Painting Over The People : Erasing the Graffiti at Jantar Mantar

How does power suppress voices and limit representation? Primarily by controlling what gets remembered. History is not simply lost to time; it is actively withheld from future generations by those who have the most to lose from its telling. The mechanism is narrative control — and narrative control works through selective publication. What survives is what flatters power; what indicts it is left to disappear. The result is not an absence of evidence but its erasure, a curated record standing in for the fuller, messier truth it was built to replace.

Consider Britain itself: colonialism rarely occupies a central place in the national curriculum, because a state has little incentive to teach its citizens a history that would turn them against it. Postcolonial literature, by contrast, thrives in the countries that were colonized — in India, no school leaves a child unaware of slavery under empire, British rule, or the freedom struggle that ended it. The colonizer's oldest justification was always the same: that the colonized were uncivilized, disordered, in need of governance. It was a narrative built to excuse brutality in advance. The violence Europeans committed across Africa and Asia has never been met with full acknowledgment, let alone apology, because accountability would require accepting a version of history that unravels the story the colonizer prefers to tell about itself.

Jallianwala Bagh makes the mechanics of this erasure visible. What we know of the massacre survives largely because the bullet marks remain gouged into the walls of the enclosed garden — physical evidence the British could narrate around but could not fully erase. Where the archive could be curated, filed away, or rewritten, the walls could not. They are a record that outlasted the men who tried to write the official one, a rare case where the "evidence attesting to reality" described earlier is not paper but stone.

"They are a record that outlasted the men who tried to write the official one."

As to why I am talking about this now is because I want to highlight the fact that narrative change can change the whole history because when you do not know the reality from first hand experience which is hidden by the people in power, you can never learn what a revolt or a protest was about. I am talking about the protest organised at Jantar Mantar in July 2026 demanding the resignation of then education minister Mr Dharmendra Pradhan. The general public was in deep dismal because over 18 students committed suicide after the NEET 2026 paper leak. The Jantar Mantar walls were painted with slogans, instagram feeds filled with content covering the protest. People joined from all over the country. Several Independence journalists and channels like Al Jazeera, IndiaTV also covered the event but the event went largely unnoticed by the main media houses and news channels. Simply because the protest did not confirm with their narrative and their ideology and for this reason they downplayed the entire situation.

The students' side of the protest remained peaceful throughout. It was the state's response — the lathi charges and tear gas unleashed by the Delhi Police and the Rapid Action Force on 20 July — that turned violent. Protesters were beaten, injured, and detained for doing nothing more than standing at a sanctioned protest site. And yet, the moment the minister resigned and the ground at Jantar Mantar was cleared, the walls were repainted within a single day — restored to blankness, as though nothing had ever been written on them at all.

That single day matters more than it first appears to. A protest wall is not decoration; it is testimony written in real time, by the people who lived it, in their own words and their own hand — unmediated by a reporter's paraphrase or an editor's headline. It carries names, dates, slogans, grief, and rage in a form no secondhand account can fully replace. To stand before it is to read history before it has been filtered into narrative. That is precisely what makes it dangerous to power, and precisely why it is often the first thing removed once a movement has run its course: not because the state fears the protest happening, but because it fears the protest being remembered on the protesters' own terms rather than on the state's.

"A protest wall is not decoration; it is testimony written in real time, by the people who lived it."

Erasing a wall, then, is not a neutral act of maintenance. It is the final stage of narrative control — the point at which lived testimony is converted back into official absence. Repainting in a single day does not erase the fact that a protest occurred; the resignation and the headlines already made that undeniable. What it erases is the texture of how it occurred: the handwriting, the specific slogans, the visual proof of scale and feeling that no article can fully substitute for. A future visitor to Jantar Mantar will find a blank wall and nothing to tell them that, weeks earlier, it was covered edge to edge with the voice of a generation demanding accountability.

This is why public archives, independent photography, and citizen documentation matter as much as the protest itself. Testimony that lives only on a wall can be painted over in a day; testimony that has been photographed, archived, and independently corroborated survives the repainting. Years from now, it will be these fragments, the images circulated by independent journalists, the screenshots taken before the walls went blank, that let future generations verify that the protest happened as its participants described it, and not only as the state's cleared, silent ground would suggest.

That is also why this moment carries a broader warning. In an age when video and images can be fabricated as easily as walls can be repainted, the burden of verification has shifted onto every viewer. The same skepticism that should be applied to a state erasing physical evidence needs to be applied to synthetic and doctored media — both are ways a narrative can be manufactured after the fact. Trusting a single image or article without checking its source is no longer a small risk; it is how future erasures, whether physical or digital, get away with rewriting what actually happened.