled with life, unwilling and unable to do the regime’s bidding.This tendency continues in the work of younger contemporary artists like Amol Patil, Prabhakar Pachpute and Anupam Roy. Srishti’s practice, and the practice of many other young artists like her, sits squarely within this space. The judge who asks what an artist – “who is not a worker, not an employee” – is doing in an industrial area is basically asking why an artist is an artist at all. By implication, this argument would ask, “Why does she not stay at home, decorate the rich, adorn the gods, contemplate her navel, and generally turn into the stillness of the stillest of still lives?” Srishti refused this diktat, perhaps not even consciously or deliberately, but naturally, organically. That is why she is being prosecuted. In recognising this, we need to mark the fact that no visual artist has ever been prosecuted in India for ‘being’ an artist, especially a contemporary visual artist, until now. It’s not as if we live in a paradise where the freedom of artistic creativity and expression flourishes. Writers, journalists and poets have had their liberty taken away and their works suppressed more than once in this country. Filmmakers have had their work censored and canned. Artists may have had their works proscribed or banned or dragged into court – one can only think of Akbar Padamsee, MF Husain, or more recently Chandra Mohan (the student in the Fine Art Department at MSU Baroda whose work was removed from a student show). One can certainly remember the spells of imprisonment that theatre artists like Utpal Dutt had to undergo for the content of their productions, and some stand up comics have had to do time for ‘insulting’ what has been considered sacred. But no visual artist, no matter how politically committed, has ever been arrested simply because they were artists, until now. Mudassir Gul, an artist in Kashmir was arrested in May, 2021, for a total of three days and then let go for having drawn a mural about Palestine (he was also asked to paint over it) but that’s about all. Also read: Vikas and Fear: What the Noida Protest Reveals About Labour And Democracy in Uttar Pradesh(Interestingly, the charges against Akriti Chaudhary under NSA repeatedly refer to her activism on the question of Palestine. What relationship the question of Palestine has with the protests of Industrial workers in Noida is not explained (because it cannot be explained) and the fact that the Indian government’s stated position on the question of Palestine involves an endorsement of the ‘two-state solution’ is completely evaded. And yet, the mere mention of ‘Palestine’ is a ground for suspicion). Whatever be the case, we have to mark the fact that Srishti and Akriti’s arrest (and Akriti being charged under the NSA) is an inflection point. This moment, if left unchallenged, will embolden the state to suddenly start prying into artists’ practices, habits and their spaces. The nervousness is palpable. Quiet, tentative efforts to organise responses, or even meet to share information about this situation from within the artist community have so far hit a wall. Spaces (especially non-commercial and artist led spaces) that were normally willing to be hospitable to any gathering to celebrate the arts’ link to society, have had to mute themselves out of the anxiety that speaking up for Srishti may invite undue trouble. A simple, innocent gathering of artists and art students in a cafe in distant Shantiniketan (Srishti’s alma mater) in the ‘new’ Bengal has invited preliminary police scrutiny. There is a change of tone, a chilling of the atmosphere, a cloud hovering over a real sympathy that actually exists but is not able to express itself in any meaningfully robust manner. Perhaps it is time to give serious thought to how the art world in India might find a way out of this impasse of enforced silence and paranoia.The assumption of the criminal culpability of Srishti, Akriti and their comrades, rests on the notion that left to themselves, people would not question or agitate against their oppressive circumstances. Workers must have been ‘misled’ by an external ‘leadership’ that seeks to mobilize workers against their will. This is where artists, poets and intellectuals come in handy. Rather than being seen as witnesses and interlocutors in evolving social processes, they are processed into sinister agent-provocateurs, trained in triggering restlessness and unrest. This is insulting to workers, because it assumes that they are mindless people who have no agency or understanding of their own. It is insulting to artists, intellectuals and creative people because it assumes that all they do is manipulate people into being rebels. In a recent pronouncement, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Adityanath, said that while ‘Naxalism’ has been eradicated in the country thanks to the efforts of the Union home minister, the spectre of ‘urban Naxals’ are still present in his state, and that this is proven by the Noida workers stir. If Srishti and her friends were not present in Noida, they would have to be invented. Because that is the only way in which the regime can process the reality of widespread working class discontent in Uttar Pradesh. So what can we make of the charge that Srishti and her comrades were guilty of ‘provocation’ simply by being in Noida? Subsequent investigations by journalists and activists have shown that some incendiary messages were in fact being circulated on a WhatsApp group associated with workers of the Richa Global factory. Membership in this group could be obtained by anyone clicking on a QR code set up by the group’s administrators (who were Srishti’s friends Rupesh Roy and Aditya Anand). Two individuals joined the group in this way, and made provocative posts. One, Anil Kumar, identified as a driver for hire, left an incendiary voice message on the group asking for workers to jam the highway where the prime minister was coming for yet another infrastructural inauguration event. In another instance, a police sub-inspector – SI Beena – entered the group and posted pictures of burning cars. Anil Kumar was not apprehended for over a month, and once arrested, was soon let off on bail. In a mobile phone sting undertaken by some of the activists associated with the Campaign to Release Workers and Activists of Noida (CARWAN), he said that he works as a driver for senior police officers, and the police said that he was a contacted driver for an important central government agency that just happened to be the Ministry of Home Affairs. As for SI Beena, the Uttar Pradesh police admitted that she was an ‘undercover cop’ who had been tasked with ‘infiltrating’ the workers’ WhatsApp group to plant deliberately provocative messages in order to ‘see who responds’. No action has been