Why Sawaal?

Sawaal means question. Not a decorative name. To ask why, to look again at what is presented as settled, is part of democratic life.

Who owns the forests, mountains, rivers and other water bodies? Who decides who may live in a city, work on its streets, claim citizenship, or speak in the name of the nation? These are not abstract questions. They shape everyday life.

The first issue of Sawaal brings together writings on nationalism, citizenship, hawkers and eviction, forests and commons, ecological crisis, fascism, and the world at large. The subjects are different. The underlying concern is not only who has the power to define belonging, rights, public resources, and the terms of collective life, but also examining the very idea and expression of democracy.

Elections and Parliament are indispensable to the form of democracy we are familiar with. But democracy cannot exhaust itself in voting every few years. It also has to mean the ability to question power, organise, dissent, assert rights and take part in decisions that shape and reshape people’s lives.

That distinction matters, especially now. A government is not the country. A ruling party is not the nation. To question a government — or any public institution — is not to reject India. It is a way of taking the country seriously enough, to argue over what it should become.

Nationalism is one subject over which this argument has become especially fraught. The nation can be imagined as a shared political community capacious enough to contain difference. It can also be narrowed into a language through which differences are suppressed, dissent is treated as disloyalty, and some citizens are made to appear more legitimate than others. Asking what type of nationalism we are being offered is not hostility towards India. It is a political question important to the idea of India.

Citizenship highlights the same problem in another form. It is more than a legal category. It determines who is secure in their sense of belonging and who can be rendered precarious.

The city gives the question a material geography. The hawker is often reduced to congestion, encroachment or disorder. But behind the argument over a pavement lies another question: whose city is it, anyway? A democratic city has to think about movement, safety and regulation, certainly. It must also ask how public space can be shared without making the people who depend on it for their livelihoods disappear.

The environmental question takes us to the commons. Forests, rivers, soil and water are not simply resources to be commodified and exploited. They are the material basis of collective life. When decisions about them are made without the people whose lives are bound to them, environmental policy becomes a question of democracy: who decides, whose knowledge counts, and who bears the cost?

Then there is fascism. It cannot be understood only through elections, parties or individual leaders. Fascism grows socially: through the conversion of anxiety into exclusion, the normalisation of hierarchy and violence, the narrowing of acceptable expression, and the shrinking of spaces in which people can act together. Defending democracy is therefore a social duty as much as an institutional task.

Democracy has to be practised — in workplaces, universities, neighbourhoods, villages, cities and forests. It needs rights, participation, dignity and accountability, but also the difficult habit of making decisions together.

This is where the idea of oppositionality demands attention. By oppositionality, we do not mean opposition for its own sake, nor do we assume that every movement against authority is democratic. Movements can reproduce majoritarianism, exclusion and authoritarianism. But struggles can also create solidarity, challenge hierarchy and open new forms of collective decision-making.

The anti-fascist question cannot therefore be separated from livelihood, citizenship, labour, public space, ecology and dignity. These are not less important questions waiting for ‘real politics’ to hit the ground running. They are the ground on which democratic politics is made. Sawaal hopes to create a space, however small, for that argument.

We are not a big media organisation nor do we pretend to be one. We cannot represent every voice or offer a complete picture of the country. What we can try to do is make room for experiences and arguments that institutional media often neglect, often deliberately: to listen to movements without romanticising them, to question institutions without assuming they are uniformly biased, to examine power without losing sight of the people, and to allow disagreement without portraying the person in disagreement as an enemy.

The writings in this issue do not speak with one voice. They should not. Their value lies partly in the connections that emerge when different questions are placed side by side: nationalism and citizenship; citizenship and belonging; urban development and eviction; hawking and livelihood; the environment and commons; fascism and democratic space, war and geopolitics. Together they return us to a larger question: what does it mean to live as an equal citizen in a democracy?

The answer cannot be found only in elections or ballots. We have to look for it also in the struggles through which people claim the right to their own future. In the questions: Who owns what? Who decides the future of a city? Who has the right to work? Who has the right to speak, organise and belong? Who determines national interests? What kind of India do we want to build?

We do believe a democratic society can never stop asking questions.

Where Do We Stand?

What, then, are we trying to build? Sawaal was not conceived as a profit-making venture. We wanted Sawaal to be more than a media platform in the conventional sense: a small, politically conscious social space that inhabits the world it reports on.

We want to look at the world from within it, not as detached chroniclers but as participants who, too, can be questioned. We would rather have readers and viewers who argue with us than just consume what we publish.

Initially, our output will be modest given our resource and financial crunch. But we intend to make our publication regular, one edition every month, to begin with. We welcome criticism, disagreement and conversation.

We conceived Sawaal as a bilingual portal, publishing articles in both Bengali and English.

Each article is translated into the second language from the language in which it was originally written. In many cases, we have used artificial intelligence as an aid in the translation process. However, every effort has also been made to edit and refine these translations carefully.

We are conscious of the contradictions of the medium we have chosen: speed, visibility, the demand and urge to react instantly, and the platform pressure that decides what is seen. Our refusal to completely submit to that logic is deliberate.

There is value, and perhaps virtue, in slowness. There is value in asking whether something needs to be said before asking how quickly it can be posted. There is value in remaining critical, not because criticism is a posture, but because power should never become unquestionable.

We are grateful to the friends, well-wishers and readers who encouraged us to shoulder this responsibility and made the launch possible.

We hope the community around Sawaal grows, but more than that, we hope the questions do.

And we hope democracy lives.