Spaces of Resistance: From Indian Coffee House to Tihar Jail
With an alarming rise in political prisoners in BJPs India, a reflection on the historic use of prisons and other urban spaces in resisting authoritarianism.
A still from Anand Patwardhan’s documentary ‘Prisoners of Conscience’, released in 1978, on the political prisoners of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency (1975-77). During the 21-month national emergency, over 100,000 people were arrested. Image: South Asian Visual Arts Centre
One problem with authoritarianism is the severe repression of dissent. Under the authoritarian state, resistance becomes severely constrained, but also more necessary. In this context, opposition movements need to adopt creative strategies. In the classic cases of authoritarian rule, such as Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, urban space became an important resource for movements against the state. Public urban spaces, first of all, provided a place to escape the loneliness of life under Fascism, but also allowed people to deliberate and organize face to face. During India’s Emergency, urban spaces such as the Indian Coffee House at Connaught Place, and after the mass arrest of student movement leaders, Tihar Jail, played important roles in facilitating the anti-Emergency student movement.
Students holding a range of political viewpoints from different universities across Delhi met in the Indian Coffee House in Connaught Place to launch a movement against the Emergency and then continued organizing that movement from behind bars as political prisoners. A range of activities took place in Delhi’s vibrant urban spaces including rumour spreading, the dissemination of pamphlets and poetry, postering, formulating organizing strategies, forming cross-party alliances, recruiting, and even compiling bomb making materials and dynamite for use against public property. Not only did certain urban spaces facilitate collective action against the state, but they also facilitated surprising alliances between groups of different political persuasions.
The Indian Coffee House at Connaught Place
“Not only did certain urban spaces facilitate collective action against the state, but they also facilitated surprising alliances between groups of different political persuasions.”
Students’ Union President and SFI (Students’ Federation of India) JNU leader Devi Prasad Tripathi, known by his comrades as DPT, told me that the Indian Coffee House at Connaught Place was an important organizing space for the anti-Emergency student movement. It linked the SFI-led student movement in JNU with student and other movements across Delhi and beyond. Meetings at the coffee house between SFI JNU and Delhi University Socialists (affiliated with the Socialist Party) were critically important in organizing Delhi’s underground student movement against the Emergency. DPT told me that the Socialist student groups in Delhi University had, “formed some kind of communication network at a grassroots level and on a national level in which these coffeehouses were initially an important node… various kinds of protests and communication networks against the Emergency were organized from these coffeehouses…various forms of protest were connected by these centres where we used to meet. People [came] from diverse organizations which were opposed to the Emergency.”
The Socialists organized an underground network through their affiliation with the Railway Workers’ Union and relationship to Indian Coffee House workers (even though the Indian Coffee House workers’ union was affiliated with the CPI(M)). Unionized railway workers would transport pamphlets, dynamite, and other materials for the movement and then drop them at Indian Coffee House locations in various cities to be handed over to Socialist anti-Emergency activists. For example, Socialists involved in the Baroda Dynamite Conspiracy obtained dynamite sticks through unionized miners in Gujarat, who stole the dynamite from their work sites, gave them to Socialist party affiliated journalists who brought them to railway workers, who then transported them to Delhi where they were given to Indian Coffee House workers to then be handed off to Socialist leaders during their meetings there.
Another example of how this underground network was mobilized was recounted to me by Lalit Mohan Gautam, a DU Socialist leader. When he went underground, Gautam headed east, making stops at Indian Coffee House locations in Lucknow and Allahabad to exchange underground pamphlets and anti-Emergency poems with local student leaders before finally making his way to Patna. Once in Patna, he met a cleric at the Indian Coffee House there, who supported the anti-Emergency movement by sheltering activists in his madrasa. The first night Gautam was sleeping in the madrasa, an unknown man came to visit him. At the behest of George Fernandes, a noted trade unionist and a key national leader of the anti-Emergency movement, the man entrusted Gautam with bomb making materials to transport back to Delhi.
The Indian Coffee House at Connaught Place, Delhi was shut down during the Emergency as it became one of the central locations for organizers and activists to coordinate their protests against Indira’s rule. Image: Flickr / souvikdg
“Unionized railway workers would transport pamphlets, dynamite, and other materials for the movement and then drop them at Indian Coffee House locations”
Because of this extensive India-wide network created by the Socialists, the Indian Coffee House in Connaught Place, New Delhi became a key node, not just for the left student groups who opposed the Emergency, but also for the right. SFI JNU, Delhi University Socialists and ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the right-wing Hindu nationalist group, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)) met together in the Indian Coffee House to organize and coordinate a united student movement in Delhi against the Emergency. ABVP members, for example, were involved in the Baroda Dynamite Conspiracy, during which they learned from Socialist leaders how to coordinate an India-wide grassroots effort through connections to the Socialist and Communist labour movements. Some other tactics that the Socialist student groups taught the ABVP included how to provoke strategic discussions in the coffeehouse, how to use satyagraha as a mass movement tactic, and how to develop code to organize in the Indian Coffee House without detection by undercover police. From the Communists, the ABVP learned other tactics, particularly ways to effectively disseminate and circulate statements, pamphlets, politically engaged poetry, and other propaganda through interlinked urban spaces such as the coffeehouses, and on surveilled college campuses.
