Right when the protests at Jantar Mantar were called off, the state machinery moved with quick swiftness to paint over the walls surrounding the protest site. Within a day, there was no trace of the messages once left by the people. But had you walked the streets of central Delhi during the protests, the popular resistance would have been visible in every space around you. Graffiti came up on the walls leading up to Jantar Mantar, on police barricades, and even generator enclosures.
These inscriptions spanned a wide range of subjects, surpassing calls of resignation to Dharmendra Pradhan extending to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. They included condemnation of the lathi charge on students, criticism of the Delhi Police, appeals to save Manipur and the Andaman, political slogans such as 'Jai Bheem,' and expressions of gratitude toward opposition leadership. The walls also carried popular memes appealing to PM Modi to 'bring back the bad days'. Alongside these, were also graffiti deployed as an insult calling PM Modi gay. This coexistence of dissent reflects the varied perspectives, levels of political awareness, and social locations from which participants in the movement came — converging together to give rise to the July Kranti or a momentous GenZ movement. Casual homophobic language is an indicator that these spaces invited people of all kinds, and that protest spaces are not immune from reproducing the prejudices of the wider society they emerge from.
Perhaps the graffiti that best captured the spirit of the movement was the one that read, '[We] do not have jobs, if you erase it, we'll come again tomorrow!'. The message has been spray-painted over a layer of white paint used to cover an earlier graffiti, telling of the message itself.
"Job nahi hai, mitaoge to kal phir aayenge!"
Graffiti has always been an integral part of any popular resistance in contemporary times. They are cheap, easy to practice and leave wide visibility for as long as they occupy space. While modern graffiti is a product of New York in the 1960s-70s where it collided with other forms of artistic expression such as the rise of Hip-Hop. It has since gone to become one of the most recognisable visual languages of youth over the world. In the simplest terms, graffiti is the trace left by ordinary people relaying their messages, even if that message is as simple as two names etched onto a rock.
It's popularity within social spaces also emerges from within a psychological framework, as it can denote deviance and delinquency, visible breakings of laws and order. In India as well, murals and graffiti often occupy a fine line between art and criminality. On one hand, India's Constitution guarantees the right to freedom of expression under Article 19. On the other, laws such as the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act and various anti-defacement statutes criminalize painting walls without permission, leaving most street artists vulnerable to prosecution. Even central universities have moved to regulate this simple act of expression: Jamia Millia Islamia, for instance, has issued specific orders making unauthorized wall-painting a punishable offence, carrying imprisonment of up to one year, a fine of up to ₹50,000, or both. And yet, graffiti is rampant in university spaces. This is because it carves out alternative spaces for politics, giving rise to new political imaginaries.
Henry Giroux's influential concept of the 'dis-imagination machine' highlights how the broader culture surrounding us, fuelled by capital and political interests — particularly the military-industrial complex — works to rationalize and normalize oppressive and violent acts. From cinema to songs, state machinery works to capture cultural spaces. Graffiti, in this context, becomes one of the most accessible ways to reclaim collective imagination.
A wall becomes available to anyone willing to use it, much as a blank surface invites a toddler with a pen — an instinctive, unmediated act of mark-making that requires no permission.
This holds true whether in New York subways, where artists paint over AI advertisements to push back against narratives of human dependence on AI as an enhanced way of living; or in India, where writings on the wall emerge every time there is a protest. In a photo essay on Kashmir's resistance graffiti by Mehak Wani and Hassnain Riza narrate how graffiti is a "reminder to the establishment that the people will not be gagged even if they are not given a chance to protest."
In a city like New Delhi today, where the ruling government's advertisements have colonized public space, from the insides of the Delhi metro cabins to towering billboard hoardings, graffiti remains one of the few tools left for ordinary people to exhibit their reality to a large audience. It insists, against the state and capitalist monopoly over public messaging, that the city belongs to its people and must carry their voices. And even as the state paints over it again and again, the writing will return — for somewhere, jobs grow scarce, and elsewhere, dignity is quietly erased; and for those left with little else, resistance is the way of life and it cannot be subdued. Mitaoge, to kal phir aayenge [Erase it, and we will come again tomorrow].