Shaheen Bagh and the Idea of India: Writings on a Movement for Justice, Liberty and Equality 9789389958157, 9789389958164

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Seema Mustafa is a journalist and has worked in or written for a number of major Indian newspapers—including The Patriot, The Pioneer, The Indian Express, The Telegraph, Economic Times and Asian Age—and travelled across the globe on assignments. She also worked for a couple of years as the National Affairs Editor for the News X television channel. She has covered conflict in Assam, Punjab and Kashmir; communal violence in different states of India; and was the first Indian journalist to cover the first war in Beirut. She is presently the Founder-Editor of The Citizen, an online initiative.

CONTENT

INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF SHAHEEN BAGH TIMELINE OF A PROTEST

PART ONE: GROUND REPORTS FROM A PROTEST WOMEN, VIOLENCE AND DEMOCRACY Seemi Pasha VOICES FROM SHAHEEN BAGH: FEBRUARY-MARCH 2020 Seemi Pasha IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT, AZADI…—FRAGMENTS; DECEMBER 2019 TO MID-FEBRUARY 2020 Sarover Zaidi and Samprati Pani I FOUND MY COUNTRY IN SHAHEEN BAGH Mustafa Quraishi HOW SHAHEEN BAGH BECAME A SYMBOL OF DIALOGUE AND SOLIDARITY Zeyad Masroor Khan

PART TWO: THE IDEA OF SHAHEEN BAGH

THE MESSAGE Nayantara Sahgal MAHATMA GANDHI WOULD HAVE APPROVED Harsh Mander OCCUPYING STREETS: WOMEN IN THE VANGUARD OF THE ANTI-CAA STRUGGLE Zoya Hasan MUSLIM HAIN HUM WATAN HAI HINDUSTAN HUMAARA Nizam Pasha ROKEYA’S CHILDREN IN PARK CIRCUS Nazes Afroz THE SHAHEEN BAGHS OF UTTAR PRADESH Subhashini Ali WHY WOMEN ARE AT GREATER RISK WITH NPR/NRC Renuka Vishwanathan CHILDREN IN PROTESTS AND CHILDREN WHO PROTEST Enakshi Ganguly MUSLIMS AMIDST THE STORM OF HINDUTVA: HOW MUSLIMS ARE CREATING A NEW VOCABULARY OF SECULARISM FOR INDIAN DEMOCRACY Sharik Laliwala WHO IS AFRAID OF THE INDIAN CITIZEN? Nandita Haksar

THE LIGHT OF SHAHEEN BAGH Apoorvanand

PART THREE: A RIOT, A WITCH-HUNT TERROR AND ITS AFTERMATH Seemi Pasha DISSENT IS CONTAGIOUS Anirban Bhattacharya AFTERWORD Seema Mustafa NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

Poster by Sahej Rahal, courtesy The Citizen.

INTRODUCTION THE IDEA OF SHAHEEN BAGH On the night of 15 December 2019, a handful of Muslim women came out of their homes in Shaheen Bagh, a little-known locality in southeast Delhi, to protest against the government’s controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), 2019, which introduces religion as a factor in granting Indian citizenship. There is always a moment in protests across the world, through history, that changes the course of politics without people quite realising what really happened, or why. And this was one such moment, when the group of women came out and occupied a road, staging a public protest for the first time in their lives. It did not seem unusual or strange or iconic to them, as they did what men and women across India had already started doing—coming out to demonstrate against a piece of legislation that sought to discriminate against the minorities and bring into question their future as citizens in the country they had chosen to live in despite the option of a theocratic Muslim nation, Pakistan, given to them at the time of Partition. Led by elderly women in their eighties—who subsequently came to be known as the ‘dadis’ of Shaheen Bagh, even as many of us, rejecting the patriarchy implicit in that appellation, insisted on calling them ‘nanis’—this group of women did what seemed to them very natural. They came out of their homes to safeguard their homes. To ensure that their citizenship was not brought into question, that their youth remained assured of a future as equal citizens of India, and that their menfolk remained safe and secure. The women felt that they had no choice but to come out on the streets, as the CAA merged into the five or six years of continuous repression and

victimisation of Muslims, especially Muslim men, across India—the lynchings, the regular detentions and arrests. It was as if something had snapped. As one of the women at Shaheen Bagh told this writer, ‘We knew we had no choice left but to come out together if we wanted to survive.’

Photo by Agneya, courtesy The Citizen. A question of survival, with dignity and respect—which they all knew, with the wisdom of the traditional homemaker in India—was linked directly to equality and security, conditions that could be protected only through secularism and the Constitution of India. These linkages were not articulated immediately; but the longer the women stayed on the streets and the more time they had to reflect, they realised that there were connections that their minds had made automatically but their intellect had still to decipher. And the street made it easy for them to understand—not just the linkages, but the power of secular unity. The women slowly found a

language, they became more and more articulate, as diffidence gave way to empowerment and a realisation that by what seemed a small action, they were making history. Shaheen Bagh was the moment that broke through seemingly disparate actions and provided a binding nucleus for all the struggle and protests against the CAA. And as the days went by, against the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the National Population Register (NPR) that were also understood to be discriminatory measures undertaken by the government. The very fact that ordinary Muslim women had stepped out of their homes fired the imagination of secular India, and within hours the little protest expanded to cover all of Delhi and indeed the country. The Delhi police arrived in full force and soon closed the entire main road on both sides of the 150-metre stretch where the women were sitting, thus blocking an expanse of 2.5 kilometres to ensure that even those who did not need to be inconvenienced were put to trouble, with shops downing shutters and commuters looking for new routes amidst deep traffic jams. But all this became secondary as more and more women emerged to join the protests, Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs alike. Artists from all over Delhi arrived with their paints to record the movement; poets came to share their songs of struggle and resistance; writers and authors and lawyers and scholars could not keep away. The city’s privileged lot, who had never smelt a protest, left the comfort of their drawing rooms to ‘experience’ Shaheen Bagh and came back quietly impressed. And soon there was an endless stream of Delhiites making their way to Shaheen Bagh, the little mohalla in Okhla that most had never heard of until that moment. Young people took over a makeshift stage with a mic that amplified voices through the day and the night. Students sang and danced, activists spoke, the nanis/dadis gave endless interviews, and yet despite the swelling crowds there was always an air of seriousness and purpose around the demonstration. Azadi slogans rent the air, as the crowds stood up to sing the national anthem over and over again, and on Republic Day, 2020, hoisted the national flag

