A group of teenage girls at Delhi's Jantar Mantar, tears streaming down their faces, stand before a line of riot police singing the national anthem as though it is the only weapon they have left.

Elsewhere, medical students arrive carrying supplies to set up makeshift field hospitals. They bandage strangers on pavements.

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Hundreds of kilometres away, people who cannot march themselves quietly order food and drinking water for protesters they will never meet.

Richard Attenborough spent millions of dollars trying to recreate moments like these for his Oscar winning movie, Gandhi. Delhi produced them for free, in real time, because they were never cinema. They are what happens when a state confronts its own children with batons.

Perhaps that is why these images from the protest organised by the Cockroach Janta Party have travelled so far and so fast. They are no longer just images from a single demonstration in Delhi. They have become a mirror in which millions of Indians see their own frustrations reflected.

They are reminders of what citizenship looks like when stripped........

© Mathrubhumi English