Though Socialists consistently complained to me that the ABVP were poor learners, were too quiet and timid in coffeehouse debates, and were not cut out for the bravery required to do satyagraha — while the Communists, for their part, lamented that the ABVP were just not fun to hang out with — both Socialist and Communist groups alike acknowledged that the ABVP played an important role in the left’s anti-Emergency student movement strategy.
At noon on May 15th, 1976, the Indian Coffee House at Connaught Place was demolished by the New Delhi Municipal Corporation on the orders of Sanjay Gandhi. While there is no direct evidence as to why the Indian Coffee House was demolished, many involved in the student movement have suspicions. Members of the Jan Sangh (a precursor to today’s BJP), Socialists, Communists, and Maoists alike consistently recounted to me that it was known to Indira Gandhi’s administration that the Indian Coffee House was an important space where a wide range of political groups met to organize against the Emergency. As such, it was seen as a threat to the state. Soon, a new Indian Coffee House location was erected on the terrace of Mohan Singh Place, located further up the road from Connaught Place in a shopping complex that mainly sells made-to-order designer knockoff jeans. The new space was qualitatively different from the Connaught Place Indian Coffee House in many ways. Notably, only the left began to frequent the new location while the centre and right found their own separate spaces for meetings. Right-wing groups like the RSS interpreted the state’s demolition of the coffee house as a signal: that by participating in the deliberations here, they were engaging in a politics that was too confrontational, one which could invite further repression and threaten their group’s mainstream acceptance. In demolishing the coffee house, the linkages among left and right student groups in Delhi were permanently severed.
The Tihar Jail
Soon, many of Delhi’s student leaders were arrested, but they continued to organize the student movement from behind bars. DPT, for example, told me that while he preferred to associate with “radicals, left wingers, Marxists, Socialists, not with the RSS and ABVP… they [ABVP members] were my cell mates and we used to discuss with them….different parties, we used to meet, we used to discuss and work out details.”
“Socialists, Communists and Naxalites began to organize Capital reading groups in Tihar Jail and invited Jan Sangh and Jamaat-e-Islami members to participate.”
I was told by both Socialist and Communist student leaders that Socialists, Communists and Naxalites began to organize Capital reading groups in Tihar Jail and invited Jan Sangh and Jamaat-e-Islami members to participate. Some political prisoners on the right accepted this invitation and participated in the discussions. While left political prisoners included the right in political discussions and reading groups, there was still some distance between them. Many Socialists recounted to me their frustration at the maafi-nama (apology letters) that the Jan Sangh would often write to Indira Gandhi after Socialist leaders had spent a significant investment of time and effort teaching Jan Sanghis how to agitate for better conditions in Tihar Jail. Said Ravi Nair of right-wing political prisoners, “they [Jamaat-e-Islami members] kept to themselves, but the top head leadership was a well read gentleman, unlike the Jan Sangh people who were not tolerant. They were Delhi guys, businessmen who thought this was going to be a la-di-dah.” Food politics in Tihar similarly caused tension between left and right. There were two wards for political prisoners in Tihar during the Emergency: a veg and non-veg ward. The non-veg ward was primarily occupied by the left and Jamaat-e-Islami, while the ABVP/Jan Sangh/RSS occupied the veg ward. Initially, according to SFI JNU member Prabir Purkayastha, “some of the RSS who were non-veg used to come eat in our barracks but they stopped because the Jamaat people, when they used to have their meetings, would eat beef and then the non-vegetarians of the RSS had problems so they had to finally turn vegetarian [and return to the veg ward].”
News clipping from June 26th, 1975 announcing the imposition of Emergency and the arrest of prominent political leaders of the opposition. Image: The Wire
Still, for the right, this experience was extremely beneficial. According to one Jamaat-e-Islami member:
the Emergency united everybody in jail, they were talking, they were discussing, there was dialogue. It was an indirect blessing for us because we met people who we were not meeting otherwise. By force, inside the jail, we came across people with various ideas and had communication, dialogue, this and that…They will know what Jamaat is doing, our ideology, our way of working, [the kind] of social transformation we want and what kind of country we want to make. Everybody had their own vision of how they wanted to make the country, so everybody has certain differences, everybody has their own vision of this country and this was discussed. It was a blessing in disguise you could say. People became closer and they could see that unity when the Emergency was removed and elections were declared. The whole country united.
But the left-wing Prabir Purkayasta told me that these alliances forged in the heat of the moment did not endure. “Jail is a peculiar place,” he said, “they say jail friendships only last until the gates of the jail. And that’s not a wrong statement.”
