The Delhi Police’s decision to de-notify Jantar Mantar as a designated protest site is the latest episode in the Indian state’s long history of curbing dissent. Ramlila Maidan, Burari Ground and CBD Ground have been designated as Delhi’s new protest sites. The vocabulary of this move is predictably administrative: Public safety, traffic, and inconvenience to residents.
Against these seemingly innocuous considerations, we must examine how protest spaces are managed and produced. History shows that every time the state attempts to take a space of protest away, people find ways to produce new political spaces. The history of India’s protest spaces reveals their gradual displacement from centres of political power. For decades, Rajpath lawns hosted enormous demonstrations. In October 1988, nearly half a million farmers led by Mahendra Singh Tikait occupied them for days. With tractors, cattle, charpoys and cooking arrangements, they transformed the Republic’s ceremonial landscape into an extraordinary temporary settlement, bringing their everyday life into the state’s monumental core.
The Narasimha Rao government restricted demonstrations there in 1993, following the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Protest was redirected towards Jantar Mantar, whose narrower streets made policing easier. From lawns accommodating hundreds of thousands, dissent was confined to a corridor with limited access.
Yet, over three decades, Jantar Mantar became one of India’s most recognisable political landmarks. Countless groups transformed an ordinary street into an archive of democratic struggle. Its significance was not bestowed by the government. For Rao, relocation to Jantar Mantar was a means of curbing mobilisation. He couldn’t have imagined the stature that it eventually gained.
Across political parties, governments have regulated dissent by managing its geography, calibrating the distance between protesters and institutions of power. Underlying this management is an arrogant misunderstanding. Governments imagine that protest requires a place allocated in advance, as though dissent were an administrative activity to be accommodated within a municipal enclosure, a mere presence of bodies on geometric land. Political history suggests the opposite.
The anti-colonial movement showed this. Mahatma Gandhi did not await British permission to practise civil disobedience in public space. He transformed roads, marketplaces and seashores into political spaces. During the 1930 Dandi March, the journey itself constituted protest.
The same phenomenon appeared during the anti-CAA movement. Shaheen Bagh was neither an established political square nor a designated venue. It was an ordinary neighbourhood road, in a ghetto no less. Yet women, many previously unfamiliar with political mobilisation, transformed it into one of contemporary India’s most consequential public spaces.
In 2020, when farmers were prevented from entering Delhi, they transformed its borders into political settlements. Singhu, Tikri and Ghazipur developed kitchens, libraries, medical facilities and institutions of solidarity. In 1988, farmers had occupied the capital’s ceremonial centre. Three decades later, their successors turned its peripheries into new centres of political life. Barricades intended to separate dissenters from the state, became political spaces themselves.
This is a ubiquitous phenomenon. During Egypt’s 2011 revolution, protesters transformed Cairo’s Tahrir Square into an experiment in popular sovereignty. Occupy Wall Street established an encampment in New York’s Zuccotti Park. Istanbul’s 2013 Gezi Park struggle transformed a threatened green space into a symbol of resistance. In Hong Kong, highways became spaces of assembly and deliberation. More recently, Palestine solidarity encampments transformed university lawns into political communities with libraries, communal kitchens, teach-ins and prayer spaces. As police dismantled encampments in one place, others emerged elsewhere.
Space is not an inert container of social life; it is itself socially produced. Political space emerges wherever people gather to act together, not where the state grants legitimacy.
None of this makes the withdrawal of protest spaces harmless. Producing new political spaces requires time, money, organisation and sacrifice — not every movement can reproduce Shaheen Bagh. Governments can suppress protest with devastating effectiveness. The emergence of new spaces must never excuse the destruction of existing ones.
But a deeper truth remains. The state assumes it can decide where citizens may assemble and therefore, where politics may happen. Again and again, citizens have answered by reinventing revolutionary geographies.
Jantar Mantar itself escaped the intentions of those who designated it. Governments cannot de-notify the people’s ability to (re)produce political spaces — out of thin air, like magic.
The writer is a doctoral scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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