Introduction

1In the past few years, urban spaces in India have witnessed eruption of protests and demonstrations such as ‘Kiss of Love’ in 2014, a protest against attacks by a right wing cultural organization, Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha on young couples hanging out in a café, ‘Why Loiter’, an on-going campaign in Indian cities premised on the argument that women should ‘loiter’ and walk in the city without purpose, and ‘Meet to Sleep’, an iterative demonstration organized by Blank Noise collective. Interestingly, none of these campaigns started in Delhi – which is my field site – but reached and converged there nonetheless, often with a renewed vigour. Yet, the practices and tactics employed by these protests such as loitering and sleeping in public parks have escaped definition and failed to fit into dominant intelligible frameworks of understanding citizen action and social movement. Instead, they have been criticised on the grounds of ephemerality, unsustainability, lack of mobilization, and levity in their politics from various quarters including feminist scholars and social activists, who are more familiar with traditional forms of citizen action. At the other end of the spectrum, there have been mass mobilizations such as the Nirbhaya (fearless) agitation, which in a very short time became iconic, and is already seen as a watershed point in Delhi’s history by some, as opposed to the ephemeral and small-scale campaigns mentioned above. As it is now well known, Nirbhaya agitation is the name assumed by the protests and agitation that followed the brutal gang-rape of a 23-year old student, Jyoti Pandey1 in a moving bus in South Delhi, across Indian cities in the winter of 2012.

2The task of this chapter is to locate the ‘dissident bodies’ and practices central to the former campaigns, recover the politics in their tactics, and weave them together as, what I argue, significant ‘moments’ in politics of gender and sexuality that help us to re-think the right to city. The chapter is divided into three broad sections. The first section will provide the context within which these moments of protest have germinated. The second one will engage with the organizational and operational tactics of the de-Certeaui-ian ‘everyday’ employed by a few contemporary movements and campaigns in Delhi – ‘Take Back the Night’ marches which emerged in the aftermath of the Nirbhaya agitation and draws from the global history of women’s marches ; ‘Meet to Sleep’, a campaign by ‘Blank Noise Collective’ and ‘Why Loiter’, which is based on a book of the same name. This is based on ethnographical fieldwork undertaken with activists and participants of these campaigns as well as across police stations of Delhi between July 2015 and February 20162. The fieldwork combined in-depth interviews with participant observation notes and content analysis of media reports3. This chapter argues that these moments of activism rely primarily on ‘presencing of bodies’ in everyday urban spaces to challenge the normalised police order. The final section of the paper will further elaborate upon this argument within the frame of right to city and Rancerian politics.

Contextualising the established Urban Order

3The campaigns and demonstrations under study here are challenging, what borrowing from Ranciere I call, the ‘established police order’ and ‘distribution of the sensible’. The ‘police order’ is comprised of implicit rules which establish roles and modes of participation and perception and determines what is visible and invisible.4 It controls="true" the space of appearance of bodies, ascertains who can access public spaces at what times and for what purposes, and in our context, who can search for pleasure in the city and who can appropriate the city5. I argue, that this process denies the city spaces to sexual dissidents. Following Gayle Rubin, the term ‘sexual dissidents’ is used here to describe those figures who digress from the accepted sexual as well as gender norms and cross the imaginary line between sexual order and sexual chaos6. Note here that the term ‘sexual dissidents’ here does not only refer to those who transgress dominant heteronormative norm, but anyone who violates the established lines of sexual order and conduct. I read in this imaginary line the workings of the police order and distribution of the sensible.

