Writing The Resistance

We need to think about writing the resistance, not just writing as resistance. The comfort and semi-glamour of the art world often invites us to talk about writing as resistance. Eager as I have been to talk about this particular role of the writer, yet I increasingly feel that we need to expand our framework of thought.

Look around in India. Everywhere, there are mass resistance movements. Farmers’ protests. Student protests. Protests for workers’ rights. Protests against land grabs; against corporates; against mining; against militarisation. In the backdrop of such powerful resistance, there arises the inevitable natural question, or corollary. Who is writing the resistance? Who is chronicling these movements, archiving them, reflecting on them?

Yet the obvious response — writers! — is being rendered void. The space for writing the resistance is shrinking every day. The risks of documentation have never been starker.

In recent years, the ruling party (and consequently, the state) has weaponized the term "urban naxal". A calculated fusion of “urban ” as in “city-based intellectuals”, and “Naxals”, or “Naxalites”, as in armed Maoist movements, criminalizes any engagement with radical politics. This deliberately vague label transforms writers, artists, and academics who document or express solidarity with mass movements into suspected terrorists overnight. The term's power lies in its ambiguity and flexibility: a poet writing about tribal displacement, a journalist covering farmer protests, or an academic studying labour movements can all be (and are) branded as "urban naxals." This conflation delegitimizes the intellectual's role in documenting resistance. It also delegitimizes the mass movements themselves.

The machinery of state repression has perfected this transformation, drawing a straight line from writer to terrorist.

With so clear a pipeline from individual writer/activist to “terrorist” — who dare stand for the people? The writers and intellectuals and lawyers arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case are testament to the perils involved and punishments incurred. Six years after sixteen activists were jailed in this case — the trial has not commenced. An eighty-four-year-old Jesuit priest, Father Stan Swamy, who worked for displaced indigenous people, died in custody; and he was famously denied a sipper in the days leading up to his end. Many of the accused in this case still languish in prison.

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What happens when pens and guns are equated?

The conflation of the figure of the writer with the figure of the gun-toting fighter is dangerous, for then the state allows itself to hunt down writers. By “writers”, I mean intellectuals, artists, dissidents, anyone who works in the realm of thought.

This is not a romantic equation. Nor is this “edgy” marketing where revolutionary iconography is rendered sterile, palatable, through repackaging as aesthetic. This is a lethal equation. Writers can be hunted down with the same calculated precision the state uses against fighters. The right-wing regime's invented term, "urban naxal", expands the terrain of this hunt. To be marked as prey, you need not bear arms, or hide in the forest. The hunt now extends from the forests of Bastar to the concrete forests of our cities, from the physical to the metaphorical—the forests of bureaucracy, the forests of speech, the forests of thought itself. Even in broad daylight, in the open, you can be labelled a (quote unquote) terrorist.

The echoes of historical hunts reverberate in our present: from the colonizers who hunted enslaved people through forests for sport, to today's state forces in Central India pursuing Adivasis through the forests of Bastar. The state's deadline of March 2026 for "eradicating naxalism" is a genocidal countdown—a systematic plan to clear ancestral forests of the people who have lived there for centuries. When the great silence descends in the forests of Bastar—when enough Adivasis have been killed for the area to be "secured" and handed over to corporates or used for setting up yet another military camp—that silence will be accompanied by the silence of the writers. Silence as prequel, silence as sequel. A silence of forests where only the smallest beings remain to make their inconsequential noises: crickets chirping in the undergrowth of a dead zone, the clatter of keyboards in the emptied spaces of dissent.

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To be labelled a terrorist is to be deprived of your humanity. To be termed a terrorist is to earn the bulls-eye on your back. Calling radicals, militants, writers, artists, lawyers terrorists --- that is the biggest cancel culture ever. This is not Cancel Culture as Internet Fad – this is a death sentence at the level of the individual; the deliberate dehumanisation of inconvenient people at the level of the collective. We know that once this language of terror is used against anybody, then anything can be done. We know how that story inevitably ends. When the word terrorism is used against nations, they're bombed. When the word terrorism is used against liberation movements, they're decimated, destroyed and wiped out. When the word terrorism is used against individuals, they're locked up. We know this. We have witnessed this play out over and over again.

