You can tear-gas a protest, but not a song: Inside CJP’s music of resistance

It is faintly funny to watch a generation accused of eight-second attention spans reach for mid-century poetry to express this particular rage. But classic resistance verse keeps resurfacing on protest reels for a reason: it already did the work of naming the feeling.

Old verses in young hands

Faiz Ahmad Faiz wrote “Hum Dekhenge” in 1979, as a direct answer to General Zia-ul-Haq’s martial law in Pakistan. It got him nothing but trouble at the time. It got its afterlife in 1986, when the singer Iqbal Bano performed it at the Alhamra Arts Council in Lahore in a black sari, which Zia’s regime had all but banned for women in public. Midway through, the venue’s power was cut. Bano kept singing. Fifty thousand people in that hall chanted ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ until the lights came back on.

Nobody at Jantar Mantar was alive when any of that happened. It doesn’t matter. The poem’s entire argument, that power which humiliates people is, by definition, borrowed and temporary, didn’t need updating for a paper-leak protest in 2026. It was never really about Zia. It was about every government that mistakes its current strength for something permanent.

(Photo: PTI)

Sahir Ludhianvi supplies the other half of the register. His poetry specialised in one thing: refusing to let power sound impressive. When Delhi Police moved to break up a CJP march this month, the footage went up within the hour, scored to a line from “Khoon Phir Khoon Hai” — the nazm Sahir wrote in 1961 as a tribute to the assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. “Zulm jab hadh se badhta hai toh mit jaata hai”: oppression, once it crosses its own limit, destroys itself. A poem written for a murdered African prime minister now plays under video of police batons landing on students.

And then there’s Piyush Mishra, quietly doing two jobs at once. “Aarambh Hai Prachand”, written for the stage before it found Gulaal, has become the track protesters play to psych themselves up, a hype song for people who know exactly what they’re walking into. “Ek Bagal Mein Chand Hoga” does the opposite work. It’s gentler, sadder, and it’s the one used for footage of exhausted students facing down barricades — a song that admits, in the same breath, how much this costs and why it’s still worth doing.

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From the silver screen to street soundtracks

Music has never waited around for a protest to commission it. It gets absorbed into one, because a movement always needs a language faster than speeches can supply, and a good song already comes pre-loaded with feeling.

“Sadda Haq” is a case in point. In Rockstar, it plays as Jordan’s breaking point, his demand, mid-concert, that the world stop deciding what’s right for him and hand him back his own life. At Jantar Mantar it isn’t being reinterpreted so much as put back to its original use: a song built for demanding something back from an authority that won’t give it up.

Written for Gully Boy in 2019, DIVINE’s track “Azadi” built its hook around a slogan the film didn’t invent, “Hum leke rahenge Azadi,” a chant with its own long run through Indian student protests, from JNU in 2016 through the anti-CAA demonstrations of 2019-20. CJP crowds are doing exactly what that slogan has always been for: turning a five-word demand into something a few thousand people can shout in one breath.

(Photo: PTI)

“Humein Dekhni Hai Azadi”, from Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Heeramandi, is sung on screen by the tawaifs of Lahore’s red-light district during the final years of the freedom struggle. It was written for women the freedom movement’s own history mostly left out. A protest that started out as a joke has ended up leaning on a song written for people nobody took seriously either.

Rang De Basanti and the Yuva theme, Rahman’s two great scores about young men waking up to politics, now soundtrack the cinematic montage edits of the marches themselves. And “Yeh Jo Des Hai Tera”, Swades’ hymn to civic duty, now plays under footage of night vigils and hunger strikes, patriotism repurposed as an argument that dissent, done properly, is itself an act of love for the country.

A language older than the movement

None of this is new. Music has been protest’s first language for as long as protest has existed, in India and everywhere else, and every generation simply reaches for whatever’s closest at hand when it needs the feeling turned up.

India’s own version predates the movies by a century. Bismil Azimabadi’s “Sarfaroshi Ki Tamanna”, written well before 1947, turned into the couplet young revolutionaries recited on their way to the gallows, Bhagat Singh included. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s “Vande Mataram”, written in 1875 and folded into his novel Anandamath, gave anti-colonial resistance a hymn before it had a flag everyone agreed on.

The same instinct shows up everywhere a movement has needed a shared voice. “We Shall Overcome” began as a Black church hymn before it became the anthem of the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, and was later translated into Hindi as “Hum Honge Kaamyab”.

“Bella Ciao”, first sung by Italian paddy-field workers protesting their conditions and later claimed by anti-fascist partisans in the 1940s, turned up eight decades on at the borders of Delhi during the farmers’ protests. And “Dammi Falastini”, released by the Gaza-born singer Mohammed Assaf in 2014, surged during the 2021 protests in Sheikh Jarrah, now sits under most Gaza solidarity content on social media, sung by people who have never set foot in Gaza.

(Photo: PTI)

This is what a song is for, in the hands of a crowd that needs one. It says the thing everyone in the room already feels, before anyone has to say it themselves.

The song that unseated a government

Nowhere has that been more literal than a case that has nothing to do with any of this month’s playlist. It happened in the hills, in 2006, and it happened without a single stadium or smuggled cassette.

That year, the iconic Garhwali folk singer Narendra Singh Negi released a satirical song called “Nauchami Narayana” — “Nine-Tricked Narayana.” It was a scathing, witty attack on Narayan Dutt Tewari, the sitting chief minister of Uttarakhand, and it went after his administration on corruption, political opportunism, and lax governance, point by point.

Attempts to quietly suppress it went nowhere. Cassettes and CDs spread through villages, dhabas and public buses across the hill state faster than any press statement could catch up with. The song went on to become the Opposition’s de facto campaign soundtrack, and political analysts still credit it as a real factor in what followed: Tewari’s government lost the 2007 Uttarakhand Assembly election. A folk singer had understood something most political speeches never manage, that a tune people can’t stop humming will outlast a media blackout, and outlast the government it was written about.

(Photo: PTI)

Governments can clear a street. They can throttle a signal, and cut a hall’s power mid-performance, the way Zia’s regime tried and failed to do to Iqbal Bano in 1986. What Lahore then, Uttarakhand in 2006, and Jantar Mantar now all prove is the same thing, on a loop: you can do all of that but you cannot arrest a melody. You cannot tear-gas a song.