NGT order drowns Jantar Mantar into eerie silence but protesters can't afford ill-equipped, costly Ramlila Maidan

New Delhi: Men and women who feel wronged by the state and showed up at Jantar Mantar—the capital’s key protest site—are being evicted because the National Green Tribunal believes they violate environmental laws.[caption id=“attachment_4190113” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Once buzzing with protesters Jantar Mantar now puts up a vacant look. Pallavi Rebbapragada/Firstpost[/caption] Until the eve of November, on the wide footpaths on either side of a road adjacent to Jantar Mantar, an astronomical monument in Central Delhi, people would sit like vendors of grievances. They’d pin banners on walls, spread out folding cots and plant placards two inches into the soil; a sense of permanence was an acceptance of the unlikelihood of justice. The banners have now been neatly removed; the cots might have been folded back and taken away along with clothes and shoes, and photocopies of petitions that these protesters loved to share with anybody who showed up to chat with them. The agitators, as per the order, were to be relocated to Ramlila Maidan, which is, structurally, more suited for political rallies. The site has been a venue for social reformer Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption andolan, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s oath-taking ceremony and Narendra Modi’s Idea of India speech. Walk into the ground and you see a chaos of tentwalas and tandoors and roll-over-roll of carpets. Ask people what’s going on and there are chances that they’ll tell you the entire venue is booked for five days for an event on spiritual harmony. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi is opposed to designating space to protesters here because a single party books the entire ground for a fee and that is a source of revenue generation for Delhi’s municipal body. Even the agitators have complained of a lack of public toilets, drinking water and shaded nooks over here. “I am a rape victim. I have been agitating against my offender, an Inspector General of Police from Punjab, since 2013. The municipal bodies are demanding Rs 1.20 lakh from us and are giving us permission only for a day,” asks Jagjit Kaur, who was the only agitator to be seen roaming around Jantar Mantar. She confessed that she spent the night at the foot of the Patel Chowk Metro Station, ever since the police beat her up while she was asleep. She also asks why the NGT is hell bent on sending a rape victim like her to a place where sanitation and safety may prove to be a challenge. Moreover, booking the sprawling 12 acres of this facility can cost up to Rs 50,000 a day. Protesting at Jantar Mantar was free of cost. The North Delhi Municipal Corporation still hasn’t made it clear if it has worked out an arrangement to carve out fragmented portions of the ground for full-time protests to move into, a possibility highly unlikely at this point since the ground is mostly booked by one group at a time. Members of the All India Kisan Sabha, a national level farmers’ association, arrived in the capital to protest against the rising of support price for sugarcane by Uttar Pradesh farmers and cotton price by Telangana farmers. Given the Ramlila Maidan’s unpreparedness, they started their programme at ITO’s Ferozeshah Kotla Park. On Thursday, all major groups of protestors from Jantar Mantar have coined the slogan Insaaf do yaan maut do (give us justice or death) and are in the process of filing a common petition against their eviction. The Jantar Mantar, closer to Parliament, was a place where people would scream in the desire to be heard, to be watched, by those higher powers they’d become nearly infatuated with. Among those who have been expunged were farmers from Tamil Nadu sat here with skulls and chained hands, using spectre to tickle anybody’s morality, one former national-level fencing player from Tamil Nadu had set up a bar with empty liquor bottles to convey, inversely, his demand for a liquor ban. Ostracised by the khap panchayat of a village in Haryana, some young men moved here, they’d often ask where else they should go? The wives of retired army men demanded one rank one pension - same pension, for same rank, for same length of service, irrespective of the date of retirement. Followers of godman Santh Rampal who has been accused of rape and murder, also sat here disapproving of the country’s judicial system and in support of a man who sponsored their every meal in a large tent throughout the protest. The nature of complaints of the recent lot of stationed protesters ranged from ‘A big corporate company in Madhya Pradesh stole my factory and the police didn’t register my FIR twenty years ago’ to ‘The state of Uttar Pradesh has declared me dead and my brother now owns everything that was once mine’ to ‘I want to marry Narendra Modi’. Some protesters would proudly confess they’d been living here for months. Another type would come here on any given day, typically before or after a court judgment or an incident, to attract media and social media. Earlier this year, people from 20 cities, including Chandigarh, Amritsar, Lucknow, Kanpur, Bhopal and Nagpur came to Jantar Mantar to stage a satyagraha for men, demanding the revocation of Section 498A (a law regarding the harassment of women for dowry). From #NotInMyName against mob lynching and subsequently, against the death of journalist Gauri Lankesh, to Mai Bhi Kisaan ki Santaan - a national agitation for farmers’ rights, day-long protests at the venue made headlines the day after. Not yet at the Ramlila grounds, not at Jantar Mantar anymore, where did those on a hunger strike disappear? Will they now give up on their cause because both their stage and their audience have been withdrawn? Or will they find newer and more fatal ways to speak out? The vacant silence at Jantar Mantar quickly fills up with these questions. A cluster of police barricades and water cannon trucks, and chai and kulcha stalls have suddenly lost their purpose. The walls resemble unmarked epitaphs that stand erect in silence and in denial of a mortal end. In a city whose government came to power on the strength of its political activism, the key protest site is now barren of all its fury.