4Investigating into the workings of this established police order in the city, one finds that it is sustained not just by the state and official structures but by moral policing on one hand and informal societal norms and every day conscriptions of ‘good behaviour’ on the other which is justified through extraordinary and everyday incidences of violence experienced by those who transgress the boundaries of good behaviour. ‘Moral policing’ is the popular phrase used to denote the extra-legal authority of the self-appointed guardians of morality and what they perceive to be ‘Indian culture’ and appropriate behaviour. Indian culture here is understood to be a monolithic category by the moral police which should be preserved against the incursions of ‘western influence’. The moral police seeks to control the bodies of the sexual dissidents and mandates that the good woman, and as a corollary, the good feminist, does not ape the ‘West’. She does not indulge in ‘galat harkatein’ (wrongful activities) to gratify her own desires and demonstrates purpose and respectability when accessing public spaces. This emerged during the conversations I had with police officers in Delhi and members of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s Delhi Unit, which is the cultural wing of Bhartiya Janta Party, on the issue of women’s safety. As we have seen in the recent past in India, anyone seen to be violating the unwritten code of heteronormativity7 and challenging Indian culture and societal norms – sanskriti and sabhyata8 – is attacked by guardians of morality and endogamous norms. This has manifested in the form of honour killings in rural and urban India9 and ‘anti-Romeo’ squads in Uttar Pradesh for example who issue (and perpetrate) threats of violence against couples and ‘corrupt’ women.

5Interestingly, this discourse of moral policing often coincides with the discourse on nation’s honour. Further, these codes of morality, nation’s honour and dignity are often inscribed on the body of the middle-class woman, who is the carrier of both modernity and tradition and measure of nation’s progress – an argument well-articulated by several scholars.10,11 Coupled with this heteronormativity and moral policing is the excessive visibility accorded to spectacular and extraordinary sexual violence by the state and civil society through regulations, mass movements and mainstream media reportage. This excessive visibility is then used to further the agenda of building safe, secure and sanitised cities, which in turn further restricts women’s mobility and re-establishes the police order. A case in point would be the stringent hostel deadlines which were reinforced across university campuses after the aforementioned 2012 Delhi gangrape to ‘protect’ women from rape. Further, the poll manifestos and planning documents that were published in the wake of the gangrape placed emphasis on ensuring women’s ‘safety’ by installation of close-circuit television cameras and increased surveillance. This was coupled by intensification of policing of women’s movements by women themselves. For example, a 30-year old French language lecturer in Delhi University who has lived, studied and worked in Delhi for 10 years, shared with me how after the Nirbhaya rape case, her parents and friends started cautioning her not to go out at night and stay ‘safe’. As she puts it,

As a girl, there is always a fear what might happen. If you are a single girl in Delhi, you have to be responsible for yourself… I stay out till 11 pm only when I am with a male friend, otherwise I do not feel safe at night… There is also a perception that prostitution goes on at night. Sometime back, I was going for a Dandia (folk dance) function and was waiting for an auto (rickshaw). I was dressed up… It was late, around 10 pm and the kind of gaze we received – guys thought we were prostitutes and slowed their car down near us. That way, even the space near our own house became unsafe. Incidents like these make you feel that if you will travel alone, you will be looked at like this. If you are with guys, then they do not think they can do anything… But in Nirbhaya, even that did not work. The accused felt that she was their property and they could claim her. Then how can we believe we are safe ? (Female Discussant, Personal Interview, December 8, 2015)

6The possibility of being perceived as a ‘prostitute’ made the discussant extremely uncomfortable and her tone suggested she took offense, because she is a ‘respectable girl’ who was legitimately occupying public space, since she was waiting for a vehicle to go to a traditional Indian dance function. This resonates with Phadke et al’s12 argument about how women constantly feel the need to manufacture respectability and purpose, in order to access public places without the fear of being blamed if one faces sexual harassment. Further, even after an hour of a reflective conversation, she held onto her perceptions and asserted that she ‘cannot even imagine’ going out at night with only women because ‘we are not trained in self-defence’ (sic). Self-defence is seen as a necessary skill in absence of male friends because it is assumed she will be harassed on the road – a commonly held perception among women as well as police forces. In fact, she feels she has been “lucky” not to have faced such harassment even though she has heard instances, which have served to exacerbate her perceptions. Thus, for a woman, it seems, you have to be really lucky to have survived the city, and the night.