“the left taught the RSS new organizing tactics, strategies, and the mechanisms for coalition-building with other groups”
The ultimate beneficiary of this open collaboration between the right and left opposition during the Emergency was the ABVP and RSS. Through these conversations, exchanges, deliberations, and coordination in the café and in jail, the left taught the RSS new organizing tactics, strategies, and the mechanisms for coalition-building with other groups. By enrolling ABVP members into the various mobilizations of the Emergency – including the Railway Workers Strike (1974), the JP Movement (1974-5), the Baroda Dynamite Conspiracy (1976) and the 1977 elections – the Socialists and SFI JNU inadvertently reformulated the political strategy and outlook of the RSS leadership in the decades that followed. During the Emergency, the right learned from the left how to link-up with the trade union movement, how to launch an effective propaganda campaign, how to evade state censorship and detection, how and when to use satyagraha versus more violent social movement tactics, and how to form strategic alliances with other political parties and groups.
Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), a prominent leader of the opposition to Indira Gandhi, was arrested a few days before the Emergency for leading an anti-government rally in Patna, Bihar. Image: Raghu Rai via The Week
Student Politics Today
These lessons helped catapult the BJP to national election victory in 2014. But 2014 also ushered in a revitalized student movement as a reaction against the new BJP government’s casteist, communal, anti-feminist, neoliberal and anti-democratic policies. From the contemporary perspective, one of the great ironies of the movement against the Emergency is that because most of the older, established political leaders were arrested the night the Emergency was declared, the anti-Emergency movement was effectively a student movement led by a coalition of left and right groups. Today, the student movement in India is experiencing a vibrant resurgence against a far right Hindu nationalist government, but the BJP and ABVP, who were actively involved in resisting authoritarianism during the Emergency, are now the main force repressing democracy, along with academic and other freedoms.
At the onset of the contemporary student movement in 2014, ABVP groups’ main tactic was to enlist the support of University administrators — often Modi political appointees — to ban left and Dalit student groups from campus; for example the Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle at IIT Madras, and the Ambedkar Students’ Association in Hyderabad University, which led to Rohith Vemula’s tragic suicide. The JNU Sedition Case of 2016 marked a ratcheting up of ABVP’s tactics. The ABVP not only complained about the left to sympathetic university administrators, but the accusations led to the arrest of several left student leaders. ABVP tactics further escalated in the following years to physical violence against fellow students. The ABVP is suspected of being responsible for the disappearance of Najeeb Ahmed from JNU, and the ABVP coordinated an attack on a special lecture in the English Literature department at Delhi University in 2017, throwing stones at students and threatening violence and rape. In January 2020, aided by police, ABVP students attacked students and professors at JNU with sticks, rods and acid, injuring 39 people. While both left and right student leaders used violence as a tactic during the Emergency, the Socialist leaders had a slogan, maal hani haan, praan hani nahin (We can damage public property but must not injure any life)/ One important difference between the ABVP of the Emergency and today’s ABVP is that contemporary ABVP leaders have proven through their use of violence against fellow students that they have a complete disregard for the sanctity of human life.
In September 2018, the “United Left”, a coalition of the 4 largest leftist student unions (AISA, SFI, AISF and DSF) at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) won all four key positions against the right-wing ABVP during student council elections. Image: India Today
Given that student politics in Delhi today is truly a matter of life and death, one key question facing the student movement is how to form coalitions, and how to deliberate and strategize across party lines. During the Emergency, one effective strategy employed by the left student movement in Delhi University and JNU was to have cross-table conversations at the Indian Coffee House along with broad political alliances, even with student leaders on the right who had drastically different viewpoints regarding the future of Indian society. While to some extent these exchanges were limited, this left-right coalition was critically important in ousting Indira Gandhi in 1977 and ensuring victory for the Janata Party. Today, this strategy of organizing across party lines is already being enacted. The United Left, for example, an alliance of AISA, SFI, AISF, and DSF swept JNU elections in 2018, keeping the ABVP in check. The lessons of student organizing during the Emergency would indicate that a broader coalition, one that includes centre and right parties, would be the most effective way to unseat the ruling BJP.
However, while the left-right coalition against Indira Gandhi’s Congress was extremely successful in the short term, in the long run, it inadvertently contributed to the success of the right, as the right acquired from the left a better way to mobilize and organize. The left failed to maintain hegemony within the Janata Party, mostly as a result of the collapse of the Socialist Party in the aftermath of the Emergency. While today’s student movement could similarly benefit from the types of broad coalitions left parties built during the Emergency, it is critically important for them to learn from the left’s previous missteps and aim to maintain hegemony over these broad coalitions.
Jamhoor Event: "Brewing Resistance: From Emergency to Authoritarianism" book launch and discussion with author Dr Kristin Plys to follow on Oct 24th, 2020. Register here.
Kristin Plys is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto and the author of Brewing Resistance: Indian Coffee House and the Emergency in Postcolonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2020).