Media365
Spend even a few days on the frontlines of a protest, and you learn very quickly how it is decided who is allowed to have political agency.
There is a carefully curated, managed role that the system prefers for the political woman: The victim.
This is why you see such a stark, almost dizzying bifurcation in how dissent is policed. When women march against sexual violence, flooding North and South Campus of Delhi University under slogans like “Hum auratein azaad hain” in the wake of horrors like the Aastha Kunj gangrape, the machinery operates with an easy, calculated patience. Traffic is diverted and permissions are granted. Why are these expressions of protest accommodated? Because a patriarchal system can digest the fear of women. When women march as victims of sexual violence, the state can be recast in its preferred role as the paternal protector of damsels in distress. By turning a systemic crisis into a manageable law and order problem of street lights, curfews, and police patrols, the protest is sanitised.
But shift the coordinates by a few miles, to Jantar Mantar, where a designated protest site has been locked down for days on end, and watch what happens when women take to the streets as citizens, organising, agitating, and refusing to look away from “vote chori”. They are no longer seen as a constituency to be managed, but as a threat to be dismantled. The woman who refuses to be rescued is not easy to digest, because a voting, politically sovereign woman destabilises the entire hierarchy. And so, to crush that political agency, the very thing they are to be shielded against is unleashed on them. Any pretensions of chivalry vanish as women protesters and journalists are groped, thrashed and shoved into buses. We are hauled off after sunset to the peripheries of the city, to Kanjhawala, Narela, and beyond, crammed into vehicles without a single woman police officer present, in blatant violation of every legal norm.
To understand this reaction, we have to look at the sheer scale of electoral malfeasance, an estimated 13.5 crore voters flagged or locked out in electoral rolls revisions, disproportionately impacting women, Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims who find themselves systematically pushed to the margins of electoral access.
When a Dalit, Adivasi or Muslim woman steps forward not as a docile subject of a majoritarian project, but as an equal citizen protesting against citizenship exclusion, fighting for her voting rights, or guarding her land, the entire apparatus panics. What is happening at Jantar Mantar and across the nation today is precisely this collision, women are refusing the status of subjects and claiming their space as equal citizens of the republic. And because of that, they are met with brute force.
Just as women march to demand their freedom to walk the streets with dignity and autonomy, they must now carry that exact unyielding defiance into the fight for franchise and citizenship, refusing to let the state quietly erase their right to vote and to belong.
The writer is a postgraduate student at the University of Delhi and a member of AISA
