Graffiti News

A four-day campaign in Uttar Pradesh put murals, poetry and comics against criminal culture

A campaign called Rang De Basanti ran across the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh from 11 to 14 August 2026, according to NewsX. It used poetry, art, music and dialogue to reach Generation Z, and set itself against those who promote criminal and mafia culture. The campaign is coordinated by Vishwadeep Shukla.

Each city took a different medium

According to NewsX, the four days were divided by city, with one form of work in each. The campaign opened in Prayagraj at the Hindustani Academy with a poetry reading. On 12 August a graffiti wall initiative took place in Lucknow, where artists created murals live in public. On 13 August comics promoting communal harmony were distributed in Muzaffarnagar alongside dialogue sessions. On 14 August the campaign anthem, "Dar Se Azadi" — freedom from fear — was launched across the state.

That is one message split across four formats. Rather than repeating the same event, the campaign assigned each city the form most likely to land there.

Who read at the launch

NewsX names the poets who performed compositions at the Prayagraj launch as Sankshep Baranwal of Delhi University, Abhishek Awasthi of Madhya Pradesh, Akanksha Bundela of Banaras Hindu University, Morari Mandal of Bihar, Bajrang Nath of Ballia, and Abhijeet Mishra and Dr Mrityunjay Parmar of the University of Allahabad.

The session was chaired by the lyricist Dr Vinamra Sen Singh, with the storyteller Acharya Shantanu Ji Maharaj as chief guest. NewsX describes Prayagraj as the literary city of Nirala and Mahadevi.

What a mural does that a reading cannot

A poetry reading reaches the people who come to it. A mural reaches the people who did not. That is the practical reason a graffiti wall earned a slot in a programme otherwise built around readings, comics and a song: when the reading ends, the audience disperses, but the wall stays where it is and keeps saying the same thing.

Painting in public rather than delivering a finished wall matters too. The making becomes the event. Passers-by stop, watch the work appear, and ask what it is. For a campaign that names dialogue as one of its methods, the hours spent filling a wall are themselves hours of conversation.

This is sanctioned work

The murals in this campaign are part of an organised public event. That places them in a different legal category from painting on someone else's wall without permission. The tools and the surface can be identical; the owner's consent is what separates the two. Wallscape does not encourage unsanctioned painting.

Using street art as an instrument of civic campaigning is not new, but the structure here is unusually clear. Poetry indoors, murals in the street, comics passed hand to hand, a song anywhere. The programme is built on the assumption that each medium reaches somewhere the others do not.

What is on city walls elsewhere in the world, right now, is recorded on the Wallscape map and feed.