Over the past two decades, the world has been witnessing massive upsurges and the spread of political mobilizations, protests and movements in urban public spaces. As the marginalised are invisibilized by the mainstream public and polity, the margins constantly seek out various public avenues to be seen and heard. Despite its diverse geopolitical contexts these protests appropriate public spaces and come together in their fights against the neo-liberal authoritarian rule and its consequent inequalities, unemployment, and financial crisis. It is through these spaces that niche avenues are negotiated and constructed for a marginally effective engagement in democratic politics where they rewrite democracy in more political, egalitarian, and inclusive ways. Here, public space and protests are interconnected. The political centrality of public spaces opens wider arenas for mass protests to emerge, expand, and shape both locally and globally, while protests in turn, structure, restructure, and create new public spaces through social interactions. For the state, these mobilizations and protests obstruct the order of the space and in order to maintain the abstract, ideal order, the state employs violent mechanisms of surveillance and control.
Given this context, I attempt to trace the trajectory of protest spaces in the city of New Delhi- how the state and its agencies silence marginal voices in urban public spaces through spatial arrangements like zoning and how the marginal public on the contrary, negotiate with the state, claim, reclaim, and create new and alternate spaces of protest in the city. By employing ethnographic method of data collection, the study aims to analysing the changing spatiality of protest spaces in the contemporary period like Shaheen Bagh and throw light on the contesting politics of spaces of protest.