We know that to embrace silence in the face of a genocide is a death in itself: this death carries shame, guilt, betrayal. We know that the death that comes from martyrdom--that comes from speaking truth to power and embracing the crushing blowback – this death that we do not inflict upon ourselves through self-censorship is more honourable.

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The evolution of anti-terror legislation in India reveals a sinister refinement: the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) opened the doors to say that an individual could be considered a terrorist without belonging to any proscribed organization. In this targeting of the individual, something more insidious is at work - a transformation in how terror laws shape the landscape of free expression in this country.

See how precisely the state deploys its weapons. Anti-terror laws, in their earlier avatars – MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act), TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act), POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) – were exploited to attack politicians. Now, the UAPA is primarily weaponized against individuals. Politicians are "handled" through CBI and ED – government apparatuses that operate on the logic of neoliberalism and its vacuous talk about the elimination of corruption. Smearing political opponents as corrupt is more effective than labelling them terrorists. As they are afforded this luxury (partly because it would be ridiculous to call centrist politicians terrorists), few political parties worry about anti-terror laws.

See the sophistication of the machinery of state repression. The informal power of labels like 'Urban Naxal' works in concert with the formal power of laws like UAPA. One creates the atmosphere of suspicion, the other provides the legal framework for persecution. Together, they achieve what neither could alone — the systematic isolation and destruction of individual dissenters. The fight against draconian anti-terror legislation, in a country like India, thus never becomes a mass civil society movement. The law becomes scalable in the worst possible way – precise enough to hunt individuals, broad enough to cast a shadow over entire movements. The state has perfected the art of making the collective abandonment of individuals seem natural, inevitable.

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This effectively prevents the collectivisation of writers and activists, The minute you come together, you risk being labelled a proscribed group. This terminology of terrorism, Urban Naxal, forces writers into self-censorship. Language and law make you fear being a dissident.

Is the atomization of thought and resistance perhaps the most nauseating victory of neoliberal ideology? We are brainwashed into looking at ourselves as discrete units with digital footprints. Entrepreneurs of our own destiny. Each of us is a start-up! Meanwhile, the muscle memory of collective thinking atrophies. The very language of collectivity—solidarity, mass consciousness, class interest, revolution—has been displaced by the vocabulary of individual achievement and personal branding. This erosion runs deeper than simple fear. It rewires how we imagine change as possible. As we lose the capacity to think collectively, we lose the ability to see the structures that bind us, to recognize that our individual struggles are intertwined with the larger war against all forms of oppression. The death of collective imagination precedes the death of collective action.

What happens when writers fall silent? It affects the body politic of the country. Peoples' movements, mass protests, grassroots resistance, collective action, civil disobedience, and at the end, armed resistance – whatever's happening around the country loses an intellectual support base. A writer goes beyond reportage. S/he/They offers ideological clarity. That space is now corroded; it no longer exists.

Lenin famously said that “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”. We can agree that just as theory without revolutionary praxis is sterile abstraction, movement-building without revolutionary theory is naked adventurism—one cannot exist meaningfully without the other. The role of writers and intellectuals is to forge this unity, to give shape and direction to rage, to transform the raw material of resistance into a coherent force for transformation. When they are silenced or atomized, movements lose their compass, their ability to see beyond the immediate struggle. Without this dialectical relationship between thought and action, between the intellectual and the mass movement, resistance fractures into isolated outbursts, each unable to recognize its place in the larger war of liberation. The system knows this—which is why it works so hard to break these bonds, to turn writers into clout-chasers and collective thought into a crime.

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Allow me a detour: What else does neoliberalism accomplish? Beyond degrading intellectual work into social media performance, it weaponizes a deranged version of identity politics to ask: "But why should writers tell these stories? The people will tell their own stories." This seems, on the surface, like an unassailable ethical position. Of course the people must tell their stories. Of course their voices must be centered. But this seemingly radical stance conceals a profound abdication.

The thing is, people are burdened with carrying on a protest. They are also facing state brutality for being protesters. Tasking them with the additional burden of being witness-bearers and chroniclers, as well as being revolutionaries, means that writers absolve themselves of any role in society. The writer says, "I'm going to throw my hands up. I have resigned. It's not my job. You're protesting. You go, you write your own story.”