7The overweening focus on safety in the face of violent crimes also has the effect of unproblematically masking and normalising the everyday instances of violence such as eve-teasing, or public sexual harassment. ‘Eveteasing’, a term which plays on the Biblical Eve, hypersexualizes a woman’s body against her will, which in turn bears its marks on her, who constantly find tactics to be ‘safe’ while negotiating the city. However, this everyday harassment is dismissed as trivial and light-hearted13 and the perpetrators are perceived as harmless. Ironically, this harassment becomes the very basis for restricting the physical movement and social behaviour of one gender, as well as internalization of certain acceptable behavioural norms of both masculinity and appropriate femininity. The ‘lived space’ of women in the city then gets constituted very differently than that of the heterosexual man.

8It is also important to note here that the established police order and partition of the sensible has not just spatial but also temporal dimensions. The nocturnal, or following Lefebvre, what Robert Williams14 conceptualizes as ‘night spaces’15 are spaces which are socially and temporally mediated. It, as Williams argues, “threatens to de-territorialize the rationalizing order of society” and “facilitates counter-hegemonic practices to take shape by marginalized groups”. The diurnal society, which is based on control and surveillance, and Foucault’s panopticon discipline, is not able to control the night without the aid of patrols and modern technologies, he argues. The state – through government’s laws and regulations as well as its everyday machinery, then attempts to reterritorialize night space by enforcing order and surveillance using the discourses of safety and crime, as it is perceived as a zone of prohibitions and transgressions, a space which ‘good girls’ do not or rather, should not, access. In fact, in Indian cities, obscure laws have been evoked time and again to prohibit women from working late at night, guarding the temporal boundaries of women as strictly as the public-private boundaries. For example, the Gurgaon administration in state of Haryana evoked archaic laws to ask women not to work after 8 p.m. in the aftermath of the Nirbhaya rape case, absolving them of any responsibility16. Similarly, Article 66 (b) of the Indian Factories Act 1948 prohibited employment of women between 7 pm to 6 am, until it was amended in 2005.

9Night is then constantly taken away from women even before it can become theirs. Similar attitude towards the ‘night spaces’ was reflected by both male and female police officers of Delhi during the course of my research. For example, a female Constable of Delhi Police, opined that ‘girls from good households’ (or as she puts it, “ache ghar ki ladkiyan”) do not venture out at night without the company of their father or brother, unless they want to invite trouble17. “Even in Nirbhaya case, the girl was roaming out with her friend at 9-10 p.m., and so…”, she trails off, squarely placing the blame on the raped woman (Personal Interview, September 3, 2015 ; emphasis original).

10Respectable women are thus expected to stay indoors after dark, a fact which continues to be deeply internalised by otherwise seemingly empowered women who place ‘deadlines’ on their movements to avoid risks. Moral policing, the discourse of safety and the normalisation of the everyday public sexual harassment then together work to establish the police order, determining how women access the city. How does one begin to challenge this police order that determines how, when and where women will access the city ? In search of this answer, the second section of the paper will engage with the tactics of the de-Certeaui-ian everyday employed by a few contemporary campaigns in Delhi.

