As election fever heats up in India, and no less a personality than the Prime Minister signals a “back to basics” for the ruling party by invoking the term ghuspaitiya as an allusion to the country’s Muslim minority, it is time we recollect the tenacious resistance to the imposition of the divisive Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) late in 2019 and early in 2020.
Tenacious resistance
Across the country, resistance to the imposition of the CAA continued. Students of universities across the seven north-eastern states, including Gauhati University, Cotton University, North-Eastern Hill University, Dibrugarh University, Tezpur University, Assam Women University, Nagaland University, Rajiv Gandhi University, Assam Agricultural University and North Eastern Regional Institute of Science and Technology abstained from their classes and participated in seven-hour long hunger strikes. Even the usually peaceful state of Meghalaya, which had separated rather cordially from Assam in 1971, saw mass rallies and demonstrations. The army had to be deployed in Tripura where Bangla-speaking supporters of CAA clashed with the Reangs and Tripuris who opposed it. The idyllic mountains of Arunachal Pradesh, land of the dawn-lit mountains, turned into fiery battlegrounds where protestors carried grim placards that declared ‘ai jui jolise, jolise jolibo, ai hongram solise, solise, solibo’ (this fire is burning and will keep burning, this movement is on and it will continue).
Opposition to the CAA across the north-east was not merely a primeval reaction to the possibilities of a demographic invasion. As critics pointed out, the legislation does not only exclude Muslims—animists, ancestor-worshippers and other practitioners of the region’s myriad faiths and traditions were also excluded. To avail of the CAA’s provisions, they would have to identify themselves as Hindus or Buddhists rather than as practitioners of their specific faiths. Members of such trans-border communities as Khasis, Garos and Hajongs face persecution on account of their tribal identities and are often evicted from their lands, compelling them to seek refuge in India.
Indeed, Adivasi communities across the country balked at the prospects of having to pigeon-hole their diverse beliefs and syncretic customs within the six religious categories approved by the architects of the CAA. Yamuna Murmu, a tribal rights activist in Bihar, summed up the resentment against the CAA among the Adivasis cogently. ‘Our ancestors—Tilka Majhi, Birsa Munda, Sidhu-Kanhu—fought vehemently against the British for our rights and independence but sadly today, the government is seeking proof of relation and belongingness to our motherland,’ he told the reporter of Newsclick, a left-leaning news portal. The approved religious categories fail to reflect the diversity of faiths held by members of India’s numerous Adivasi communities. This fuelled growing anxieties among them that their religious beliefs would disappear altogether from official enumeration.
Cities in the south weren’t far behind when it came to voicing their fury against the legislation. Tens of thousands of people in Hyderabad marched through streets, calling on the government to axe the act. Over 2,00,000 people converged on Mangaluru in South Karnataka from road, sea and air to register their opposition. Further south, nearly seven million people linked together to form a human chain across the length of Kerala in protest, led by the chief minister himself. As elsewhere, these protests tended to be punctuated with collective readings of the preamble of the constitution and slogans hailing the unity of India despite its religious diversity, concluding with the singing of the national anthem.
Smaller towns were as vociferous in the articulation of their anger. On Makar Sankranti, the sun festival, Gujarat’s skies became a battleground as government-sponsored kites supporting the CAA were cut down by kites in opposition to it. In February 2020, a sea of yellow flooded Punjab’s Malerkotla town as farmers’ organisations joined hands with religious associations to convene an ‘invitation march’ that sought to inform people about the divisiveness of the act. Over 12,000 women marched through Malegaon in Maharashtra demanding its withdrawal.
Harsh Mander eloquently captured the ethos of the protests when he suggested to students that the claims of equal citizenship had shifted from parliament to the streets.
To do this, we have come out on the streets and will continue to occupy the streets.
This fight cannot be won in the parliament because our political parties, who declare themselves secular, do not have the moral strength to take up the fight.
This fight can also not be won in the Supreme Court because, as we have seen in the case of the NRC, Ayodhya and Kashmir, the Supreme Court has not been able to protect humanity, equality and secularism …
What will be the future of the country? You are young people; what kind of a country do you want to leave for your children? Where will this decision be made? On the one hand, this decision can be taken on the streets. We are all out on the streets. However, there is one more space, bigger than the streets, where this decision can be taken. What is this space where the solution to this struggle can be found? It’s in our hearts—in your heart and mine.
