Aamir Aziz, whose poem Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega became a rallying cry during the protests against the new citizenship regime in 2020, has accused contemporary visual artist Anita Dube of using his lyrics without consent.

In a post on multiple social media platforms, Mumbai-based poet and musician Aziz said: “On 18th March 2025, a friend saw my words stitched into a work on display at Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi and immediately called me. That was the first time I learned Anita Dube had taken my poem and turned it into her ‘art’. When I confronted her, she made it seem normal like lifting a living poet’s work, branding it into her own, and selling it in elite galleries for lakhs of rupees was normal.

“I discovered she had been using my poem for years, including in a 2023 exhibition titled Of Mimicry, Mimesis and Masquerade, curated by Arshiya Lokhandwala and then again displayed in the India art fair 2025. She didn’t mention this in our first conversation. She hid it.
Deliberately.

“Let’s be clear: if someone holds my poem in a placard at a protest, a rally, or a people’s uprising I stand with them. But this is not that. This is my poem, written in velvet cloth, another carved in wood, hung inside a commercial white cube space, renamed, rebranded, and resold at an enormous price without ever telling me,” Aziz said.

Lyrics of this and other poems of Aziz, 34, are regularly used as graffiti on the walls of his alma mater Jamia Millia Islamia, as well as other universities with a strong Left presence. In 2020, Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters recited it at a rally in London to free Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Dube, 66, was part of the Indian Radical Painters’ and Sculptors’ Association in the 1980s. She is known for mixed media and installation art.

Aziz wrote: “This is outright cultural extraction and plunder stripping authors of autonomy while profiting off their voices, especially those from marginalised backgrounds. Their work is used without their knowledge, precisely so they can be excluded from the wealth produced through it.

“I have sent legal notices…. In return: silence, half-truths, and insulting offers. I asked them to take the work down. They refused. The exhibition at Vadehra Art Gallery is now extended till 26th of April.

“What Anita Dube has done isn’t a gesture of solidarity or resistance, it’s the oldest trick in the book, inherited from the same colonial masters: steal the voice, erase the name, and sell the illusion of originality…. That a poem written in defiance was gutted, defanged, and stitched into velvet for profit. That a poet’s voice was looted, and the looters still pretend to be revolutionaries.”

Dube responded saying that as a visual artist, she works with materials that she loves, and that becomes a means to critically comment. The intent of quoting words from Aziz’s poem was to celebrate it, she said.

“It is the lost old world where there were fellow-traveller solidarities, spirit of the Commons and Copy Left. I have quoted Martin Luther King, Bell Hooks and others in the same spirit in this exhibition and elsewhere.

“I realise that I made an ethical lapse in only giving credit, but not checking with Aamir using words from his poem. However, I reached out and called him, apologised, and offered to correct this by remuneration. Aamir instead chose to send a legal notice, and then I had to go to a lawyer as well.

“As far as the accusation of my wanting to monetise the poem goes, I immediately put the works not for sale.”

Vadehra Art Gallery said in a statement that they’ve been in touch with Aziz for a month, and the disputed works had not been sold.

Art critic Sandip K. Luis, who teaches at Jamia Millia Islamia, explained in a Facebook post: “His complaint of having his lines stolen — lines that belong to the cultural commons and can be both used and misused —misses the larger picture, which is more serious than what he seems to grasp through his aggravated poetic ego. The complaints he raises against the artist could just as easily be turned against him....”