Shivtirth — the corner of Shivaji Park by the statue of Masaheb Minatai Thackeray — on the afternoon of Friday 24 July. More than five thousand people, most of them young, most of them carrying a flag. It was the fifth day of the nationwide protests and Mumbai's largest turnout so far.
The rally was called by the Vidyarthi-Yuva Sena, the student wing of the Shiv Sena (UBT), and the people who came kept saying it was not a party event. Uddhav Thackeray was there and so was Aaditya Thackeray; Sandeep Deshpande came from the MNS to say the movement had his support. The crowd was courteous about all of them and got on with its own business, which was three demands: Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation over the NEET-UG paper leak, justice for the students the police had gone after at the Sansad Chalo march that Monday, and reform of the examination system itself.
They sang the national anthem. The dispersal had been planned for earlier in the evening; the park held until seven.
"At Jantar Mantar, students were treated like terrorists even though they were only exercising their democratic rights," said Janhavi Pejale, who had just finished a BFA. "Peaceful protest is a constitutional and democratic right," said Ubada Parvesh Kazi, an engineering student. Ankit Pandey had come from Goa, and he is a businessman rather than a student: "I want to participate in the agitation and become a voice for students."
The police put Additional Commissioner Vikram Deshmane and Deepali Dhate, the Deputy Commissioner for traffic, on the ground for the afternoon. Nothing happened, which four days after Delhi was worth noticing.
This one is not a slogan. It is a drawing of a lathi with nails driven through it, and one line underneath: सब याद रखा जायेगा — all of it will be remembered. The contributor who sent it to the archive wrote that it was about Delhi on 20 July, when the march on Parliament met tear gas and batons and at least 178 people were hurt.
"सब याद रखा जायेगा."
The placard in the opening photograph is doing something else entirely — never trust a man after 12 a.m. — the joke of a generation that spent the month turning group chats into signage. Both were at the same park on the same afternoon, a few metres apart, and neither was there instead of the other.
Pradhan resigned the next day, in a letter addressed to "young friends" that accepted moral responsibility for NEET and defended everything else. The Cockroach Janta Party, which had been sitting at Jantar Mantar since 20 June and had held its first day of protest there on 6 June, called the agitation off at a joint press conference with the health minister — cases against protesters to be withdrawn in NDA-ruled states, compensation at the maximum the rules allow.
Mumbai had been the least confrontational of the big turnouts that week. Delhi had been baton-charged on the 20th, Kolkata held a crossing for forty-five minutes on the 24th and was tear-gassed for it, and Shivaji Park sang the anthem and went home at seven. That is partly the ground: Shivtirth is a rally venue with a century of practice behind it, and everyone involved, including the police, knew the choreography. It is also why the placards had to work harder. Nothing happened at Shivaji Park, so the only record of what people came to say is what they were carrying.
Then on Sunday the 26th the same ground filled again, this time for the parties. Uddhav Thackeray and his cousin Raj held a joint Tiranga march at Shivaji Park, and it rained on and off, and people came anyway with flags and printed posters of the Constitution. Both men paid tribute to the aspirants who had died by suicide. Uddhav said the youth had written a golden chapter in India's history, that Modi had realised votes can be stolen but not people, and that this was the beginning of a bigger struggle. The demand he ended on was the one the students had been making all week: who ordered the lathi charge.
Two days earlier, on the same grass, nobody had needed a stage to ask it.