300 Activists Express Solidarity With CJP Protest Through Art Forms In Hyderabad
Theatre practitioner Shaik John Basheer said that writers and poets read their work, musicians and singers performed, and theatre and dance became part of the protest as the programme continued through the evening.
HYDERABAD: Among the several solidarity protests with the CJP movement in Delhi, songs, poetry, dance and theatre was the means at Sudarayya Vignana Kendram with more than 300 people on Tuesday, while Telangana activists at Jantar Mantar said they had returned to the site before dawn after police cleared it the previous night.
The programme was the first public initiative of the Independent Artists’ Collective Hyderabad. The non-partisan group includes theatre practitioners, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, writers, poets, visual artists, photographers and other cultural workers who believe art cannot remain separate from society. Its members said violence in Delhi on Monday was against peaceful protesters, weakened democratic dialogue and required a public response from artists.
Theatre practitioner Shaik John Basheer said that writers and poets read their work, musicians and singers performed, and theatre and dance became part of the protest as the programme continued through the evening. Singer Suppi was among the performers.
Also present was drag artist and activist Patruni Chidananda Sastry. “If your art is not talking about fascism, it is not art,” they said, asking artists to use their work to speak about what was happening around them.
Sastry then turned to Telangana’s history of political music. Younger people needed to remember how the statehood movement began and how artists had responded to oppression, they said, before singing a song written by Gaddar.
“I want you to get that reminder from a drag queen, from a trans person, about how you have to agitate when power is oppressing us,” Sastry told the gathering.
Calls and accounts from Telangana residents who had travelled to Delhi gave the performances their immediate context. Amit Bose, who left the capital early Tuesday, said several scenes from the police action would remain with him for life.
“A policeman was chasing a girl and a boy stopped him to say, ‘Hit me instead. Why hit a girl? Do you hit your wife too?’ That really moved me, and there were many moments like that,” Bose said.
Protesters returned to Jantar Mantar early Tuesday after police had cleared the location on Monday night, according to Bilal Quadri, a Telangana activist who had been coordinating with CJP representatives and lawyers. Lawyers spent the night trying to locate young students taken away after Monday’s events. A team visited Mandir Marg police station and remained there until several students were released, Quadri said.
The solidarity programmes in Hyderabad had reached those connected to the Delhi agitation. “It is extremely heartening because when we call back home, we see that people there have noticed that we were beaten here and are organising in response,” Quadri said.
He described the mobilisation as younger than many movements he had worked with earlier. “Young people are seeing students being beaten live on their phones. It is different from reading about it later, and they have responded in large numbers,” he said.
