First, you have to get to Jantar Mantar. That means dodging police personnel, negotiating barricades and navigating Delhi’s roads. Along the way, you must recruit enough supporters to build a sizeable kafila (procession), because the larger your crowd, the better your chances of evading detention. But watch out for the media crew. An encounter with the wrong one could see your supporters disappear, their minds supposedly swayed by “godi media”.
Welcome to Jantar Mantar Chalo, a satirical simulation game that turns protesting into a contest of strategy, numbers and survival. You can play either as a protester trying to reach the demonstration site or as a police officer wielding lathis and tear gas to disperse the crowd. The game has become viral, with players calling for further updates. As many as 2,000 players can play the game online at any given time.
For Suraj Kushwah, 27, the engineer who built the game, the idea emerged from the television broadcast of Jantar Mantar Protest 2.0. He found protesters struggling to make their way to the demonstration site both absurd and hilarious. His instinct, then, was to recreate it as a game. “It was a bit like a circus,” laughs Kushwah, a Bareilly-based engineer. “People were trying to dodge things just to reach Jantar Mantar. I thought it was a kind of dark humour.”
The humour, however, extends beyond the immediate spectacle of the protest. In Kushwah’s Delhi, the struggle to reach Jantar Mantar unfolds against a backdrop of civic neglect. Potholes, broken roads and overflowing rubbish bins become part of the game’s obstacle course, turning the everyday frustrations of navigating the city into satire.
Although he initially imagined a 3D game, Kushwah soon realised that developing one would be a more complicated undertaking. After discussing the idea with friends in game development, he settled on a format inspired by Age of Empires II and decided to build it himself using his knowledge of game development and AI. The entire game was put together in about a day and a half.
The game allows players to step onto either side of the barricades. As a protester, the task is to gather supporters, build a procession and reach the demonstration site. As a police officer, it is to break up the gathering. In either case, numbers matter: the larger the crowd, the greater its strength.
For Kushwah, though, the game is about more than the mechanics of a protest. Its details reflect a wider frustration with what he calls ‘the absurdities of everyday life’, from crumbling roads to political controversies such as E20 fuel. “The game isn’t only about the protest,” he says. “If you look at the finer details, there are potholes on the roads, broken infrastructure and E20, which is another political issue.”
As an engineer, Kushwah finds the state of roads and civic amenities particularly irksome. Yet he is reluctant to describe the game as political, let alone an act of political resistance. For him, the conditions depicted are not an exaggerated version of reality but an extension of what people encounter when they step outside. “There’s nothing political about it. It depicts conditions that people encounter in everyday life. If you go outside, this is what you see. This is the real world,” he emphasises.
Kushwah has made a few changes but is wary of allowing the project to grow beyond its original scope. The response has been gratifying, but virality brings its own expectations, he says, particularly when audiences begin reading a larger political narrative into something its creator intended as entertainment. “Most people are trying to present the game as a narrative rather than just a fun, normal thing,” says Kushwah, who runs a YouTube channel with around 33,000 followers.
The creator hopes players can simply enjoy the game. “If I could have one aim with this game, it would be for people to get a bit of peace of mind from playing it,” he says. In a city where reaching a protest site can feel like a game of survival, the simplest relief, Kushwah insists, is being able to laugh at the obstacles.