On the evening of 20 July 2026, the Rapid Action Force cleared unarmed student protesters off the road near Jantar Mantar with pellet guns, tear gas, and spike-studded batons. The march had been on its way to Parliament, demanding the Education Minister’s resignation over the NEET-UG paper leak. Within an hour of the crackdown, the photographs were everywhere. Within a week, they would start to disappear — placards discarded, images pulled off timelines under pressure, the visual record thinning out one screenshot at a time.
Democracy by Design started with a phone call between the two of us — Pallavi Nayak and me — that afternoon. Pallavi runs Arts and Culture within the All India Professional’s Congress and had been watching the same photographs I had, from a different angle. She noticed the joy in the record — the sarcasm on cardboard, the meme-shaped Hindi, the women turning out in numbers nobody had predicted. She also noticed that this record was going to be gone.
The website went live in about two hours.
What a protest archive has to refuse
The design constraint was simple and the design refusals were where the work was.
We refused to identify protesters. The Jantar Mantar photographs contained faces the state had every reason to want. A public archive that preserved them without asking would be doing part of the state’s job. The pipeline auto-obscures faces before publishing. Manual review flags edge cases. If a submitter believes their own face was in a photograph they now wish to remove, the site has a documented takedown path.
We refused to become a news outlet. The archive is not the piece of journalism. Journalists were already covering the violence. What was disappearing was the art — the placards and the photographs of them. We stayed narrow. The scope is: posters, placards, photography. Not video. Not commentary. Not the news of the day.
We refused to filter for ideology. The archive takes non-violent placards that criticise the government from anyone who cares to send them, including from ideological quarters we would not usually publish. A protest archive of posters that agrees with the curator is not an archive; it is a slideshow. The single filter is content that incites violence. Everything else, in.
We refused to manufacture a narrative. The curated essays that accompany the visual record explain a placard’s socio-political context in the plainest language we can write. They do not celebrate. They do not rouse. They point at what is on the placard and let the placard speak.
The two-hour part
The technology was almost the smallest thing.
The domain (democracybydesign.in) was registered in the first fifteen minutes. The backend went up in the next hour. The submission form, the anonymisation pipeline, the metadata verification, the cross-reference against public sources, the takedown request path — most of the shape of the site was there by the end of the second hour. What took longer was the editorial guidelines, which we wrote together, in a shared document, over the following days. The technology was a scaffold. The rules were the building.
We say “two hours” because it is true and because it is a small argument against the reflex that any civic tool has to be a six-month project. Some tools have to ship at the speed of the news cycle that produced their need. If Democracy by Design had launched in November, the placards from 20 July would already have been forgotten.
Verification is not the same as certainty
Every submission is checked by a human. Then the system runs its EXIF and metadata checks, watches for signs of image alteration, and cross-references any published-elsewhere version. Then a moderator decides.
None of this is bulletproof. A determined bad actor can spoof metadata. A photograph published nowhere else can still be a plausible fake. What the verification chain does is raise the cost of getting a fake in far enough that most attempts fail early. What it does not do is tell you the archive is certain. It tells you the archive is cared for, and that is a different claim.
The distinction matters because a public archive that claims certainty is a public archive that can be used against its own subjects. An archive that says openly what it can and cannot verify — and puts the safety of contributors ahead of the completeness of the record — is one that behaves like a witness rather than a court.
What the archive is really about
Pallavi put it in the interview with The Hindu: the archive is about what we choose to remember.
The 20 July placards will not survive on their own. Nobody was going to keep them. The cardboard was going to go into the rain. The spray-painted “Resign” on that rain-soaked Kolkata street would have been walked over by Monday morning. The photograph of that word being sprayed is the last version of it that will ever exist.
An archive that catches those is not neutral about the future. It is a bet that the memory of how the protest actually looked — the joy inside the fear, the humour inside the violence, the specific handwriting of the person who wrote koi bhi sarkar ho, jawabdehi honi chahiye — will matter to somebody in three decades who was not there. If that person is a fourteen-year-old in 2056 trying to understand what her grandmother did in her twenties, the archive is for her.
If you were at Jantar Mantar, or Nagpur, or Kolkata, or any of the other marches this summer, and you have a photograph on your phone that is not on the site yet — submit it. The verification is real; the takedown path is real; the archive holds what nobody else is going to hold.