Satyagraha for Constitution-as-commons

Conviviality and the cultural politics of care, as the conscientious resisters demonstrate to us today, can only be located in the context of civic resistance against state violence in India. | Photo Credit: Sushil Kumar Verma

The events unfolding on the streets of India signal the emergence of a new language of citizenship and a new language of the Constitution. This has been in the making over the past decade and a half. It has taken its time as fashioning a new language and grammar of justice is a process that has to distil public anger against the criminal dispossession by this government. The public face of criminal dispossession brazenly glares down at us: from dwellings and homes, savings, education, and now voting rights. 

This is the time when it all comes together — through the fearless confrontation of young protesters with a disproportionately weaponised police; when only those political leaders, who are out on the streets engaging with the armed state in the same manner in which these (extra)ordinary protestors are, retain public credibility and legitimacy; when lawyers preparing to defend resisters (and themselves) know that they will be huddled into vans and booked for practising their profession. This is the time when self-styled monarchs who took possession of their seats of power, grabbed through a daylight robbery of votes, can no longer sit on them, but instead hide behind them, cowering in fear.