Brushstrokes of Democracy: The Art Show That Became a Classroom on Rights
It’s the vibrant colours that draw your eye almost instantly as you enter the art gallery. Titled “Nothing Human Is Alien to Me” by artist Aban Raza, the paintings on display combine scenes from everyday life and from mass movements like the Right to Information or the farmers’ protest to make powerful statements. Even the scene of women waiting at a bus stop in Bhim in Rajasthan becomes a metaphor for democracy.
As one takes in the vibrant colours of the canvas, the gallery floor turns into a kind of open forum: activists, artists, students, and ordinary citizens gathered to discuss not just the paintings, but what they stood for. Co-founders of the MKSS and long-time RTI campaigners, including Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey and Shankar Singh, travelled from Rajasthan specifically for the event. Their presence turned the exhibition into a live classroom on transparency, accountability and civic responsibility.
Raza’s painting, bursting with energy, colour and the presence of women, challenged the nearly monochrome view of struggle and marginalisation. By portraying a “mela”, a fair or gathering, she shifted the narrative from victimhood to agency, from passive suffering to collective power.
Beyond imagery, the event introduced a deeper political education: the speakers spoke about RTI as the real tool that turned votes into meaningful citizen power.
Shankar Singh gave us some examples of how ordinary people have used the right to information to ask for accountability. ‘People have used RTI to ask questions that are connected to their daily lives – pensions, PDS, compensation for farm land acquisition.”
As Shankar Singh explains, the RTI empowered people with information that otherwise stayed concealed and through that information, power passed on from the government and administration to ordinary people.
“Balu ji asked for details related to the pension list. He wanted to know how people who were still alive and should have received pension were declared dead and their names struck off the list.”
“Laxmi asked for a copy of the register of the hospital OPD.” The patients there were being prescribed medicines (for dog bite, snake bite, etc) that are supplied by the government to the hospital but were reportedly unavailable. This forced patients and their families to shell money from their own pockets. “She also asked for the copy of the stocks and the equipment available in the hospital, for example, for screening, sonography. She found out that they had a sonography machine but weren’t getting it fixed for months on end.”
For Aruna Roy, the painting of the women sitting at the bus stop, is a familiar site, one where she too has spent many hours, waiting. “We have all waited on that bench. And the frustration of not getting on to the bus is a metaphor for how we have not got on to democracy. That is democracy too. We are voters, but not much more. The RTI made the vote speak,” she says.
They warned, however, that recent amendments and challenges threaten to erode this hard-won mechanism for accountability.
“There were attempts to weaken the RTI earlier too”, explains Nikhil Dey. What has happened now, through the digital personal data protection act is that that Act has amended the RTI.” The amendment to one particular section – 8(1)-J – he says, ‘was the harmony created within the RTI between information and privacy.’ “This law (DPDPA) has very diabolically, mixed privacy with personal. Everything personal is called private, which it cannot be, because if your personal is affecting public interest, it is no longer personal. DPDPA says anything that identifies a person cannot be given, taking away its connection with public activity. And therefore the RTI becomes meaningless.”
What began as a visual experience became a reminder that democracy survives only when citizens stay informed, ask questions, and defend their right to know.
