We publish below a letter from an FRFI supporter in Birmingham.
Late last October, at the ‘Gadri Mela’ in Jalandhar, India (an annual festival honouring the anti-imperialist revolutionaries of the Ghadar Party) I met Srishti Gupta, a Delhi-based visual artist and social activist. She was running the stall for the Progressive Artists’ League, a grassroots collective that uses art to advance working-class solidarity, labour rights, feminism, and revolutionary culture. I remember her warmth as she guided me through each artwork, translating the Hindi script I couldn’t read. We stayed connected online afterwards, exchanging regular check-ins and messages of solidarity.
Then came the evening of 11 April 2026, when Uttar Pradesh police abducted Srishti. There was no warrant, no evidence, and no due process. Her ‘offence’ was standing with workers in Noida’s industrial belt as they took to the streets to demand higher wages, an eight-hour working day, and dignified conditions amid soaring rents, food, and fuel costs. The state responded with beatings, detentions, surveillance, and charges under the National Security Act.
Srishti had the foresight to film her own arrest, capturing plainclothes officers with no badges or policewomen present as they dragged her into a police jeep after sunset. Every detail violated Indian law as women cannot be arrested without policewomen present or after dark. Evidently, when state power feels threatened, legality becomes optional.
At the time of writing, Srishti has spent over three months in Luksar District Jail. She is under investigation for offences including rioting, unlawful assembly, and criminal intimidation (some relating to events that occurred after she was already in custody). Her bail petitions have repeatedly been denied because her solidarity threatens a system unwilling to tolerate organised workers or those who stand with them.
Yet even imprisonment has not stopped Srishti from creating. She makes portraits of fellow inmates and runs workshops for women and their children. This is prisoner solidarity; transforming incarceration into collective care and organising even behind prison walls.
Our task is to carry that spirit beyond those walls. For us, prisoner solidarity means more than letters and petitions, vital though they are. It means building the collective power of a revolutionary working-class movement to end the conditions that create political prisoners in the first place.
I send my unwavering solidarity to Srishti and to all the other artists and activists unjustly imprisoned in the Noida case and eagerly await their release.
Charan Kaur
