Devaki Jain and the Pulse of Indian Dissent
The pavement has a way of outlasting political regimes, shifting ideologies, and the fleeting cycles of daily headlines. On an otherwise ordinary Friday, amid the swell of flags and chanting voices during the Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) ‘Tiranga March,’ the street belonged momentarily to memory. Navigating the crowd was Devaki Jain, a 93-year-old development economist, feminist pioneer, and veteran of India’s defining civil mobilizations.
Surrounded by a generation raised on digital organizing and contemporary anxieties about democratic erosion, Jain looked at the peaceful assembly, paused, and delivered an observation marked by dry wit and long historical seasoning: “You’ve all not been arrested, that means our democracy is still working. We used to get arrested in our times.”
The line elicited knowing laughter, but its weight lingered far beyond the afternoon. In an era where debates over the health of institutions are carried out through abstract indices, prime-time shouting matches, and academic seminars, Jain’s remark offered an unvarnished, street-level metric. For someone who walked the frontlines of the Narmada Bachao Andolan in the 1980s, pushed for transparency during the Right to Information (RTI) protests of the 1990s, and lived through the mid-1970s Emergency, democracy has never been a theoretical ideal. It has always been a physical negotiation between citizens, the state, and the police barricade.
The Street as an Economic Classroom
To understand Jain’s presence in a march in her nineties requires understanding her life’s work. She belongs to an era of Indian public intellectuals for whom data and field reality were indivisible. After studying at Oxford and teaching at Delhi University, Jain did not retreat into the quiet corridors of academia. Instead, she pioneered feminist economics in the global South, co-founding the Institute of Social Studies Trust (ISST) and championing the idea that uncounted labor—primarily that of women in rural areas and informal sectors—constitutes the backbone of the economy.
Her feminism was fundamentally grounded in physical space. She stood with the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and helped amplify the voices of vegetable vendors, chintz weavers, and construction workers. When the Narmada Bachao Andolan gathered momentum in the 1980s, demanding justice for adivasi communities displaced by mega-dam projects, Jain was there. When grassroots workers in rural Rajasthan laid the foundation for the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), demanding access to village development records and igniting the nationwide campaign for the Right to Information Act, Jain lent her voice, intellect, and physical solidarity.
In those decades, dissent was tactile and risky. Preventive detentions, mass arrests, long hours spent in crowded holding cells, and state indifference were routine occupational hazards for anyone questioning development paradigms. To march was to invite detention. For Jain and her contemporaries, arrest was neither an anomaly nor the end of the conversation; it was the standard cost of doing business in a vibrant, unruly republic.
The Irony of the Barricade
Jain’s quip at the Tiranga March carries a deliberate double edge. On the surface, it serves as a grounded reassurance to younger demonstrators. It reminds contemporary activists that the Indian state has frequently swung between toleration and heavy-handed coercion across its post-independence history. In her eyes, a protest that concludes without the mass loading of protesters into police vans remains an operational victory—a sign that the civil space, however constrained, still retains breathing room.
Yet beneath the surface lies a sharper, more provocative critique. By measuring the survival of democracy against the threshold of mass incarceration, Jain highlights how high the stakes of public assembly have always been. In the 1970s and 1980s, getting arrested was an open, public confrontation: activists broke section 144, the state detained them, and the court systems or public pressure eventually secured their release.
Today, dissent often faces subtler, more insidious mechanisms: preemptive bans on public gatherings, algorithmic surveillance, bureaucratic intimidation, or the lingering threat of stringent anti-terror provisions where bail is the exception rather than the norm. To walk out into the open air, hoist the tricolor, make one’s voice heard, and walk home without handcuffs is an act that can be read simultaneously as a sign of institutional restraint and an indictment of how low the expectations for democratic freedom have fallen.
A Living Bridge Between Eras
Perhaps the most potent aspect of the scene was the generational bridge Jain represented. Modern Indian political discourse often suffers from historical amnesia. Contemporary movements frequently view today’s democratic friction as unprecedented, forgetting the deep scars of the Emergency (1975–1977), the brutal crackdowns on labor strikes in the 1970s, or the systemic displacement of tribal populations throughout the late 20th century.
Jain’s presence serves as an antidote to despair. At 93, when most retirees have long since retreated to private comfort, her insistence on showing up on the tarmac communicates something essential: democracy is not a finished architecture that one inherits, but a continuous muscle that atrophies the moment it stops being exercised.
Her generation fought for fundamental premises that contemporary youth now treat as givens: the right to question state expenditures, the recognition of women as autonomous economic agents, and the legitimacy of civil disobedience outside electoral cycles. By joining a march organized by civil rights platforms like CJP, she was not looking back at history; she was actively validating the modern chapter of the same long struggle.
The Enduring Currency of the Tricolor
There is an enduring symbolism in a veteran activist carrying the national flag at a street rally. In contemporary India, the tricolor has become a contested canvas—claimed by state nationalism on one side, and reclaimed by civil rights defenders on the other as an emblem of constitutional guarantees.
For Jain, the flag belongs squarely to the preamble: to justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity. When she stood under its canopy, her laughter and her warning were two sides of the same civic faith. A society that fears the police van cannot remain truly free, but a society that abandons the street altogether has already conceded defeat.
As the rally dispersed and the crowd made its way into the evening traffic—unhindered, unbooked, and unarrested—her words lingered in the cooling air. They served as a reminder that the health of a democracy is never measured solely by the speeches delivered in parliament, but by the quiet courage of citizens who choose to walk together in public view, and the fact that, on this day at least, the road remained open to them.
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