We know the people will write their own stories; but then, what does the writer exist for?

This self-erasure masquerading as respect for lived experience is sophisticated abandonment -— a posh way for writers to wash their hands of the collective struggle while virtue-signalling. Solidarity transforms into spectacle. The hard work of building revolutionary consciousness turns into performative surrender. When writers step aside, claiming they're making space for authentic voices, they refuse their role in the dialectical relationship between intellectual work and mass struggle. The task is not to speak for the people. The task is to speak with the people, to bring individual experiences into collective understanding, to connect seemingly isolated struggles into a unified analysis of power and resistance.

Anything less is not humility—it is class betrayal and counter-revolutionary desertion wearing the mask of ethical consideration.

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“What does the writer exist for” becomes a very existential question. . .

If you're being atomized in this manner, if you're being silenced, if you're being divorced from lived human reality—you do not write about it, you do not engage with it, you do not go to sites of struggle, you do not sit with people, you don't read to people, you don't engage with people.

Becoming this thoroughly cut off limits your experience, limits the world you inhabit. Then you can ONLY write about your own alienation. You can only write about the shameful silences that you, or your peers, inhabit. That silence, too, becomes a commodity to be managed, in our comfortable and glamorous art world. . .

You can also write, maybe, about how carefully you're avoiding trying to get on the wrong side of power, on the wrong side of the regime, on the wrong side of whatever law exists. You can share in an Instagram reel how you have managed to turn yourself into a puppet intellectual: one who has perfected the art of saying nothing while appearing to speak.

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Today, not only is writing resistance. Even reading is resistance. Friends of mine have been picked up under UAPA merely for possessing books by Marx and Lenin.

The machinery of state repression has reached such absurd proportions that it criminalizes not just radical thought but even state-sanctioned knowledge. When the National Investigative Agency raids a professor's home in Hyderabad and confiscates the complete Writings and Speeches of Babasaheb Dr Ambedkar—a government-published collection by the architect of India's Constitution—we see power consuming itself in its paranoid quest for total control, a snake eating its own tail. Government-published texts are now contraband; Constitutional thought is now seditious; passive reading is a proof of criminal intent.

There has been a complete collapse of liberal pretence here – but like the emperor’s new clothes – the respectable layers of society will not call it out. Somewhere, a court questions an activist for possessing Tolstoy's War and Peace. This is not fiction.

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The "Urban Naxal" label functions as a weapon of bureaucratic torture—its power lies in shifting the burden of proof onto the accused. You must prove you're not dangerous, prove you're not in league with actual Naxals, prove your innocence daily. This constant defensive posture is designed to wear you down, to force you into performing your harmlessness: "No, I'm innocent, I haven't written anything controversial, anything of consequence, I'm not political, I'm neutral." The state has perfected the art of exhausting revolutionary potential through the endless labour of self-negation.

The machinery grows more grotesque by the day. When Mohammed Zubair highlights hate speech, he is slapped with charges of threatening India's sovereignty. A fact-checker performing the essential work of documenting fascism becomes a threat to national security. The state's logic reveals itself: those who mirror society's violence back to itself must be silenced, those who document must be disappeared.

The circle shrinks daily. First, they come for someone you know, then someone you know better, then someone closer still. You begin to inhabit this contracting space with an acute awareness that anything can happen to you. This awareness itself becomes a form of control—you begin to police your own thoughts before they reach the page, you begin to inhabit the silence before it is imposed.

In this machinery of repression, where thought itself becomes evidence of sedition, where the mere act of documentation becomes proof of conspiracy, we witness the ultimate triumph of the neoliberal state: its capacity to naturalize atomization, to transform capitulation into strategic wisdom, to render the abandonment of collective struggle in favour of mere individual survival. Yet this victory contains within it the seeds of its own undoing—for in making both reading and writing acts of sedition, the state exposes the fundamental antagonism at the heart of its repression: that in its desperate campaign to prevent the development of revolutionary consciousness, it teaches the masses the most essential lesson—that every act of thought, every moment of understanding, must necessarily become an act of resistance against the system that trembles at the idea of a people collectivising.

(First Published in RSL Review, The Royal Society of Literature, 28-31, 2025) (Images from Emory Douglas' phenomenal work on/for the Black Panthers