Three posters in this archive were made by people who did not know each other, in three different cities, and all three use the same photograph. It is an ordinary phone-camera portrait of the Prime Minister — head and shoulders, a flag behind him, the slightly over-processed look of an image that has been resized and re-shared a hundred times.
In one, printed in quotation marks along the top: "FRANDS". Underneath, in red poster paint, ISTIFA DO! Resign.
In the second, from a Mumbai march: Friendzz above, Ghar Jao pleajj below. Go home, please. The doubled z and the doubled j are doing most of the work — that is not a spelling mistake, it is the register of a group chat, and it is being aimed at a head of government.
The third has been laid out like a social-media card. Sunglasses emoji, flame emoji, a small gold crown, a 100 in the corner. Across the top: Friend without benefits. Along the bottom, in the typeface of a promoted post: NO STRINGS. NO DRAMA. JUST PURE DOSTI.
The word is his. Mitron — friends — is how he opens, and the November 2016 broadcast that began with it turned it into something people repeat in a particular voice. What these three posters do is keep the friendliness and take away the friend. That is a harder thing to answer than an insult. An insult can be dismissed as hostility. A greeting cannot, and "friend without benefits" is the cruellest of the three precisely because it is not rude: it says the relationship exists, it has a name, and nothing comes out of it.
Once you have noticed the friendliness, the other half of the joke becomes hard to miss. Almost nothing in this archive is addressed to somebody who answers.
A missing-person notice, in Malayalam and English, printed properly — distressed paper, a red drawing pin, the photograph in a taped-on frame. MISSING. NARENDRA MODI. Then three lines, each with an icon: കേൾക്കാൻ കഴിയില്ല — cannot hear. പറയാൻ കഴിയില്ല — cannot speak. And a measuring tape beside the chest, for the inches. At the bottom: does not see the people's problems, does not hear them, does not speak — active only for photographs. Then, in the format every such notice ends in: കാണുന്നവർ വിവരം അറിയിക്കുക! If you see him, let us know. #WhereIsModi #AnswerThePeople.
It is the three monkeys, redrawn as a police notice, which in a country where those monkeys are attached to Gandhi is not a light choice. It is also, in its English glosses, a poster that reaches for DEAF and DUMB as insults — a habit worth naming rather than tidying away, in the same way Album 011 named what was sprayed on the walls. Protest spaces carry the reflexes of the places they come from.
The same accusation, made to the other man, by the party named after an insult. चुप्पी क्यों प्रधान? Why the silence, Pradhan? The caricature has a finger pressed to its lips and its eyes swivelled sideways, and the Cockroach Janta Party's logo sits in the top corner. Note what is being complained about. Not a policy, not a decision, not a bad answer. The absence of any answer.
And then the same question in baby talk. Pink card, two pictures side by side — the minister's official photograph, and a drawing of the Prime Minister with his hand at his mouth, blowing a kiss. Above them: Kucchu-Pucchu tum kahan ho? Where are you. The nickname does its own work, and Album 009 is about what that infantilising was for. What matters here is the second half of the sentence. Not what have you done. Where are you.
Kucchu-Pucchu tum kahan ho?
Put the posters in a row and they are all the same shape: closeness, plus absence. Friend, but not answering. Missing, but everywhere on a hoarding. Silent, but photographed constantly. A generation that grew up being able to reach anyone — to reply to anyone, to be left on read by anyone — worked out that the most accurate insult available was not you are wrong but you have not replied.
The resignation, when it came on 25 July, came from Dharmendra Pradhan. The archive holds no photograph of an answer from anybody else. What it holds instead is two months of one-sided conversation, kept and carried and held up over people's heads, addressed each time to a friend.