ADHIKAR PATH
ADHIKAR PATH
ADHIKAR PATH
2035
2035
2035
Designing for the Roots of Democracy
Seoul, 2019 Seoul, 2019
Seoul, 2019
On the 21st of February 2019, The Honourable Prime Minister reached the South Korean capital for a two-day state visit where he unveiled a Mahatma Gandhi bust, besides accepting the Seoul Peace Prize 2018 and engaging with businesses. The Seoul Peace Prize, he said, belonged not to him personally, but to the success India had achieved in the last five years powered by the skill of 1.3 billion people.
As part of state visit, he also observed the Statesanctioned vast infrastructure of the Gwanghwamun Square.
TWO YEARS EARLIER
TWO YEARS EARLIER
For a moment, lets suppose the Indian Ministerial Motorcade had paused, and he had walked into Gwanghwamun Square. This was a ground where, two winters earlier, over two million Koreans had stood by candlelight and unmade a president without breaking a single window, on infrastructure engineered to CARRY the crowd rather than keep it out.
TWO YEARS EARLIER
TWO YEARS EARLIER
2.3 million people took to the streets across the nation, to demand
President Park’s resignation over an influence-peddling and corruption scandal. If the organisers’ figures were correct, the Rally was the biggest in the Korea’s history, yet comfortably serviced by the State’s Protest Infrastructure.
How may a Democratic Nation ( legally bound to allow and even encourage Peaceful Protest ) service this fundamental right of it’s Citizens in the best way possible ? How may a Democratic Nation ( legally bound to allow and even encourage Peaceful Protest ) service this fundamental right of it’s Citizens in the best way possible ?
Can we sensibly re-orient Authoritarian infrastructure to provide safe spaces to practice Democracy? Peaceful protest is best served when made visible to policy.
What would an “Adhikar Path” look like ?
What does Peaceful Protest need ?
A Newsroom
A press amphitheatre with broadcast uplinks and translation booths, so that a movement reaches the country in its own twenty languages, and is reported rather than bent out of shape.
A little shade
A deep canopy and a mist of cooled air over the ground, because a protest in Delhi is already a heat emergency. Shade is what lets a crowd be old, and young, and patient.
A LITTLE SHADE
THE PRINT ROOM
Subsidised Volunteer run Open presses -screen, riso, cloth, wide-format - where any Grievance, Slogan or Manifesto can become a banner or a Zine by the afternoon. The means to being seen belong to everyone.
THE PRINT ROOM
THE LANGAR
A pan-India kitchen, farm to table, feeding thousands a day — the community kitchen that once sustained a year at the borders, made permanent, with a plate any Citizen can quietly pay forward.
THE LANGAR
THE GATE
Watched entrances whose only purpose is to keep the crowd safe from the crush and from those who would harm it — A secure regularly cleansed database to count who came, or why, and never to create a single inventory list for any reason.
The blind lawn
Surveillance is forbidden here by law: no reading of faces, no tower of cameras, no all-night lens.
blind lawn
The CHAMBERS
Rooms where a lawmaker is bound to receive a delegation on the record, ringed by seminars and a desk of volunteer lawyers. Dissent is answered with a receipt and defended by state appointed counsel.
The chambers
The mound
A standing platform where anyone may climb up, unbooked and unvetted, and simply speak — the oldest infrastructure of protest there is. Inspired by Hyde Park and now on the national axis.
The mound
AAVAZ STAGE
A permanent stage, a wall of sound and screens facing Raisina, so a single speaker reaches a crowd of a million.
Kranti Aashram
Medics, a crèche, warmth and cool, and galleries to sleep and charge, built for occupations measured in months. Mothers and elders and the exhausted can stay comfortably as long as the cause demands.
Meanwhile, at Jantar Mantar
Protests share space with Sawai Jai Singhs’ astrological instruments, probably in the hope of divine help descending from the heavens.
The end Is here. The end Is here. The end Is here.