Challenging the Police Order : Tracing some cases

Nirbhaya and Beyond

11While the larger articulation of the Nirbhaya agitation vehemently focused on the demand for safety, legal reform and death penalty for offenders, it is pertinent to note that some of the voices also went beyond the language of sexual violence and safety, to claim, what they called, ‘bekhauf azaadi’ or ‘fearless freedom’. Anupama Roy, who categorises the various strands in the Nirbhaya discourse into ‘izzat/honour’ and ‘azaadi/ liberation’ discourse, argues that the latter drew attention to the gendered hierarchies within the foundational and overarching matrices of people’s lives and the web of normalized violence across the country18. Protestors from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, particularly on the left of the political spectrum, and some women’s organizations raised the slogans of azaadi or freedom/liberation, in all its multifaceted and radical form, demanding azaadi from the violence of all structures : “Bus mein lenge aazadi, Dafter mein, Sadkon mein, Gharon mein, Din mein, Raat mei” (we will claim freedom in the bus, offices, on roads, inside homes, during day and night).19 Note here, the slogans had a spatial and temporal emphasis along with an emphasis on freedom from patriarchal institutions and practices, grounding the notion of freedom in a list of not only where, but also when. In the absence of an active women’s movement in India which some attribute to its NGOisation in the 1990s, feminism seemed to have been re-discovered by young students under the rubric of freedom. In the process, protestors claimed the city, asking for freedom along with safety in the various spaces that they use and navigate every day. A new articulation of right to city thus started emerging. What is worthwhile for us to note here is that even though the aazadi or freedom framework came to be subsumed under the broader concern of safety and amendment of sexual harassment legislation, it gave an impetus to campaigns such as ‘Take Back the Night’ (TBTN) and later, ‘Pinjra Tod’ (break the locks), a women’s movement against discriminatory hostel deadlines in universities.

12TBTN Delhi was first organized by a feminist collective on New Years’ Eve in Delhi after the 2012 incident. The aim of TBTN Delhi, also known as the ‘Din humara, raat humari’ (‘day is ours, night is ours’) campaign, was to challenge the ‘conditional freedom’ that is granted to women and claim equal access to public places, without fear, at all times (TBTN organizer, Personal Interview, 2016). It is noteworthy that TBTN Delhi was organized in market places and crowded places instead of Jantar Mantar road, which is the only stretch where democratic expression is legally allowed in New Delhi. This was done to subvert the policing of protest spaces and take politics out of familiar spaces.

13However, TBTN Delhi lost most of its momentum after the first few marches. Nonetheless, it was important for expanding both the discourse and the space of the Nirbhaya movement. In 2014, it was reinvigorated in the form of ‘Reclaim the Night Delhi’ by a different group. Aligning with its politics of rightfully occupying public spaces at all times, this group did not seek police permissions as a matter of principle, and, did not engage in sloganeering, large gatherings and public speeches. Even though this does not align with most people’s idea of protest, organizers read this as a direct action against gender violence and hierarchies by calling to occupy ‘unsafe spaces’ at ‘unsafe times’ in ‘unsafe numbers’20, thereby claiming freedom from fear. The aim was to normalize the activity of occupying spaces and bring out bodies that are marked by vulnerability to “loiter, talk, laugh, share stories and take walks”. This in itself is profoundly political, argues one of the organizers of Reclaim the Night Delhi (Personal Interview, January 13, 2016).

Why Loiter

14Reclaim the Night Delhi drew inspiration from the book ‘Why Loiter’ by Phadke et al21, in which the authors argue that women should demand right to take ‘risks’ instead of safety – and claim the right to seek pleasure and have fun in the city because women need unconditional access to public spaces to truly claim citizenship rights. This pleasure is sought, in the authors’ utopia, through the act of ‘loitering’. The idea of loitering is borrowed from the Michel de Certeau’s formulation of the power of ‘walking’ as something which is both an act of belonging as well as subversion, as it has the potential to constantly re-inscribe the city and defy the established urban order. The pedestrian weaves the urban space through a network of unconscious, anti-disciplinarian acts, resisting cultural and social norms and schemes through spatial and temporal practices22. Drawing from the potential of Certeau-ian walking, Phadke et al argue that the act of loitering “enables new ways of imagining our bodies in relation to the public space”23. The loitering body is not just a closed and alert figure but a stretched out one which can experience or express pleasure in the public spaces. The emphasis here is on a reciprocal relationship with the city, and not the passive relationship as embodied by the male flaneur. By demonstrating lack of purpose, non-productivity and incessantly creating alternative maps of movement, the loitering body simultaneously challenges conservative patriarchal morality as well as the global order of production that necessitates women to establish a purpose for accessing public spaces. This makes the otherwise frivolous act of loitering political. The authors further argue that loitering can radically alter the city and make it inclusive.24