with a pride that rippled through the lakhs who had gathered at the spot. There was a camaraderie, a politeness, a hospitality that never lost its edge as men stood aside while women made their way through the crowds, and strangers smiled and wished each other in recognition of each other as India’s citizens. It was an experience of democracy that few had imagined possible in the gloom of our recent history—as a young professor from Delhi University said, ‘I come to Shaheen Bagh whenever the world outside depresses me. I find solace and peace here.’

A poster reads: Yeh ladai hum sabki hai, hum ismei jeet kar dikhayenge. Agar ab nahi lade toh baad mai pachtaynge. Photos by Agneya, courtesy The Citizen.

It became the place to go to. Privileged youngsters dropped the nightclub for Shaheen Bagh over the weekends and any number of first-timers joined the women, sat with them in solidarity, sang Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s stirring anthem, ‘Hum Dekhenge’, and raised the flag of unity and harmony. Religions, castes, class—all seemed to fade into oblivion in this tiny space that helped Delhi find its conscience. Unlikely revolutionaries—lower-middle-class Muslim women easily lost in a crowd—took the lead, laying claim to our democracy and its enduring symbols, and the rest of India followed, singing the national anthem, shouting ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’, hoisting the national flag, carrying photographs of M.K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh and scores of other heroes of the freedom struggle. Shaheen Bagh became a space for everyone who cared to drop by, with a mic and a platform to speak from, sing, raise slogans, stage plays in defence of the principles enshrined in our Constitution.

The images of sheer brutality as the Delhi police cracked down on students protesting peacefully in Jamia Millia Islamia, which got these women out on to the streets in the first place, were replaced by images of peace. Of stoic women, sitting resolute, as inclusive and pluralist Delhi milled around them in empathy and support. The grief and the anger over the attacks on the students in Jamia, in Jawaharlal Nehru University and Aligarh Muslim University, poured itself out in Shaheen Bagh where the women gave their shoulders, and dried the tears with the wisdom accumulated over eighty and ninety years of life. *** Shaheen Bagh became a first in living memory. Where women in purdah, homemakers from lower-middle-class homes, came out as one to protest against a diabolical law. Like 82-year-old Saira Bano, one of the faces of the protest. A firebrand despite her years, Saira Bano minced no words explaining why she was at the protest site, why she would not move, and why it was so important that her citizenship be recognised and protected. In her ‘I will not go until CAA goes’, she demonstrated a fierce courage that drew admiration and trust—although now there are many who are questioning this tenacity as stubbornness, but more of that in the Afterword. That she along with the other women had, in effect, busted the stereotype of the demure, caged Muslim woman was perhaps beyond Saira Bano’s understanding. She, like the others, did what she knew instinctively that she had to: protect her home, her men, her children and herself from the final straw with which the government was seeking to break their back—of citizenship. ‘We cannot bear it,’ one of the protestors said with passion. Were she and her fellow protestors reacting to the past years of sustained abuse, encouraged by members of the government—of being called anti-national, pro-Pakistan; of the targeted killings, the mob violence, the harassment, the torture? ‘I do not know about that but yes, they cannot drive us out of our homes, they cannot beat our children, they cannot take away our citizenship, this is our land, our country,’ the

middle-aged woman without a burqa said. Others sitting beside her nodded, and another woman of roughly the same age, her head covered, added, ‘I am a mother, I hurt when those children were beaten. I have to secure the home for my children now and I will sit here until they assure me of that.’ These were not political women. For Saira Bano, it was her first protest in over eight decades of her life. As it was for all of them there. They were not protesting because their men had instructed them to—in fact, they laughed when you asked them the question. ‘We are here to protect our men, not because of them,’ a woman in full burqa said. Outside the protest, in other parts of Delhi, rumours floated every other night before the Delhi state elections scheduled for early February 2020 that the police was moving in to throw out the women. But on reaching the protest site one always found calm and peace, the women untouched by the concerns raging outside. They were resolute, they would not panic under pressure. ‘We are fine, come join us,’ was their response as they sat around the makeshift stage sharing tea and homemade snacks. They laughed over rumours that they were being paid. ‘Who can pay us, who can dare?’ an older woman said. ‘This is their lie, no one will believe them,’ the women declared, confident in themselves. As the days passed, Shaheen Bagh acquired greater strength, for the women brought no malice, no anger, no abuse into their protest, and countered every allegation hurled at them with a smile and an honest and forthright response. The idea of Shaheen Bagh ignited, and became, the idea of India for hundreds of millions, because the women sitting in protest spoke a language that was not hard politics but came from the compassion of the matriarch. It was born of the love for children, and it brought with it a smile and an embrace for the youth who spent the nights sitting and singing with the women, and an affection and gentleness that made even the sceptics feel welcome. In other words, Shaheen Bagh became important because it was inclusive from the start. There was no religion or caste there. And it was the reason why it turned into what a scholar who has

spent most of her adult life on the streets ‘in some protest or the other’ described as a ‘pilgrimage for Delhiites’. A pilgrimage for all genders, classes, communities, age groups—the only walls were the barricades that the police had put up all around. Everyone mingled, no eyebrows were raised, no questions asked. Unless of course the ambience was soured by persons spewing hate or carrying guns, both of which the protestors had to face, and they did, undeterred. It wasn’t as if there was no anxiety, but as one woman said, ‘I don’t know where the fear has gone.’ The idea of women sitting through the cold, leaving their homes for the streets, taking their children with them—one even suffering a loss—touched the generally cold and callous Delhi heart somewhere along the way, to a point where the nasty, high-velocity campaign against the protest at Shaheen Bagh that the BJP ran during the Delhi Assembly elections failed completely. It did not bring the party to power in the Capital.

