South Asia Citizens Web

There is no doubt in our minds about why we support AAP. At the same time there are anxieties about the increasing set of questions, doubts and confusion in the minds of so many, as to the nature of this new creation called AAP – which defies all existing prescriptions and definitions of what politics and movements should be. It is in this mood of both excitement and some agony, that we share with you the following piece which has been put together by a small, passionate group of people who have have subsumed their doubts, their scepticism, their very different ideologies, and which attempts to capture and to address the questions that so many of you are asking today.

Immediately, one saw two aspects of the Aam Aadmit Party that could haunt it in the future. One is a sickening sense of piety about their idealism, their sense that campaigning for the good gives them a hygienic sense of superiority. If power created a sense of distance for the Congress, piety seems to create that same sense of violence for AAP. Secondly, AAP has to be clear that corruption must be fought within the law. AAP as a vigilante crowd would be a horror.

On 19 January 2014 there was a sit-in at Jantar Mantar, Delhi, to protest the violent racism against Africans that was encouraged by a Delhi minister. Photos by Mukul Dube and by Harsh Kapoor.

From: Kavita Krishnan
Date: 18 January 2014 12:04
Subject: Join Sit-In Against Racist Violence On Africans in Khidki Village, 19 Jan (Sun), Jantar Mantar, 12 Noon
Join Sit-In Against Racist Violence On Africans in Khidki Village
19 January (Sunday) Jantar Mantar, 12 Noon
Please take time out on Sunday to join in large numbers, come with friends and family, with banners and placards, to dispel the clouds of racism that hang over Delhi...Do endorse this call and circulate it widely. (…)

Photographer Sunil Janah (1918-2012) in a discussion with Ram Rahman during his exhibition at the Gallery at 678 in New York in August 1998.