15The utopia posited in the book inspired some women to try and translate it into reality. They started ‘loitering’, strolling, riding bicycles and having chai in city’s streets, parks and tapris (roadside tea stall) to challenge the everyday moral and social policing and conditioning.25 When these women started the loitering sessions, they did not envisage it as a campaign, nor did they have a predefined strategy – it emerged as a formless movement, one without banners and mass mobilizations. It relies primarily on, what I call, ‘presencing of bodies’. By ‘presencing’ here I mean inserting one’s material body in unwelcome spaces to challenge the normalised police order and attempt reconstitution of distribution of the sensible. Further, it uses ‘levity’ as a political instrument to negotiate with the people they encounter during their loitering sessions. The element of fun and levity in ‘Why Loiter’ is similar to the one articulated by the ‘Pink Chaddi Campaign’ and ‘Kiss of Love’ protest before it. Resistance is found in the de Certeau-ian everyday and alternative visuals, instead of in the one-time spectacle and the extraordinariness of a mass protest. In doing so, these campaigns convey irreverence to not just the state but to established modes of doing politics as well. This signals that protest practices are changing, and new forms and tactics are replacing the otherwise masculinist, slogan-shouting, speech-giving style of politics. However, critical supporters question where an act such as loitering remain purposeless when the actor is consistently documenting the experience on social media?26 Does the idea of risk retain itself if these activities are always done in a group, with the intellectual power of a movement, some ask. Some young feminists have also expressed concerns of absence of an enabling infrastructure for such a campaign.

16Nonetheless, what’s valuable is that ‘Why Loiter’ has inspired other similar movements like Girls at Dhabas in Pakistan and collaborated with other campaigns which are premised on presencing of the dissident bodies in public spaces such as ‘Park mei PDA’ (based on expressing affection in public spaces such as parks) and ‘Meet to sleep’, making it possible for us to identify a pattern of new politics taking shape which is establishing its stake in the city.

Meet to Sleep

17‘Meet to Sleep’, is an iterative campaign organized by Blank Noise Collective under its ‘I never Ask for it’ initiative, which started as a public art initiative to address and confront the widely prevalent but under-addressed problem of street sexual harassment and victim blaming. By January 2016, it came to have chapters in ten cities, including Delhi, which is the focus of this chapter27. It called out to people to be defenceless by taking a nap in public parks in order to tackle the fear-based relationship women have with those spaces through the instrument of trust. It does not intend to challenge or aggravate people, but instead seeks to build a vocabulary of positive and affirmative politics. Simply put, it invites people to take a nap in a public park. In the process, it politicises the simple act of sleeping, an otherwise deeply personal activity.

18It was rolled out largely as a self-organized event, with no large-scale mobilization. Facebook, popular social networking site, served to provide, what Merlyna Lim28, borrowing from James Scott29 calls, ‘hidden transcripts’, for coordinating the event. Social media by virtue of being placeless, served as a medium to open up and coordinate possibilities of resistance30. When asked about the lack of mobilization or publicity of the event, the coordinators of ‘Meet to Sleep’ distinguished it from mass-based protests and loud spectacle-like public demonstrations. As Jasmeen Patheja, the founder of Blank Noise collective explains, “it is a meet to sleep in your park, and not come-watch-us-sleep” (Personal Interview, 2016, emphasis original). Central to ‘Meet to Sleep’ was the idea of being defenceless in the face of constant warnings of being unsafe and vulnerable and creating a visual of relaxed women occupying public space and establishing presence. Meet to Sleep thus aimed at transforming the fear-based relationship women have with the city.