Photos courtesy Nazes Afroz. In the process, the protest empowered women. There was never any doubt that women were in the lead. They were sitting on dharna, they commanded the stage, they spoke to the media. Women volunteers managed the crowds with smiles and polite instructions, and the male volunteers deferred to them. In Delhi’s embrace, the women blossomed into leaders who brought civility, culture, compassion, empathy, honesty and courage to the political discourse.

Photo courtesy Mustafa Quraishi. They were not aligned with any political party, which was among their greatest strengths. They did not even speak against the BJP, only the CAA, NPR and NRC. There was no hate terminology at all, just a quiet resistance—‘We will go if they agree and withdraw the CAA’; a hunkering down against the hate campaign; holding hands for courage to withstand the threats. There was no appeal from within the amazingly disciplined women to vote for or against any political party during the Delhi elections. On counting day, Shaheen Bagh observed silence as a protest against the continuing attack on Jamia. No elation, no sweets, nothing, as the election results were announced. Just black bands over their mouths, to keep the focus on the reason they were sitting in protest: Against CAA-NRC-NPR and against violence. For peace and for the security of their children. The heightened feeling of empowerment had some of us smiling. ‘How will you go back and lead your old lives after all this?’ we asked. One of them laughed in response, ‘Very easily; this [protest] has not been easy.’ Indeed, it wasn’t, and in recognition of

this the men and youth from the area stood by all the time. Every now and again there were appeals on social media—‘Please come in large numbers, the women are under threat of police assault.’ Or similar words. And hundreds would reach the spot, all volunteers coming from different parts of the city. Days before the elections, when a right-wing group gave a call to all its supporters to storm Shaheen Bagh, different groups, organisations and individuals— including three Members of Parliament— reached Shaheen Bagh and stayed through the day and into the night until the threat of attack had been averted. The role of the women during these tense times was to keep calm, and keep everyone else calm. This, they succeeded in doing admirably, as the threat was constant, and attack imminent almost every day. That the protest was led by Muslim women triggered not just appreciation but a chain reaction. The very fact that the women were able to put an entire community, targeted and pilloried over the past several years, back into the mainstream of India’s secular and democratic structure was no mean accomplishment. That the women could stand up and be counted in burqas and hijabs without being defensive was a remarkable turn of events. Before Shaheen Bagh, the young people of India had set the course after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statement that those who were opposing the CAA and spreading violence could be recognised by their clothes. In the days following this statement, in rally after rally young Indians reacted by challenging politicians and media persons to guess their identity by their clothes. They put out videos where a woman with a headscarf described herself as Hindu by birth, and a girl in jeans as Muslim, and so on. They effectively punctured the prime minister’s argument in a manner that gave new confidence to the Indian Muslim, and this was now evident at Shaheen Bagh. The dress became secondary to the protest, as indeed did religious identity, as every evening the protest site became a mesh of pluralist India. And young women, almost in a cathartic reaction, came out in headscarves with newfound assertion and pride. ***

Shaheen Bagh, thus, became the pièce de résistance that the government could not simply send its police to remove. Despite the sound and fury unleashed by the ruling party, there was little it could do to the women, with their babies and young children, who refused to move in the face of threats thrown at them over and over again. They did not panic, they did not grovel, they did not abuse, they just stayed the course. Even the Supreme Court embraced protest as part of democracy, and appointed mediators to speak with the women of Shaheen Bagh and reach a solution so that the protest could continue but the roads in the area could be reopened. The mediators were carefully chosen from persons who carry credibility and who have the stature and the respect that is required to reach a mutual agreement—senior Supreme Court advocates Sanjay Hegde and Sadhana Ramachandran, and former bureaucrat Wajahat Habibullah. Hegde has in the recent past appeared for citizens excluded from the NRC, and in a habeas corpus case on Kashmir. Sadhana Ramachandran has been secretary of the Arbitration Department at the Delhi High Court, while Wajahat Habibullah is a former chief information commissioner who also served as the chairperson of the National Commission for Minorities. The first finding of the mediators was that most of the roads around Shaheen Bagh had been blocked by the police using the protest as an excuse. This validated what the women had been telling the media over and over again— that there was no need to close all the roads, and the police had done so deliberately to influence public opinion against them. After the mediators intervened, one of the main roads was opened for a short while and then closed again without any reasons being given. The importance of Shaheen Bagh was felt, or rather confirmed again, during the elections to the Delhi Assembly. While journalists might give the ruling regime at the Centre the benefit of doubt, the hundreds of women gathered at any given time at Shaheen Bagh had known for a long while that they were under concerted attack by the establishment, and that the attacks would be intensified as the elections approached.

Union Home Minister Amit Shah set the pace, as he usually does, in the run up to the Assembly polls when he identified this one protest in Delhi—amongst the hundreds across the country, many of them also of a sit-in nature—as a danger to the city and the country and urged his constituents to vote for the BJP so that another Shaheen Bagh could ‘never’ take place again. At one of his election rallies, he asked people to press the button on the electronic voting machine so hard that those sitting at Shaheen Bagh would feel the current. The cue was picked up. A minister in the government shouted slogans urging the voters to ‘shoot the traitors’. A BJP leader contesting the Delhi elections described the peaceful protestors at Shaheen Bagh as rapists and killers ‘who will enter your homes’ if they were not removed. A man with a gun jumped into the protests shouting against the ‘traitors’ and threatening to get rid of them. He fired into the crowd, injuring a young student. He was followed a few days later by another gunman. And yet another. Clearly the protest had begun to hurt. It agitated the powers that be sufficiently for the home minister to specifically target the core group of some 200-odd women who were the only constant at Shaheen Bagh while others came and went in the hundreds and the thousands. Though quite prepared to use brutal force to settle scores, which was so visible on the university campuses at the end of 2019, the government knew that images of women and children being beaten and dragged away could backfire. Hence the threats, and the targeting; the men with guns being part of the tactics to scare and intimidate. The government recognised, as did most Indians, the importance of Shaheen Bagh; of the idea behind this peaceful women-led protest that had kindled support across India and indeed the world, making media headlines. It was a powerful and glorious idea, and it was no surprise that many other Shaheen Baghs had come up across the country. Even in Uttar Pradesh, that had borne the brunt of police violence and a savage government crackdown during the initial CAA protests. Women began sit-in protests in Kanpur, Allahabad, Lucknow, Azamgarh—the last was cleared by police action that left women

