On reporting resistance and resilience

When my professor Jyoti Dalal introduced me to British Philosopher Howard Caygill’s book, On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance, little did I know that I would find myself returning to its pages after reporting on the student protests in Jantar Mantar and Sansad Marg.As journalists, we are trained to report resistance as an event. We count protesters, detentions, First Information Reports (FIRs) and injuries. We report when a march begins, when the police intervene, and when the crowd disperses. We instinctively ask whether the protest succeeded or failed. Caygill, however, asks a different question.He describes resistance not merely as an opposition to power but as a human capacity that has to be cultivated and preserved over time. It is not simply the act of raising a slogan; it is the ability to return the next day and the day after that. That idea became difficult to ignore while covering the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protests as a reporter.On July 19, a day after Sonam Wangchuk was removed from Jantar Mantar, hundreds gathered in solidarity with those who had already spent 23 days at the protest site. They came from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, West Bengal, Kerala, Odisha and beyond.The following day, the crowds swelled further. Internet services were disrupted and metro stations were shut, yet people walked several kilometres to reach Jantar Mantar.“Going to the protest?” was the constant refrain I heard at almost every metro station I travelled to on July 20.If the growing crowds embodied the protest’s spread, the people on hunger strike embodied its endurance. I found myself in awe of the students who, after 23 days without food, still carried themselves with remarkable calm and composure. Watching them, I realised that hunger had ceased to be merely an absence of food. It was as if they had developed a relationship with it, a discipline around which they had organised their bodies, speech, patience, and hope.Outside, as people queued up, an elderly man overheard me asking the youth gathered there what brought them to the protest site and what they expected the result of it would be.“There is a fuel that runs the desire for freedom,” the elderly man said . “Sometimes it burns those in power. Sometimes it burns the self.”The July 20 events were inevitably reported through the language of confrontation: barricades, tear gas, lathi charge, injuries, detentions and FIRs.But the quieter story was about what the elderly man had said: burning through endurance.Perhaps the old man was pointing towards what Caygill describes as the formation of a ‘resistant subjectivity’. In his reading of Gandhi, Howard Caygill traces how Satyagraha evolved from being a strategic technique of resistance into a way of life. Resistance not only transforms politics but also the one who cultivates it.The choice, then, is not simply whether to protest, but whether to preserve the capacity to continue resisting even when confronted with repression, violence, fatigue or suffering. The protest ceases to be an event and becomes a condition of being, a lesson for life.As thousands marched towards Parliament through lathi charges and tear gas, what stood out was not only the confrontation with the police but the remarkable composure with which many met it.Women, children, and the elderly pushed through barricades, some offering roses even as lathis rained down on them. Scores were detained, yet many walked out of police stations laughing and smiling.That, more than anything else, is what I carried back from the ground.Howard Caygill gave me the vocabulary. The protest gave me the lesson.