19However, there is a need to unpack the limitations of ‘Meet to Sleep’ as a case study in order to substantially weigh its potential and impact31. First, the participants, as I witnessed in the Delhi chapter, did not invite the onlookers for a dialogue. Second, the participation in Meet to Sleep remained limited to a certain educated class of women, with similar understanding of feminist discourse, which severely limits its potential to contribute to the public discourse and alter the everyday visuals, even if it is an iterative project. Huddled together on our mats in a public park in a relatively upscale neighbourhood of Delhi, a few women spent most of the afternoon talking and clicking selfies, while a few others took a nap. Overall, the sight was that of a group of apparent friends (and not strangers) out for a picnic, which is not that unusual a sight in public parks of Delhi. In doing so, what boundaries did the project really push ? Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge that politics here is not about representing a set of demands to the state unlike the Nirbhaya agitation or ‘Pinjra Tod’. Scholars like Maesy Angelina32 argue that the lack of a prescriptive approach in campaigns launched by Blank Noise does not reveal a distrust of the state, but instead a recognition of the ambiguity of the issue of public sexual harassment, and a need to engage with the society at a day-today level. Therefore, the focus is on building a ‘new narrative’ of the city by reframing the lived reality and challenging exclusionary practices and norms. This is achieved through guerrilla art interventions, levity, sarcasm and politicization of everyday activities like sleeping, which is similar to the tactics adopted by campaigns like Kiss of Love, Night walks, Pink Chaddi and Why Loiter. I read these tactics in the register of Butler’s idea of parody33 as a means to reconstitute gender identities and norms through mock repetition of established rules, constitutive acts and signified norms in order to denaturalize them. These tactics become political, and potentially radical, precisely because they are prohibited or unacceptable for women in public spaces.

20The final section of the paper will further expand on this argument and investigate the politics opened up by these campaigns and ‘moments’ of dissident sexuality, within the frames of right to city.

Politicizing Right to City

21The campaigns under study have one stark commonality – they have been staged in the metropolitan cities. Here, I wish to expand Lefebvre’s understanding of right to city and production of space from the perspective of politics of gender and sexuality. I read ‘right to city’ as right of urban inhabitants to participate in the decisions and acts that shape the city ; and right to physically access and use urban space in everyday life.34,35 In other words, it is about both – right to material resources and social relations as well as right to urban life as an ‘oeuvre’, ‘inhabiting’ it in the manner reminiscent of the nineteenth century idea of active participation in urban life. As a corollary, right to city from a gender perspective would not merely mean infrastructural and policy decisions to ensure ‘women’s safety’, an oft used strategy by the state, but right to reshape social relations that comprise ‘everyday urban life’. Therefore, for the campaigns and moments of activism discussed here, the experience or what Lefebvre calls, lived space, becomes essential to their politics.

22This lived space of the city is experienced by embodied subjects. The city re-inscribes gender norms on bodies through economies of fear, governance and regulation. The rationally planned and aesthetically sanitized city does not allow bad women, corrupt morals and dissident bodies to tarnish the ‘safe city’ and regulates their movements and behaviours. Consequently, theorists like Butler36 place critical emphasis on visibilisation of bodies for reconfiguring public spaces to question state’s legitimacy in ‘corporeal terms’. According to Butler, since gender identity depends on repetitive performance of bodily acts and gestures, it is possible to destabilize it through a parodic repetition of its constitutive acts37. The performance of the parody can denaturalize sex as well as gender by playing on the very idea of original or natural categories, or in other words, mimicking the ‘myth of originality’38, depriving hegemonic culture of its claim of essentialised feminine and masculine identities. This mock repetition of gendered norms, albeit in a different form, such as sleeping in parks instead of homes and walking on streets for leisure instead of purpose leads to subversive confusions and parody of existing regimes by offering laughter and levity in return. Levity, or an intended lack of seriousness, and humour, adopted by these campaigns displays irreverence to the perceived opponent’s police order, and politicizes the everyday through ‘unruliness’39,40 and subversive confusion. This constitutes, what, following Ranciere, can be identified as politics against the police order.

