INQUILAB

The spirit of dissent is integral to India. You cannot shackle us.

-Mahua Moitra, Lok Sabha Member.

‘INQUILAB: A Decade of Protest’ is a thoughtfully curated anthology of inspiring lectures and speeches, vivacious open letters addressing the malicious silence and the unjust violent actions of the present Indian government (the timeline running from 2011 to 2020).

There’s a foreword by Swara Bhaskar which is inclusive of her personal opinion over the uneasiness of the society today, the increasing rage and the need for protest. The involvement of the youth in the protest, their intentions, their methods and the continuous silencing of their voices is fairly summarized by Swara with her own inputs.

For me, the major takeaways has been the speech by ‘Ramchandra Guha’ explaining patriotism, speech by ‘Romila Thapar’ defining nationalism through reliable history, lecture by ‘P. Sainath’ talking about the real reason of farmer protest , ‘Mahua Moitra’ speech in the Lok Sabha highlighting growing fascism and mode of conveying dissent, the open letter addressed ‘to PM by 48 Former IAS Officers’ and ‘Majid Maqbool’s open letter describing Kashmiri life under siege.

The protests that have inspired this compilation must have been felt and irritated, every millennial born Indian whatever maybe your ideologies regarding the govt in the past decade and if you are socially active you must have in person or a social media user contributed to a few protests. In a way there’s nothing new in the book nor is a conclusive moral note after every chapter (which I loved, nobody is imposing ideas here) but as you complete reading every chapter, you realise the portions of the speeches and lectures that get edited for media sensationalism and manipulated to create fake news.