Opinion Does being patriotic Indians mean we can’t protest the horrors in Gaza?

The constitutional right to protest

At the heart of this matter lies Article 19(1)(a) and 19(1)(b) of the Indian Constitution, which guarantee to every citizen the right to freedom of speech and expression and the right to assemble peaceably and without arms. These are not minor provisions. They are foundational to the democratic life of the Republic.

Protest, in this framework, is not a disruption of order — it is the music of democratic breathing. It is the only means by which ordinary citizens, powerless in the machinery of state, can voice their hope, grief, and resistance.

To deny permission for a peaceful protest mourning deaths in Gaza — under the reasoning that it does not concern India — is to misunderstand the very idea of Indian constitutionalism. The Supreme Court, in Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan vs Union of India (2018), has made it clear: “Citizens have a fundamental right to assemble peacefully and protest against governmental action.” And in Amit Sahni vs Commissioner of Police (2020), while dealing with the Shaheen Bagh protests, the Court emphasised that protest must be balanced with public order — but it did not deny the right itself. That distinction matters. Courts are not to extinguish the flame of protest but to ensure that it does not burn others’ homes.

Even earlier, in the landmark Maneka Gandhi vs Union of India (1978), the Court warned against arbitrary state action: “Any restriction on fundamental rights must pass the test of reasonableness and fairness. Arbitrary denial erodes the very fabric of liberty.”

The moral right to empathise

What was the crime here? A candlelit gathering. A moment of collective grief. A people who could not remain indifferent. The Indian tradition does not shy away from this impulse — it sanctifies it.

From the Mahā Upanishad’s declaration of vasudhaiva kutumbakam — “The world is one family” — to the Isha Upanishad’s invocation: “He who sees all beings in himself and himself in all beings… he never turns away from it,” Indian thought has always affirmed that compassion is a civic virtue.

Even our national poet, Rabindranath Tagore, warned against the dangers of closed sympathies:

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high/
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments/ By narrow domestic walls.”

The judge’s remarks — to “look at your own country” — seem to invoke a narrow nationalism that betrays this expansive inheritance.

Indeed, Mahatma Gandhi himself said: “My patriotism is not an exclusive thing. It is all-embracing… I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible.”

In that spirit, a gathering for Gaza is not un-Indian. It is Indian in its deepest moral sense.

Poetry as witness

Great civilisations not only permit dissent — they preserve it. And great poets, through centuries, have told us what silence costs.

Kabir, the weaver-saint, wrote: “Dard ke dāman se jo lipta, soī to insān hai/ Dusre ke dukh se jo dukh paaye, vahī Bhagwān hai.” (One who clings to the cloak of sorrow is truly human/One who grieves another’s grief — that is God.)

Sa’adi of Shiraz, whose words are etched into the walls of the United Nations building in New York, said: “Human beings are limbs of one another/ Created from the same essence/ When one limb is afflicted with pain/The others cannot remain at peace.” 

And lest we forget the price of selective empathy, we must remember the warning of Pastor Martin Niemöller, who survived Nazi prisons: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—  because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me —and there was no one left to speak for me.” This poem is not history, it is prophecy. And we forget it at our peril.

By reprimanding citizens who seek to protest global injustice, we do not “look at our own country”. We blindfold it.

When we tell people to silence their grief for others, what we’re really saying is: “Let injustice grow, as long as it’s not at your door.” But injustice, like fire, spreads unseen through silence.

This is not a Gaza issue. It is not a Muslim issue. It is not even a foreign affairs issue. It is an Indian constitutional issue. For it is we, the people — not robes, not gavels — who breathe life into our Constitution.

In the end, history will not ask whether we obeyed orders, but whether we saw clearly — and stood in solidarity with whoever in our universal family was suffering. For again, we are the people who emphasised at the G20 we hosted recently that India’s abiding value is vasudhaiva kutumbakam.

The writer is President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Grain from Ukraine Ambassador for South Asia. He has worked at the United Nations on all five continents and is also a multilingual award-winning poet