Last week I acknowledged on social media that I scroll past the world on my feed and ration out my empathy to survive what I’m forced to see. I shared that in a moment of utter powerlessness: what does one do when nothing seems capable of stopping the genocide in Gaza? Or when faced with a regime like India’s that throws hundreds of citizens into statelessness to fulfill its ethno-fascist fantasies?
But this powerlessness isn’t merely a personal struggle. It is a collective reality for those who have spoken and actioned for 21 months and counting in opposition to the Israeli-American genocide; for those who’ve been advocating for a liberated Palestine from before it’s been decades, or more than a decade at least when it comes to resisting the current regime in India. We’re facing a tsunami of escalating assaults on basic human rights with a dwindling set of options for pushing back, whether at home or abroad.
In this bleak context, it is even more critical to name exactly what’s happening here: this frustrating feeling of powerlessness does not emerge from inaction or silence. It is instead fuelled largely by blatant governmental necro-politicking.
Whether it is the continued aid and trade deals with Israel despite consistent and considerable proof of genocidal intent (although the blockade of Gaza that has been enforced since 2007 makes it an extreme example of a ‘death zone’ even before the current situation), or the policing of student encampments supporting a ceasefire in Gaza or the recent actions with ICE in the US, or in India with SIR-NRC-bulldozer justice and the like, whether in the Congo where a modern slave state exists to fuel our technological gluttony, or Sudan, which has become a playground for vested geo-political interests – increasingly, governments across the globe have perfected a system that decides who lives and who dies. Life, death, and everything in between are mere instruments of political power.
And these governments indulge in this necro-politicking by flipping on its head everything that is used to fight for basic human rights across the world.
If we don’t choose to side with the State
We talk about collective power; these regimes distort it by creating hierarchies amongst us. They use everything in their power to choose who will die and live, whose lives are celebrated and ignored, whose deaths are mourned, and who simply disappears without consequence. They decide who is protected and who is penalised, who is given access to even the most basic rights. Whose businesses get state support and whose livelihoods are at the mercy of hate politics.
Their politics incentivise us to stay close to power. Because staying close to power may be the only way to protect our loved ones, our ways of living, perhaps even our dignity.
What’s at stake when we organise in an attempt to break these hierarchies is often too high a cost for many to pay. Look at political prisoners around the world subjected to unlawful incarceration and prolonged fights for justice in courts. Look at the ways in which governments have historically suppressed worker solidarity or the rights of minorities and marginalised citizens. Look at why fewer celebrities are openly advocating for any social justice struggle. It’s been made clear to us repeatedly that we could be next if we don’t choose to side with the State.
We rely on narrative power to galvanise civil society; these regimes weaponise and propagandise history and culture such that we lose the shared ground upon which to talk to each other. When historical events are reframed using pliant mediahouses to suit present day identity politics, when hate speech is not penalised, when sites of worship and cultural significance are demolished with court sanction to appease majoritarian sentiments in India, when elected state and court officials peddle fake history as fact in India, or Zionist propaganda as fact in the US or the Torah as proof of land rights in Israel, when Israel weaponises antisemitism to shut down protesters – in such scenarios people and cultures are erased, truth itself is debated, and we risk free-falling into permanently polarised existences.
We act in dissent as a corollary to democracy and as moral accountability for citizens; but they double down on control and order in the name of patriotism. We know the examples of artists, academics, activists, and human rights defenders being hounded by the State in various ways for ‘anti-nationalism’, of book bans in the US, hijab bans and beef bans in India, of apartheid in Israel. These governments use the state apparatus to police thought, play judge and jury to satire and free speech, dictate free living and loving and private affairs like food, clothing, and commerce.
We build transnational solidarity to organise liberation struggles across the world and protect human rights; they align with ‘strategic partners’, which are basically other governments that protect capital and the power of the 1%. The State demonstrates no moral clarity even when confronted with previous red lines like bombing of hospitals and schools; there is only the pretense of ‘neutrality’ and indefensible arguments of ‘protection of national interests’.
This blatant necro-politicking incentivises the worlds’ citizens to look away. And when we look away from these maneuverings of state power, we risk losing our ability to see any injustice. We instead hand over to the State our most precious power – our ability to connect with another human being in pain.
Naming this powerlessness as resistance
So now we’re back to the beginning: What do we do with this powerlessness?
We must name it. Not in defeat because our powerlessness is not ours alone to take responsibility for. The structures we live under force us to think of injustice as isolated or unrelated tragedies. We might think this protects us from state violence, but the last few decades are proof that what is allowed in the world’s death zones soon morphs into policy and tools, pushed into legality by police states, regardless of international law.
Instead, we name this powerlessness as resistance and we transform this bearing witness into a culture of ‘seeing’. To see what is purposefully kept hidden from us, to see the blatant lies of powerful states and the complicity of democratic institutions. Which means we have to move beyond bursts of empathy alternating with soul burnouts. We have to build practices that sustain this structural witnessing. We need to build structures that always make injustices visible and connect them to our shared lives.
We have pockets of these practices already all around us that can move us towards this culture of seeing.
When we follow freedom flotillas like Madaleen or Handala on Forensic Architecture, when India Hate Lab provides statistics about systemic hate against minorities, and Safai Karamchari Andolan collects data on manual scavenging in India, witnessing is no longer a passive act. It becomes a subversion of the surveillance that is often used to silence dissenting citizens. We provide our eyes on them for safety, we confront the state’s denial of violence.
When we support social media platforms that provide an alternative to the monopoly of Meta or defeat internet blocks by purchasing e-sims, when we support grassroots journalism or movements like Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS), we are centering the voices of those under assault and ensuring their survival. Truth becomes undeniable and acts as a lever of sustained global action.
When we organise and actively participate in reading circles and teach-ins and community workshops and discussion forums that teach us to see oppression as policy, we are learning how to make systems work for us and reclaiming our power over them collectively.
When we support artists who render personal experience as political testimony, when we support arts based community engagement that centre constitutional rights and justice, we confront state memory with community memory and make visible the previously invisibilised.
There are many organisations and collectives that are actively building this culture of seeing all around us across the world. They are connecting stories and data and images to the systems that frame them. They’re asking vital questions to those systems to demand dignity for everyone and move towards power structures of equity and justice. They’re learning new collaborative frameworks that centre a plurality of ways and voices and bodies.
And most importantly, they’re demonstrating to us that to bear witness structurally is to stay alive to this moment in all its pain and vulnerability. To see living and dying as what it was always meant to be – a sacred experience that keeps us connected to one another.
Nisha Abdulla is an artist and educator based out of Bengaluru. Views expressed are the author’s own.