23For Ranciere, this dissensus, as opposition to “consensus” and police order, constitutes ‘politics’41. Politics happens when the excluded speak up in opposition to the established order and seek a repartition of the senses. That is to say, politics contests the exclusion by refiguring space and experience. This politics, according to Ranciere, is different from mass mobilizations and staged struggles for power. Consensus, on the other hand, denies formation of political subjectivities and subsumes the political within the police order by recognizing, mediating and adjudicating the demands of the civil society through institutional mechanisms42. The formation of Justice Verma Committee for instituting legal reforms in the wake of Nirbhaya agitation can be read as an effort at dissolving dissensual politics by instituting consensus. At other times, the state denies politics its status and erases it by simply refusing to acknowledge it as politics, as was in the case of ‘SlutWalks’, ‘Reclaim the Night’ or Blank Noise’s projects. Yet, politics continues in the interstices and in moments. Therefore, while activists accepted the success of the anti-rape agitations in the form of state response and Justice Verma Committee report, it is in the azaadi discourse, and the subsequent campaigns like ‘Take Back the Night’, Why Loiter’s night walks and Blank Noise’s nap afternoons, that the political is to be found taking shape in opposition to the police order.

24These campaigns are thus opening up the space for ‘inhabiting’ and reclaiming the city by opposing the police order and introducing ‘dissensus’ by making the invisible visible, and inaudible audible. Borrowing from de Certeau, one can then argue that right to city is not only experienced but politicized, operationalized and reclaimed at the level of the everyday, and in some cases, every night, since temporal practices become as important as spatial ones.

Conclusion

25Taken together then, moments such as these in the contemporary politics of gender and sexuality challenge the dominant order and territorialisation of urban spaces through presencing of the bodily subject that appears on the squares and streets, thereby reclaiming right to city. Politics here is about building a ‘new narrative’ of the city by reframing the lived reality through subversive confusions, politicization and parodic repetition of the banal and everyday activities. This framing makes it possible to argue that everyday acts by smaller groups of individuals that challenge the distribution of the perceptible are equally political as they register a disagreement with the established order.

26However, these campaigns have faced criticisms on several counts. A recurrent and knee-jerk criticism has been that they reflect an elitist and middle-class concern. Even sections from within the Indian women’s movement have rendered the ‘urban middle-class woman’ suspect and questioned the legitimacy of these campaigns as a category of politics and struggle. The criticism of class privilege is a dominant one, as there is a tendency to assume that there are more important fights to be fought for, in turn trivializing the concerns of these campaigns. However, as argued in the first section, the constructions of Indian womanhood as well as that of nation’s honour have essentially relied on the education, employment and virtues of the middle-class woman -- it is precisely on her body that codes of morality and dignity are inscribed. Further, ‘middle class’ is a fairly broad, and ambiguous category in the context of post-liberalisation India, and does not necessarily overlap with the dominant, high or middle caste and often alters between subsequent generations.

27Another frequent criticism against these campaigns is that they lack sustainability and scale, not just from outside, but within the activist circles as well. The moments of activism under study indeed lack organizational structure and planning in known forms, or entirely dissociate themselves from mainstream forms of political activism. Participants of some of these campaigns acknowledge this criticism. However, I suggest that this lack of sustainability, along with tactics of ephemerality and levity, can itself be read as a guerrilla tactic to escape the co-option and crackdown that organized movements and politics face. Finally, how does one weigh the impact of these new modalities of registering dissent given that campaigns such as ‘Reclaim the Night’ have fizzled out ? Instead of either-or answers, here I contend that instead of isolating them, these protests should be read as multiple significant moments in contemporary politics of gender and sexuality, which are challenging the dominant order and territorialisation of urban spaces, in order to give space to alternatives.

28This is not an attempt at an accurate generalization but an attempt to recover the political value of the ephemerality and limitations of these ‘moments’ of resistance as well as alternative affirmations. These campaigns, I argue, simply affirm a politics of presence in the city, which otherwise denies possibilities of desire and pleasure. In the process, this politics reconstitutes the city and reclaims the meaning of ‘inhabiting’ as lived experience. By unceasingly enacting dissent, dissensus, and disagreement, it claims right to the city as a city of equal participants and tries to rediscover the oeuvre in the everyday through politics.