‘A play can communicate with the people directly, without jargon, in an idiom that people understand, and by touching their heart. In that sense, what you might take one hour to explain in a speech, a play can convey that in twenty minutes,’ said R. Arunkumar, inaugurating a two-day cultural workshop in New Delhi on February 1, 2026. This workshop was held to create street plays and songs for the state-level jathas that will take place as a build up to the Jan Akrosh Rally in New Delhi on March 24.

Two plays and three songs were created during the workshop. The plays are: Insaf Ki Pukar by Naresh Prerna and Yaron Ke Yaar, Desh Ke Gaddar by Mohan. The first play is about 25 minutes long, and depicts the disastrous effects of the policies and bills of the Modi government in a series of moving scenes with working people as protagonists. The second play is shorter, about 12 minutes long, and is a hilarious take-off on the three buddies – Modi, Trump, and Adani – and their various shenanigans. The songs spoke about the labour codes, the displacements of the poor, and the need for unity.

The workshop was conducted by Sudhanva Deshpande, Naresh Prerna, Ashok Kumar and Praveen Vadhera with assistance from Vijay Bairagi. The songs were prepared by Kajal Ghosh along with Praveen Jaret. A total of 48 participants from 7 states participated: Bihar (2), Gujarat (5), Haryana (20), Himachal Pradesh (7), Maharashtra (4), Madhya Pradesh (5), and Uttarakhand (7). Each team was given both the scripts, and they all prepared one script and learnt the songs. These cultural teams will be part of the jathas in their respective states.

On the second day at the concluding session, the teams presented the work in the presence of Polit Bureau members M.A. Baby, Mariam Dhawale and Vijoo Krishnan, Central Secretariat members Muralidharan and Vikram Singh, SFI general secretary Srijan Bhattacharya, and a number of other comrades. In his concluding speech, M.A. Baby complimented the comrades who participated in the workshop and underlined the importance of cultural work as part of our political-ideological struggle. He noted that even though the workshop was of a very short duration, barely two days, the results were very impressive. Not only did the plays tackle difficult issues effectively, they did so with humour and emotion. Baby reminded the audience that during the independence struggle, it was the IPTA that galvanized and organized the leading artists of the day under the red flag.

This workshop is a step in the process of the Party addressing the cultural issues with renewed vigour and seriousness, and creates many possibilities for the future. Not only is there a fertile ground in the states to set up cultural teams which would assist our struggles and campaigns, it is also a way to identify cultural activists who can take forward the process of the Indian Cultural Congress that was initiated in Kochi in December 2025. Above all, the pernicious influence of the RSS and other communal forces cannot be fought without mounting an effective cultural resistance that promotes progressive ideas, secularism, rationality and democracy and foregrounds the lives and struggles of the working people.