Kranti is a festival to celebrate, honour and promote the culture of dissent in India, both past and present. Songs of protest, resistance through street theatre, political documentaries, revolutionary words and the heroes and heroines of dissent, have long challenged structures of oppression. While this culture mobilizes and expresses the powerful ideas of the oppressed, it seldom reaches people like us, the middle and upper-middle class Indian youth. Our quest then is to bring to 'mainstream' consciousness the rich, difficult, incredible culture of dissent from different pockets of India. We believe it is important to do this because our ignorance of dissent that is brewing around us will prevent us from understanding our own position in India's trajectory of 'development'.
The festival has several components to it. Our online repertoire of information related to dissent is already growing. We hope to go viral with the content we discover and generate through the course of this festival. In July, we have planned a series of screenings ofpolitical documentaries across colleges in Bangalore. In August, we are celebrating India's independence by bringing together rich sounds of songs of protest from across the country. Through this time, we are planning street plays across different cities to commemorate the brave cultural resistance of theatre artists such as Safdar Hashmi. The culmination of the festival is a political conference on the 15th of September in Bangalore, with a panel of some of India's most politically astute activists and academicians.
The conference is an attempt at understanding the evolving narrative and context of dissent in India today. For our first panel, we have picked four spaces in India where dissent is expressed and quashed – movements of the displaced, mobilization of dalits, anti-liquor movement as part of women's struggles and the changing character of trade union culture.Understanding the factors that have given rise to these movements and continue to fuel them is crucial for us to formulate our response to these desperate questions. In the second panel, the discrete strands of dissentient voices will be contextualized in the backdrop of the manner in which the Indian State employs legislation to curb dissent, the consequences of two decades of economic liberalization, implications of information asymmetry enforced by corporate mass media as also the position of the Indian State given its compulsions. The larger aim of this festival is to discover India's brave dissidents and raise solidarity for them, and the causes they are fighting for.