Delhi Police detain Congress workers after a dramatic protest inside the AI Impact Summit venue in the capital | PTI
With more arrests and detentions on Monday of those involved in the shirtless protest at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, the Delhi Police have now arrested or detained five young men, all Congress workers, from Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Delhi.
The men had stormed into one of the halls at the Summit bare-chested, with T-shirts in their hands, protesting the Indo-US Trade Deal and India-related disclosures in the Epstein Files.
One of the slogans on the T-shirts read “Compromised PM”. The Delhi Police have addressed this as a law-and-order issue and alluded to the youth being inspired by the Gen Z protest in Nepal.
Tactics, taste and attention
It is important to note that while there may have been embarrassment at the global event, which drew stinging repartee from the Prime Minister himself, there was no violence or anti-national posturing during the protest. While the law-and-order aspect must be addressed, it would be grossly unfair to limit the entire discourse and action to this.
The protest must be evaluated for its manner and tactics; there is a raging debate about the shirtlessness, its use of the global summit space, and the democratic articulation of the right to protest.
To go shirtless during an international summit was silly and juvenile, but the unusual—even risqué—act drew the attention of the national and the international media to the controversial issues of the trade deal and Indian links in the Epstein Files.
The opaque terms of the deal have raised a storm, while the mention of the former cabinet minister Hardeep Singh Puri and industrialist Anil Ambani in the Epstein Files has brought embarrassment. Neither the government nor the people involved have convincingly explained or denied this.
Where legitimate ways of focusing on these failed, the shirtless protest scored. It garnered attention across the board. In these aspects, the tactic, though in poor taste, succeeded.
Shrinking space for dissent
The democratic articulation of dissent was its most significant aspect. Opposition leaders across the spectrum expressed discomfort at the shirtlessness, but the fact remains that this tactic by Congress workers came on the heels of the party leader and Leader of Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, repeatedly being stopped from dissenting in Parliament and the mainstream media offering little space to ask questions of the government about the trade deal or the Epstein Files.
The shrinking space for critiques pushed dissenters to adopt unusual tactics. It is a comment on the lack of robustness in India’s democracy. The Delhi Police, which arrested people protesting air pollution earlier, cracking down on the shirtless protestors shows their moral bankruptcy.
While the cops and the national conversation focus on the shirtlessness, even those who condemn the poor tactic acknowledge that the protest, in an era of the attention economy, made the issues visible, compelling the nation’s attention.