with severe head injuries. At Lucknow’s Ghantaghar, the women stood up to threats and to the police and continued their protest for several days. In Malegaon, Maharashtra, almost a lakh of women— mainly Muslims—staged an enormous protest march. Shaheen Bagh thus became the epicentre of protests for a secular, democratic India. And inspired the minorities who joined the protests—sometimes led the protests—to reclaim the Republic in a secular assertion never witnessed in this form in independent India. Thousands and lakhs marched in different towns and cities—mostly ignored by the mainstream media—along with other communities to proclaim their citizenship, and question the right of any political entity to question it. Till this moment, the lynchings, the targeted attacks in different parts of India had all been quietly absorbed by the Muslims. Except for the odd spot demonstration, they had stayed indoors, waiting for the storm to pass. But as one senior writer from Lucknow said, CAA made it clear that the storm was not going to pass; it had entered their homes. And so the Indian Muslim had risen, peacefully, in the best tradition of patriotism and with quiet determination. For the first time since Independence, Muslims came out on the streets to assert their citizenship, their pride in India, their respect for the Constitution and the Tricolour, and above all, their faith that they would be heard. That ‘she’ had risen made it far more fundamental and serious, as women in any protest through history emerge when the last straw has broken. And this was a genuine people’s protest, almost Gandhian in its dignity, courage and moral force. A protest without identifiable leadership, a protest that challenged the stereotyping of Muslims and Muslim women, a protest that shunned established leadership both within the community and outside, a protest that demonstrated like none else that a people’s movement does not need the current Opposition or the so-called Muslim leadership to keep it going. This is one of the most important messages to come out of Shaheen Bagh, and one that emboldened citizens to take the lead instead of waiting for the local Opposition leader or some

organisation. No one knew then or now who was organising Shaheen Bagh. Everyone was, and no one was. As a government official exclaimed exasperatedly, ‘When it comes to boasting everyone says they are [the] organisers, but when it comes to moving Shaheen Bagh out of the streets everyone disappears and seems to have no idea who is organising it.’ Shaheen Bagh also assumed importance as it provided leadership at a time when the Opposition was fragmented at best; weak and cowardly, and without any leader with the ability to speak at a national level—a fact realised by the BJP policy makers who have used it fully to their advantage. Shaheen Bagh filled that void without even trying to. It acquired a national and indeed an international dimension, and inspired protests across the country against the CAA, NPR and NRC. And that too by remaining completely out of the political arena, which was easy because the women leading the protest did not know, nor did they care to know, the language of divisive politics. For them, all were welcome so long as they supported their cause by non-violent means; they came with no baggage of prejudice and dislikes. All they wanted was for the government to withdraw the Act. In this cause, everyone committed to justice and equality was an ally. For citizens from across the country, this little colony became an oasis where they could breathe in the fresh air of unity in diversity; there was a little something for everyone who visited the area, but over and above it all, Shaheen Bagh was an assertion of India’s conscience: ‘We are together, we care.’ It was for this reason that the authorities felt so threatened by Shaheen Bagh, and it was also for this reason that they could not unleash the kind of violence there that they had in the universities. But there would be violence. Unimaginable violence. *** Inspired by Shaheen Bagh, but out of the media headlines, women began sit-in protests in different localities in northeast Delhi. The second protest started at Seelampuri, the third at Kardampuri—all

within a few days of Shaheen Bagh. These protests continued peacefully till after the Delhi Assembly elections, which the BJP lost. Women of these and adjacent localities joined the protests every day, celebrating Republic Day with the same gusto as in Shaheen Bagh, with the national flag being hoisted, and the national anthem along with patriotic songs being sung by the protestors to strengthen their demand for the withdrawal of CAA-NPR-NRC. Then came the downslide, in an area of Delhi least expected to erupt. The mini Shaheen Baghs were put down in an orgy of violence that left bodies in drains, youth with hands chopped off by machetes, gunshot deaths and severe injuries, arson and destruction of homes and shops. Terror reigned in the congested gullies that have still not recovered from the horrific assault, and where the process of rehabilitation, let alone compensation, has barely begun. This violence opened an entirely new chapter that is playing out even as we write. It began on 22 February 2020.About 500 women gathered peacefully at Jaffrabad Metro chowk to start an indefinite sit-in, as had the women in the areas mentioned above. There was no indication at the time of the kind of violence that would follow. Reports suggest that the women blocked the main road and said they would move only after the CAA was withdrawn. However, on 23 February sudden tension gripped the entire area after a rally was organised at adjacent Maujpur by the BJP leader Kapil Mishra. Spewing venom, he said that the anti-CAA protestors should be removed within three days by the police, and if they were not, his people would clear them out. A senior policeman standing beside Mishra did not stop or interrupt him. Soon after, stone pelting began in the area, although at the first instance this seemed to have been brought under some kind of control by the heavy police contingent guarding the BJP rally. By 24 February the entire area erupted in violence, with pitched battles between the two communities being replaced within hours by large-scale attacks by seemingly organised mobs. The violence went out of control by the morning of 25 February, engulfing Maujpur, Chand Bagh, Kardampuri, Bhajanpura, Gokalpuri,