Mander’s call for love riled up right-wing commentators who misinterpreted it, as is their wont, as a call to arms. They lost no time in accusing the former civil servant of encouraging sedition, inciting violence and other fantastical nonsense. Mander was a perfect target for the wrath of the right. He had founded the Karwan-e-Mohabbat, the Caravan of Love, in 2017 as a response to the spike in hate crimes against and lynching of Muslims after the BJP’s ascent to power in 2014. The Karwan-e-Mohabbat tours towns and villages ravaged by violence between Hindus and Muslims, seeking to heal old and new wounds. Their gesture of integrating love in Indian politics has been portrayed as hateful by the Indian media. Mander was well-linked to global circuits of social movements, which made it convenient to invent any number of allegations from the idiotic to the insidious. On this occasion, the accusations were based on badly doctored videos of Mander’s speech, although the resulting footage was ridiculous enough to render any allegations groundless. After all, the protests against the CAA were an expression of people’s hopes, not activists’ machinations.
Perhaps the most iconic and well-documented protest against the CAA was the one mounted by women on the south-eastern edge of Delhi, in a neighbourhood called Shaheen Bagh. Braving the bitter Delhi winter, hundreds of Muslim women undertook a continuous sit-in for over a hundred days. They blockaded a portion of Kalindi Kunj Road, a six-lane highway that connects the city to the south-eastern suburb of Noida and onwards to south-west Uttar Pradesh, in a bid to foreground their discontent against the divisive legislation. Over three iridescent months, the home-makers who assembled in this corner of Delhi taught their fellow citizens invaluable lessons about belongingness and membership in the political community.
Shaheen Bagh, both literally and metaphorically, showcased the diverse arts of politics. Complementing the sloganeering and speech-making by prominent citizens were collective actions that were at once spectacular and banal. Thousands gathered on New Year’s Eve to collectively sing the national anthem, a routine aspect of the discipline instilled by schools in India, as a chorus of defiance against divisiveness. On Republic Day, three dadis of Shaheen Bagh, grandmothers who won national affection and international fame for their tenacious commitment to the Indian constitution, unfurled the national flag. While the national media framed the protestors as unruly saboteurs out to disrupt daily life in the capital, Shaheen Bagh transformed into an open-air exhibition centre with murals, posters and installations jostling for attention alongside politicians, singers, comedians, poets and even enthusiastic children. Enterprising people set up makeshift kiosks to serve snacks and drinks to the protestors. The effervescence of Shaheen Bagh dispelled the pall of dread that had crept over the city in the wake of the CAA’s triumph in Parliament.
Harbouring hope can be extremely difficult when the odds are stacked against you. Fear, anxiety and anger feed on these odds and birth despair. There was ample reason to feel dejected during that bitterly cold winter. When protestors were not being harangued as saboteurs, they were mocked for being unable to achieve anything. But the women of Shaheen Bagh remained determined. The solidarity they received from civil society activists, students and artistes from across India strengthened their commitment. Radhika Vemula, whose son, Rohith, had died almost four years prior, joined the three dadis of Shaheen Bagh as they unfurled the tricolour. Sikh farmers set up community kitchens in the neighbourhood to cook for Muslim homemakers as they continued their sit-in. In turn, the Muslim homemakers observed a two-minute silence on 19 January to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the exodus of Pandits from the Kashmir Valley. Inspired by Shaheen Bagh, similar protests sprouted up elsewhere. Kolkata’s Park Circus, Mumbai’s Agripada and Bengaluru’s Bilal Bagh saw comparable numbers of women expressing dissent against the CAA.
The carnivalesque ambience at Shaheen Bagh did not merely infuse hope in Delhi that winter. It spurred hope across the country, motivating many to speak out against what they considered an unjust law. That it would not last long does not dim its significance for igniting public debates on what it means to be a citizen. Although a global crisis quietly brewing in the background was soon to overwhelm one and all, the incandescence of Shaheen Bagh and the country-wide protests it inspired were to illuminate conversations on citizenship for years to come.
Excerpts from the book Audacious Hope: An Archive Of How Democracy Is Being Saved in India by Indrajit Roy. Published with the permission of the publisher, Westland.
Indrajit Roy is Professor of Global Development Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of York. He specialises in the study of Indian politics in comparative and historical perspectives. He holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford.
