Media365
4 min readOct 14, 2026 04:14 PM IST
First published on: Oct 14, 2026 at 04:14 PM IST
Protest sites are not just geography; they become cultural artefacts of expression. They connect people spatially through codes of dress, song, slogan, and movement. As spaces of resistance, they bring the marginalised to the centre. It’s an inversion of power, unlike in a carnival, where the dominant group is in the centre.
So, with Delhi’s Jantar Mantar has been denotified as a protest site, the question to ask is whom does the dominant group wants to make invisible. As a site, it is approximately three kilometres from India Gate. The three new venues designated by Delhi Police — the Ramlila Ground in central Delhi (about five kilometres), the Burari Ground in north Delhi (about 20 km), and the CBD Ground in east Delhi (about 12 km) – are like a man chopping a tree in the woods. Nobody sees it. It’s not in the face of power like Jantar Mantar is or India Gate was.
A 2022 paper from Ahmedabad’s CEPT University shows how the government of the day began reclaiming Rajpath, the stretch from Parliament to India Gate, over the years. The first layer of barricades came up with the Nirbhaya protest of 2012, closer to Parliament; the second layer came with the Hathras protest and a complete closure came in 2020 with the farmers’ protest.
The shrinking of protest spaces is not new to India alone.
Egypt’s Tahrir Square, which saw the revolution in January 2011, today has been dressed up with Nile cruises and museums. Likewise, Tiananmen Square in Beijing is now a tourist attraction, with the Tank Man imagery only embedded in our minds. Tehran’s Azadi Tower, once a site for Iran’s 1979 Revolution, has today been appropriated by the state to host sanctioned rallies. There are exceptions such as London’s Hyde Park and Place de la Bastille, Paris, where dissent is still a way of life.
India’s massive push towards infrastructure has expanded public capital expenditure from Rs 2 lakh crore (2014-15) to Rs 12.2 lakh crore (2026-27), which includes bridges, highways, railways, ports and the Metro; yet there is little or no scope for public squares or spaces where people can gather. The virtual shutdown of the national capital recently was marked by red dots on central Delhi’s map to guide people to their destinations. Like pockmarks on the city’s face, those red dots showed the dis-ease of discomfort of those in power.
Nobel laureate Anne Carson, in a 2024 interview that’s currently doing the social media rounds, completes René Descartes’ most-famous statement: ‘Dubito, ergo cogniti, ergo sum”, which reminds us how important doubt is to critical thinking. In our ancient texts, the vidushak played a prominent role. But long before kings vacated their thrones, the vidushak was gone. No critic, no king.
Moving Jantar Mantar as a protest site is not only a way to hide from criticism but also presents to the world that democracy is merely performance; as Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis puts it, erasing people’s power to act, to express and to resist. That’s not becoming of a country that is set to be the world’s third-largest economy.
shiny.varghese@expressindia.com