Khajuri Khas, Yamuna Vihar and Brijpuri, and of course Jaffrabad. Mosques were desecrated and burnt, Muslims trapped inside their homes were set on fire by the mobs, with the police either ineffective, or absent or, as several eyewitnesses have told subsequent fact-finding teams, complicit. Fortunately, neighbours sheltered neighbours, though in some cases they too joined the mobs in identifying and targeting houses. Armed mobs took over the roads and gullies, stopping passersby to establish their religious identities. Muslims were beaten, their belongings looted, their vehicles set on fire. Journalists were attacked, one even shot at. A photojournalist’s motorcycle was torched. The injured were stopped from getting medical help. Finally, activists moved the Delhi High Court that held an emergency meeting to direct the authorities to ensure that emergency services reached the wounded and fire tenders were allowed into the localities. The death toll topped fifty-five—and still counting, at the time of writing, as locals claim that bodies are yet to be recovered, and some will perhaps never be recovered. Hundreds were injured but were too scared of going to the hospital. A video of the Delhi police beating five youth and making them sing the national anthem while they lay bleeding and moaning on the road went viral. The mother of one of the young boys, Faizan, was inconsolable. She had been among the women celebrating Republic Day as they hoisted the Indian flag at the anti-CAA protest site at Kardampuri chowk. Exactly a month later, her son had died of deep injuries inflicted by men charged with defending lives. The story of Faizan and his mother tells us all that we need to know about the reason why the anti-CAA-NRC-NPR movement has drawn millions of Indian citizens. Millions who see in the movement a hope for justice and security; or who see it, at least, as a way to prevent a disastrous worsening of their precarious existence in the country of their birth, the country they call home. On 24 February, tension had mounted in Kardampuri and the adjoining localities of northeast Delhi following Kapil Mishra’s infamous speech— locals say a mob started collecting at Maujpur chowk, and word spread of

possible violence. Faizan, a 23-year-old daily wage worker, returned home that evening to find that his mother had gone to the protest site, as she had been doing regularly for some days. Worried for her safety, he went back to the main road to look for her, when hell broke loose. He ran along with everyone else who was running ‘from the advancing mob’ when he was grabbed by Delhi policemen who took him aside and, as was learnt later, beat him relentlessly. According to news reports, bleeding and barely conscious, Faizan was then taken not to a hospital but the Jyoti Nagar police station. He was released over twenty-four hours later. He struggled for life for a day, and finally succumbed to his injuries. His mother, a widow, wailed and sobbed, unable to get over the death of her young son. Her other sons are married, with families of their own to look after, and one is unemployed. Faizan, she told us, was the only one who brought in some money for her. In the tiny room where she lived, bare except for a few utensils and a takht (wooden bed) where a grandson sat listless along with her married daughter, poverty peeped at us from every crack and crevice. In localities such as these—almost all of them poor and neglected areas, with small businesses dogged by rampant unemployment—the protests were a demand for basic rights and dignity, for better living conditions and a less uncertain future. But the protests became another reason to stigmatise and demonise Muslims, and an excuse for what was clearly an orchestrated attack, as if to punish them for asserting themselves and refusing to be beaten down. A fact-finding team of senior former civil servants observed: On 12th March 2020, eleven members of the Constitutional Conduct Group visited violence affected areas of North East Delhi including Shiv Vihar, Brijpuri and Mustafabad. It is distressing that, even more than two weeks after the violence, the group did not see much evidence of any serious outreach by political parties to provide mental or physical support to victims of violence. There is no serious effort to re-establish much needed confidence building measures between communities…

The group learnt that there were several instances of Hindus protecting and sheltering their Muslim neighbours, some for several days. Similarly, Muslims have stood guard to protect the temples and Hindu neighbours of the area. There is no instance of damage to a single Hindu temple. However, we were told that in some cases, the neighbours facilitated identification of Muslim houses and properties. The visit revealed that though there were some properties owned by Hindus which were damaged and burnt as well, there were a much larger number of properties and houses owned by Muslims which were looted, burnt and badly damaged. The group did not see any camp for Hindus displaced from their homes. The general impression the group gathered was that on 23 February 2020, miscreants and rioters from both Muslim and Hindu communities fought pitched battles and damaged properties of the other community. On 24 and 25 February 2020, however, the rioting seemed to have become well organised with rioters seen wearing helmets and bearing sharp weapons, targeting the homes and businesses of Muslims. The group is appalled that the police commissioner, Delhi, failed to mobilise adequate force and did not impose curfew and issue shoot at sight orders. Much of the arson, damage and deaths could have been prevented had the police commissioner exercised his duty to maintain law and order on the very first day of violence, 23 February. He could have imposed curfew and ordered firing on any mob indulging in violence and arson. We hope that he was not waiting for instructions from anyone as he had all the powers under the Criminal Procedure Code to bring the situation under control. It was due to this failure that so many lives were lost and the incident is being referred to as a pogrom.