taken so far, against SI Beena. There has not even been a routine administrative enquiry.Also read: Noida Protests: Arrested Activists Tell Supreme Court Police Were on WhatsApp Group, Had a Role in Inciting ViolenceOn the other hand, several of Srishti’s activist friends in the circle around the Mazdoor Bigul newspaper, particularly Akriti, Aditya and Yogesh, made repeated appeals for calm, for non-violent protest and to isolate any elements who were trying to provoke workers into undertaking rioting and arson. I know Srishti well, and while she is perfectly capable of expressing how capitalism destroys the environment through street art and graffiti, she would never do anything that puts the life and safety of workers in danger through provocation. That is simply not her. I believe that her strong ethical and aesthetic impulses would mitigate against her participating in any provocative course of action that would put herself, her comrades, or workers at any risk.The additional sessions judge who wrote the bail dismissal order for the plea in relation to FIR 164 made note of the fact that Srishti is a trained artist. Indeed she is. She is a proficient painter, printmaker, creator of objects, fashioner of installations. She is also a thoughtful poet in Hindi, and her artistic work often includes fragments of her poetry, and her extensive reading of poetry.But despite her formal artistic training one could say that her actual artistic medium is life itself. Life in all its colours and textures; life as an index of a cruel social order, subservient to class, to caste and the rule of the criminal procedure code, but also life as a field of open and thoughtful curiosity; life as a refusal to accept what is presented as fait-accompli by the state, by society, by policemen and patriarchs. Srishti, whose name means creation (and life itself) creates and sustains life through her artistic practice not in isolation inside an artists studio alone, but often in the company of others – at the edges of factories and in the shanty towns where workers live. In these spaces Srishti lives life with joy, abandon and curiosity, with children, with other young people her age, and in conversation with friends across different generations, including, sometimes, me. Her solidarities mark her friendships. And she has many friends and several solidarities. Like many young people her age, (which some would call ‘Gen-Z’) she is restless in her search for solidarities. She is teaching herself the way the world works and doesn’t work by associating with tight groups of people who see an engagement with industrial labour as a necessary form of radical politics. Srishti knows me as an older artist, as someone who shares many of her curiosities and sympathies, as someone she sends shy forwards of what she is drawing, writing and thinking, sometimes. We have sparse but precious conversations, about art, about life, about living.Nandalal Bose’s art on the Indian constitution.I first came across her, far from Noida, in the seminar room at Kala Bhavan, the famous art school established by Nandalal Bose in Vishwa Bharati, the university founded by Rabindranath Tagore in Shantiniketan, in Bolpur, Bengal. It was in mid August, 2022. Srishti was part of a workshop held between the 16th and 19th of August on the subject of ‘Contemporary Art and the Relation between Text & Image’ as part of the observation of the Somenath Hore Centenary Year at Kalvera Bhavan (the School of Fine Arts) at the Vishwa-Bharati University in Shantiniketan. Srishti was a final year MFA student of Kala Bhavan and I was the person invited to conduct this workshop. In that context, I was struck by Srishti’s open ended attitude to people and practices. There was no envy or possessiveness in her about artistic practice. She was inventive in thinking through simple, everyday objects and natural materials. She was able to deploy simple objects to tell complex stories and to draw upon them to make fresh, original conceptual connections. She would take me to meet artists in the cohort just above her at Kala Bhavan that she found inspiring. On one occasion, one of these walks to see an artist she wanted me to look at took us through a Santhal village. She had many friends in this village, and had worked on several projects with the people of the village. I saw her meet everyone with candour and laughter. Since August 2022, I have witnessed Srishti mature and grow as an artist, as a citizen, and as a human being. She is the kind of artist-citizen this society, any society, could be justifiably proud of. She is a person who takes forward the legacy of Vincent Van Gogh, Courbet, Käthe Kollwitz and Frida Kahlo – all of whom made their politics and their commitment to the life and struggles of working people part of their artistic vocabulary. We have to think of her alongside Chittoprasad and Somenath Hore, and their sketchbooks as militant witnesses to the struggles of peasants and working people. While we must ask why Srishti is in prison and why she is not free, we should also be asking what, we as a society, as an arts community, could be doing to nurture young people like Srishti, to celebrate their work, to engage with their thinking, to support their desire for life and freedom. Srishti Gupta and Akriti Chaudhary, two vibrant young members of our artistic community, must walk out of prison soon. If the courts of this country cannot bring themselves to free them, if it cannot recognise that their incarceration is the actual crime we ought to be discussing, then it will have again proven itself to be hollow, and devoid of any real sense of what justice means in practice There are some good signs; the Allahabad High Court has come down sharply on Uttar Pradesh Police for their cavalier attitude to the protocols of arrest and detention, and their tendency to listen more to their political masters than to the dictates of the constitution. This means that this court, or at least a bench of this court, is alert to the abuse of power to stifle dissent. Further, protesting workers who were arrested, on very similar grounds in the neighbouring state of Haryana have been given bail in well-reasoned judicial orders. This should act as an incentive to the writing of sensible orders in the courts of Uttar Pradesh. So there is ground for (some) hope.I hope that the demands of art, life and freedom will make the judges make sensible decisions on how Srishti will live. I hope to see Srishti and her colleagues making art, outside prison, soon. Shuddhabhrata Sengupta is with the Raqs Collective in New Delhi.The author would like to acknowledge inputs from the Campaign for the Release of Workers and Activists in Noida (CARWAN) and advocates Kawalpreet Kaur and Ali Zia Kabir Chowdhary that were helpful in writing this article.