— ✍️ Com. Kajal

On 18th February, Himkhand had called for a reading circle to be conducted on “Queer by Nature, Stolen by Empire”, in collaboration with Pechaan – the Queer Collective of JMC DU, to discuss the politics of queerness and the ways Brahminism marginalizes queer communities to enforce heteropatriarchal relations in order to maintain a caste-based society. But before we could even reach San Martin Park, where the reading circle was scheduled to take place, the Brahmanical Hindutva Fascist state had its police force deployed in hundreds, a dozen barricades put up, and a couple of detention vehicles parked, in complete preparation to crack down on … a reading circle. We were subsequently picked up from the streets and taken to Chanakyapuri Police Station, where we were detained for more than 5 hours that went well late into the night, our phones forcefully seized without seizure memos of course, and a FIR absurdly slapped on us, on instructions from “higher authority”, under BNS sections 223a and 221.

This raises a simple terrifying question – what is the state so afraid of people reading, knowing, thinking on their own terms? What threat does a group of people reading a book together pose, that it requires a full paramilitary response?

These questions are important to ask because this isn’t a single incident but a pattern. Prior to this, the attack by ABVP on speakers, professors and student participants of Samta Utsav organized by AISA on 12th February, and a further attack the next day by the same ABVP on students for protesting for pushing towards implementation of UGC guidelines for a more equitable campus, the subsequent imposition of BNS Section 163 inside Delhi University Campus entirely prohibiting any public assembly or gathering of five or more people, the suspension of JNUSU representatives for protesting against installation of facial recognition gates and CCTVs at Central Library, the FIR on students of TISS Mumbai for conducting a reading circle commemorating the death anniversary of G.N. Saibaba are not random, isolated incidents but an organized, systematic attack on any and all forms of expression of ideological dissent even within the “legal” framework. The irrationality of such wholesale repression, the frenzied nature of these attacks betrays a trace of tremor within the mighty walls of power.

Free thought is as sinister a weapon as the free gun in times of growing fascism, history shows us. The fascist state of 1920s Nazi Germany turned first against thought itself to tighten its control over the masses. Universities, research institutions, and cultural spaces were rid of all dissenting scholars, especially Jews, Marxists and liberals. Autonomous thinking and critical scientific inquiry posed a direct threat to totalitarian control. Instead of fostering open-ended scientific advancement, the state redirected investments towards pseudo-scientific theories and subordinated knowledge production to militarism and eugenics that provided ideological justification for exclusion, involuntary sterilization programs, medical experimentation, mass murders and genocide of the “less desirables”. Research that did not serve war, racial purification, or nationalist propaganda was defunded and censored. Independent thinkers were exiled, imprisoned, or killed. An intellectual climate of conformity, dogma, and fear was the necessary precondition for the horrors that followed.

As the crisis of imperialism intensifies, the sellout bureaucratic governments of the peripheral countries are forced to rapidly increase the selling of land, resources, and labor of the masses to keep imperial capital in motion. The Adivasi civilian defenders of jal, jungle, zameen are indiscriminately killed with war weapons imported from genocidal imperialist nations, oppressed national territories are illegally annexed and resistance to which is crushed by blanket internet shutdowns, mass shootings in civil areas, and complete breakdown of the much-touted democracy that was never much in these regions to begin with. The breakdown of democracy, or fascism, starts crawling from the peripheral regions and peripheral persons to the core, to the “ideal” petty bourgeois subject of democracy. The fascist state drags the war to spaces and persons that have previously always been safe, secure and “democratic”.

As India sinks deeper into fascism, it is tailing the same old playbook under the Surajkund Scheme. All dissenting voices are red-tagged as “urban naxals” and delegitimized, censored and criminalized as “maoism of the pen”. Liberal and radical thinkers are arbitrarily imprisoned and killed by state-hired goons. Student campuses expressing dissent and democratic participation are surveilled and criminalized. Study groups and reading circles exposing the Brahmanical fascist ideology of the state are raided with all its military and administrative might. What was once a “peaceful”, “legal” and “acceptable” form of dissent is today criminalized as armed insurgency itself. The state is not afraid of a riot; it is afraid of a conversation.

In response to this intensifying control, we are witnessing a qualitative shift in mass movements. Two trends are popular among civil society, environmental, students’, and left organizations – there are groups and organizations who see the onslaught of fascism and move into ‘safety’; there’s another which sees the same onslaught on democratic spaces and instead moves in the opposite direction to strengthen itself against fascism and hit again. Unguided and spontaneous mass movements have also learnt the same. The era of peaceful mass movements like Narmada Bachao Andolan, Chipko Movement and Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement has faded away as the democratic space for such movements is removed by fascism. In their place, the experiences of Ladakh, Rajasthan’s anti-ethanol plant protest of December 2025, Turkman Gate protests of 2026, and many other examples point to a growing trend of short, disruptive bouts of resistance and revolutionary action becoming more acceptable among the working and exploited sections. The middle sections of society have largely been absent from such action and have instead taken to ‘internet activism’, including multiple independent media outlets that have sprung up in the last decade.

But to practice “caution” during times of fascism, during times of blanket state repression, to think of practicing progressive and revolutionary politics within apparently so-called safe and legal limits without offending the fascist state, without being “reckless” is to fail to understand how fascism has worked historically. The flames of fascism eventually catch up to everyone, no matter how safely and legally they express their dissent. The sirens might be coming for a reading circle in a park today, but they will come for you tomorrow. It’s not recklessness that is criminalized under fascist regimes but the possibility of an alternative, the potentiality of resistance. And that is precisely what a group of people reading together represents.

- Kajal, 22, is a social and environmental activist at The Himkhand. She has been a political prisoner and was jailed for 3 weeks at Tihar Central Prison, arrested for protesting against air pollution at India gate.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication or any associated entities.