That a protest which started as peaceful and inclusive, and remained so for a hundred days despite every kind of threat and provocation, should lead to, albeit indirectly, such bloodshed and violence, is a tragedy of our times. And that the violence seemed planned and targeted a specific community—just as the ongoing arrests of the alleged perpetrators are planned and brazenly partisan—is a tragic sign of our times. Nonetheless, for those hundred days before the carnage, the women of Shaheen Bagh gave Delhi a living heart, a gift of

togetherness, hope and self-confidence. It should continue to inspire and enlighten the nation long after 24 March 2020, when a global pandemic achieved what hate speeches and gun-wielding goons could not, and forced the women back into their homes. But a seed has been sown. India has been changed, and its democracy strengthened. SEEMA MUSTAFA

A mural at Shaheen Bagh made during the protests. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

TIMELINE OF A PROTEST 4 December 2019: The Union Cabinet clears the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill to be introduced in the Parliament. Protests erupt in northeast India, beginning in Guwahati, Assam and Agartala, Tripura. Some demonstrations turn violent. 9 December 2019: The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill is introduced in the Lok Sabha by Union Home Minister Amit Shah. The Bill passes with 311 votes in favour and eighty votes against it. 11 December 2019: The Bill is introduced and passed in Rajya Sabha with 125 votes for and 105 votes against. 12 December 2019: The Bill receives the president’s assent, officially assuming the status of an Act, as the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019. The Ministry of Home Affairs issues a statement that the Act will come into force from 10 January 2020. Protests erupt across the country. 15 December 2019: Over 2000 students of Jamia Millia University gather to protest against the CAA. In the evening, police officers enter the campus and attack the unarmed students. They also storm into the main library, ransack it and beat up students. Residents from neighbouring Shaheen Bagh and nearby localities come into the streets. The Shaheen Bagh sit-in protest begins. A small number of them block Kalindi Kunj Road. Elderly women join the protest over the next few days. 25 December 2019: In ten days, a kilometre-long stretch of the six-lane highway is blockaded by hundreds of protestors. 31 December 2019: Hundreds of women, joined by a large crowd of citizens from different areas of Delhi, ring in the New Year

by singing the national anthem, followed by chants of Inquilab Zindabad. Several artists, activists and social workers are also in the crowd. The national flag is waved and songs are sung as the protestors brave the second coldest December recorded in 118 years and continue the protest well into the night. 2 January 2020: Sharjeel Imam, one of the organisers and volunteers of the Shaheen Bagh protest, ‘calls off’ the road blockade scheduled for the day through a Facebook post, to avoid political parties ‘trying to tarnish the image of the movement’. He states that the protest is being withdrawn to avoid ‘impending violence from party goons’ and the ‘politicisation of the stage by parties’. Two other prominent organisers back out following Imam’s post. However, the local women protestors state they will continue to agitate until the CAA is repealed. 10 January 2020: Delhi High Court dismisses a plea to remove the protestors from Shaheen Bagh and clear road blockades. 12 January 2020: The largest gathering of protestors is reported at Shaheen Bagh. People of different faiths participate in a ‘sarva dharma sambhava’ or ‘Jashn-e-Ekta’ ceremony, in which scriptures from the Geeta, the Bible and the Quran are read and Gurbani performed. After which, the Preamble of the Constitution is read out. 14 January 2020: The Delhi High Court disposes a petition seeking removal of barricades from the Shaheen Bagh— Kalindi Kunj road, stating that the police has the power to control traffic wherever protests are going on. Later, the petitioner lawyer-activist Amit Sahni files a special leave petition in the Supreme Court seeking directives to ensure smooth flow of traffic. Delhi Police say they will not use force to remove anti-CAA demonstrators while the protestors refuse to move from the protest site. Instead, the protestors state they will make way for school buses as they have been doing for ambulances. 15 January 2020: Hundreds of Sikh farmers from various districts of Punjab (including Moga, Barnala, Ludhiana, Patiala, Sangrur)

under the banner of Kisan Union join the Shaheen Bagh protest, extending their solidarity to the women protestors and demanding the contentious Act be withdrawn. They also set up a langar on the spot. 17 January 2020: A bus stop is converted into a library—the Fatima Sheikh-Savitribai Phule Library—on the fourth death anniversary of Rohith Vemula. Lieutenant governor of Delhi, Anil Baijal, directs the commissioner of police, Delhi, to ‘exercise the powers of detaining authority’ under the National Security Act, 1980 for three months, between 19 January and 18 April 2020. The Ministry of Home Affairs later clarifies this to be a routine order. 19 January 2020: Shaheen Bagh protestors call for a public gathering in solidarity with Kashmiri Pandits. A number of Kashmiri Pandits, including M.K. Raina and Inder Salim, take stage to give speeches. 21 January 2020: Delhi Lt Governor Anil Baijal meets an eightmember delegation of Shaheen Bagh protestors who submit a memorandum of their demands, including withdrawal of the CAA. Baijal appeals to the protestors to call off the agitation ‘in view of continued inconvenience to school children, patients, daily commuters, local residents, etc. due to blockade of road’. The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) requests concerned authorities to make arrangements for counselling children at the Shaheen Bagh protest site. 23 January 2020: Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad visits Shaheen Bagh. He praises the bravery of the women and states that the central government would have to ‘go over our corpses’ to implement the CAA. 26 January 2020: Tens of thousands of protestors gather at Shaheen Bagh to celebrate Republic Day. The national flag is hoisted by three elderly women who have come to be known as the

‘Shaheen Bagh dadis’, reportedly accompanied by the mother of former Hyderabad Central University scholar, Rohith Vemula, and the mother of the missing JNU student, Najeeb. Umar Khalid and MLA from Vadgam (Gujarat) constituency, Jignesh Mevani, also visit Shaheen Bagh.

assembly

30 January 2020: Four-month-old, Mohammed Jahan, son of a protestor at Shaheen Bagh, dies of exposure to the cold. 1 February 2020: Union Law Minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, tweets that the government is ready to communicate with the Shaheen Bagh protestors and clear any doubts they have against the CAA, but in a ‘structured form’. A man fires into the air at the Shaheen Bagh protest, reportedly shouting ‘Hindu Rashtra zindabad’ before firing two rounds. He was overpowered by locals and taken into police custody. 4 February 2020: BJP leader Nand Kishore Garg files a petition seeking an urgent hearing in the Supreme Court, asking the top court to remove protestors occupying the Kalindi Kunj road. The plea states that it is the duty of the state to protect the ‘fundamental rights of its citizens, who have been facing trouble due to the road blockade’. The SC directs Garg to approach the mentioning officer for an early date. 7 February 2020: The Supreme Court postpones the hearing of two petitions—by BJP leader Nand Kishore Garg and advocate Amit Sahni—seeking removal of protestors, till after the Delhi Assembly elections scheduled for 8 February. The SC states it did not want to ‘influence’ the election. 10 February 2020: The Supreme Court draws the attention of protestors to the inconvenience caused to the general public. The SC issues a notice to the government and Delhi Police saying the people have a ‘right to protest’, however this cannot be an ‘indefinite protest in a common area’. The court refuses to pass an interim

