Everything about the Jantar Mantar protest is political — as it should be

Politics can get dirty, but at its core, it is about managing people, circumstances, human emotions and influencing them to achieve certain goals 5 min readJul 25, 2026 12:09 PM IST First published on: Jul 25, 2026 at 12:09 PM IST An old joke goes that the word “politics” comes from two root words: “Poly” or many, and “ticks” or blood-sucking creatures. The word’s actual origins can be traced to “polis”, or the Greek word for the city-state. It was the civic unit under which citizens and those holding power engaged with one another for creating a better quality of life. But over 2,000 years later, “politics” evokes a much more adverse reaction — a feeling of being compromised, of something dirty.The disgust is not limited to our nation state or political parties. One only needs to tune int