order without hearing the ‘other side’, i.e., the protestors. The matter is scheduled to be heard on 17 February. 14 February 2020: Hundreds gather and pay their respects to the forty CRPF personnel who were killed in Pulwama on 14 February 2019, observing a one-minute silence for the soldiers. Schoolchildren stage dance performances to patriotic songs. 17 February 2020: The Supreme Court appoints senior advocates Sanjay Hegde and Sadhana Ramachandran as interlocutors to speak with the Shaheen Bagh protestors, stating that people have a right to protest but the blocking of public roads is ‘troubling’ even as designated protest areas exist. The court asks the interlocutors to persuade protestors to move to an alternative site. It states that the interlocutors could take the assistance of former chief information commissioner Wajahat Habibullah when speaking with protestors. The next hearing is scheduled for 24 February. 19 February 2020: SC-appointed interlocutors reach out to Shaheen Bagh protestors in their first interaction, attempting to persuade protestors to move to another site. 20 February 2020: Interlocutors’ second visit to Shaheen Bagh protest site. Protestors remain firm on continuing their sit-in protest until the CAA is withdrawn. 21 February 2020: Third round of talks. 22 February 2020: Fourth round of talks. Protestors demand ‘security’. In addition to Shaheen Bagh, around thousand protestors begin a sit-in protest near the Jaffrabad Metro Station. 23 February 2020: Former chief information commissioner Wajahat Habibullah files an affidavit in the Supreme Court stating that the anti-CAA protests are peaceful. The affidavit also mentions that road blockades put up by the Delhi Police at five points unconnected with the Shaheen Bagh protest are responsible for the traffic disruption and inconvenience.

BJP leader Kapil Mishra, at a rally in Maujpur, demands that the Delhi Police clear the various sit-in protests, and threatens that if this is not done in three days, he and his supporters will take matters into their hands. Following his speech, violence erupts in parts of northeast Delhi, starting with Maujpur, Karawal Nagar and Babarpur. Over the next two days, it spreads to Kardampuri, Gokulpuri, Seelampur, Jaffrabad, Chand Bagh, Shivpuri, Brahmapuri, Shahdara, Durgapuri, Gamri and Bhajanpura. 24 February 2020: SC interlocutors file their ‘sealed cover’ report in the Supreme Court as the riots continue to rage in northeast Delhi. The SC schedules the matter to be heard on 26 February. 26 February 2020: In light of the northeast Delhi riots, the Supreme Court postpones the hearing to 23 March. 3 March 2020: Second phase of talks between SC-appointed interlocutors and Shaheen Bagh protestors begin wherein the interlocutors tell the protestors to come up with a ‘positive solution’. 17 March 2020: After reports of rising Covid-19 cases in India, Delhi chief minister bans gatherings of more than fifty people. In compliance with the order, the number of women sitting at the protest site is reduced to fifty. 22 March 2020: The protest continues with just five members sitting at the site in light of the ‘Janta curfew’ announced by the prime minister on 20 March 2020. Shoes and slippers are placed across the protest site as symbolic of the supporting masses. 24 March 2020: The protest ends as the Delhi Police clears the site due to the lockdown imposed across the country as a precautionary measure against Covid-19. April 2020: Delhi Police starts filing cases against, and arresting, student leaders, activists and ordinary anti-CAA protestors for ‘planning’ and ‘provoking’ the riots in northeast Delhi. No cases are filed against Kapil Mishra and other BJP leaders and supporters.

Part One

GROUND REPORTS FROM A PROTEST

WOMEN, VIOLENCE AND DEMOCRACY Seemi Pasha 1964 Kolkata: Anti-Muslim riots in Calcutta in retaliation for antiHindu violence in East Pakistan. 1969 Gujarat: Communal clashes between Hindus and Muslims across Gujarat. Out of the 512 killed, according to police records, 430 are Muslims. 1970 Bhiwandi: Anti-Muslim riots in Bhiwandi, Jalgaon and Mahad in Maharashtra following tension between Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Jana Sangh and Shiv Sena and Muslim League and Jamat-e-Islami. Two hundred and fifty people are killed. 1980 Moradabad: Uttar Pradesh police and Provincial Armed Constabulary open fire on people offering Eid prayers at the Moradabad Eidgah. Around 300 Muslims are killed. 1983 Nellie: All Assam Students’ Union organises protests against the Central Government’s refusal to remove names of alleged ‘foreigners’ (Bangladeshis) from electoral rolls. Mob surrounds Nellie and neighbouring villages; more than 1800 Muslims are killed over six hours, a majority of them women and children. 1987 Hashimpura: Provincial Armed Constabulary arrest forty-five young Muslim men and take them in a truck to the city outskirts where they are lined up and shot. 1989 Bhagalpur: Clashes break out between members of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and Muslim residents. Hindu-Muslim riots last for two months, over 1000 people are killed, of whom more than 900 are Muslims; 50,000 people are displaced.

1992 Bombay: More than 1000 people are killed in riots between Muslims and members of the Shiv Sena and BJP following the demolition of the Babri Masjid. 2002 Gujarat: Hindu mobs go on a rampage across the state following reports that Muslims in Godhra had set fire to a train carriage, killing fifty-eight Hindu pilgrims. More than 2000 Muslims are killed in riots lasting close to four months. 2013 Muzaffarnagar: Close to seventy people are killed and hundreds injured in riots between Hindu Jats and Muslims in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts triggered by an ‘eveteasing’ incident. 2020 Delhi: A day after BJP leader Kapil Mishra threatens— in the presence of policemen—to forcibly clear a road in northeast Delhi of mostly Muslim women demonstrating against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), clashes break out between supporters and opponents of CAA-NRC. Within hours, mobs take over the streets. Over four days, homes and shops owned by Muslims are ransacked, looted and burnt down; mosques are desecrated and set ablaze. Fifty-three deaths are confirmed. Fifty-one of the dead are identified, of whom thirty-six are Muslim. Hundreds are displaced, all of them Muslim. *** They bolted the doors, locked the windows, gathered their children around them and sat in silence. Waiting. Waiting for the storm to pass, for the men to come back alive; trembling with fear, a prayer on their lips, resigned to their fate. If they were caught outside the confines of their four walls, or when mobs broke into their homes, the women were sexually brutalised, often in front of their families. They seldom fought back. Out of thousands who have suffered this fate, there has only been one, Bilkis Bano, who managed to secure a conviction for rape in a communal riot. She was nineteen years old and pregnant when riots broke out in Gujarat in 2002. She was

gangraped by eleven men, and seven members of her family were killed before her eyes. No one knows why people across the country did not come out on the streets to protest against the riots and the impunity with which the state machinery shielded the perpetrators. Why was the abrogation of Article 370 and suppression of civil liberties in Kashmir met with silence in the rest of India? If Muslim women did not support criminalisation of Triple Talaq, why didn’t we see an uprising against the right-wing ‘rescue mission’ launched in their name? If all non-bigoted, fair-minded people, and not just Muslims, saw double standards in the Supreme Court’s Ayodhya verdict, why didn’t we see a public protest? Was it resignation, fear or apathy? Are the openly communal CAA and NRC the price we are paying for our history of silence? Did the protest in Shaheen Bagh come too late, or was it just in time to save our democracy? Can the women of a once invisible ghetto change the course of history and sustain the unprecedented people’s movement that they ignited? Or is their uprising now over—an aberration which is already being inverted, corrected with time? ***

THE NIGHT OF BROKEN GLASS15 DECEMBER 2019 Something snapped inside them that night. Maybe it was the fragile trust they had in the men in uniform who had taken an oath to protect them; or the belief, severely tested in recent years, that the state might be unfair to them but it would never publicly violate them. They had always been offered assurances, however empty, that the state machinery was there to protect them. Call it naivety, but it came from the conviction that as citizens of the world’s largest and uniquely secular democracy they enjoyed certain privileges. That night they realised they had no one to turn to but one another.

As the sound of gunshots reverberated in Jamia Millia Islamia— where students had been demonstrating peacefully against the CAA —and the air filled with clouds of tear gas, people from nearby ghettoes started pouring out onto the streets. There was fear, panic, disbelief and chaos. What if their children had been shot, brutalised or detained? People started knocking on their neighbours’ doors and informing those who hadn’t heard the news. Within minutes their phones were buzzing with videos of students being dragged into the streets by policemen and mercilessly assaulted with lathis. There were reports of cops entering the campus library, the university mosque, classrooms and even the girls’ hostel. As pictures of bleeding and battered students went viral, people started running towards the university campus to save their children. Thirty-eight-year-old Malka, a resident of Shaheen Bagh, said she was preparing dinner when she got a call from a sobbing friend whose daughter was trapped inside the campus. She left the vegetables half-cut on the kitchen counter, the masala half-cooked on the stove, picked up her dupatta and made a dash for the door. ‘By the time I reached [Jamia] it was almost dark. We could not make out faces but we saw girls jumping over the boundary walls and running towards adjoining Batla House. My friend could not find her daughter and her mobile phone was unreachable. I will never forget that hour we spent walking around looking for her. We were terrified. We finally got a call from her saying that she had managed to get away.’ Even after she realised that her friend’s daughter was safe, Malka stayed behind on campus trying to help as many students as she could. Nineteen-year-old Humza (name changed), who passed out of the university-run senior secondary school last year, recalled that he was studying in the campus library when a team of cops in riot gear and armed with lathis barged in. ‘They started breaking windows and chairs and throwing books on the floor. We were completely taken by surprise. We got up and started running out from the back but they chased after us saying, “Saale katue, tumhe azadi chahiye? Aao hum dete hain azadi (You want freedom, come, we’ll give you a taste

of freedom).”’ (‘Katue’, a derogatory term for men who are circumcised, is used almost exclusively to refer to Muslim men.) Twenty-seven-year-old Mushtaq (name changed), who runs a small business in the neighbourhood, got onto a bike and rushed to the university campus when he heard the news. ‘There were close to two lakh people on the streets all over Okhla. We reached the campus and started taking injured students to nearby hospitals. We did not know what else to do.’ Mushtaq could not quite remember who asked him to go to Shaheen Bagh. ‘Some messages were sent out asking people to reach the bus stop at Shaheen Bagh near Kalindi Kunj.’ When he reached there, he found close to fifteen thousand people standing on the road that connects Delhi with Noida. ‘We sat down on the pavements and on the road and started talking about what needed to be done. Some people arrived with anti-CAA posters and Tricolours. Someone suggested that we block the road in protest. We were sitting on the road already and we decided to continue sitting,’ he said. There was no grand plan, no design and no intention to start a movement from Shaheen Bagh, but one thing led to another and before they knew it, they were at the centre of a powerful protest. The men who had managed to block traffic for almost six days, following the police crackdown in Jamia, knew that the cops could scuttle their protest whenever they wanted, so a handful of women offered to sit there. Someone loaded a few carpets and blankets onto a rickshaw and brought them to the bus stop at Shaheen Bagh. Some fifteen or so women huddled together under the cold winter sky on the first night of their historic protest. By next evening, a tent had come up to protect them from icy winds and fog. Women from the neighbourhood who were not able to sit out all day because of their household duties, started bringing hot tea and home-cooked food in the evenings. Someone set up a small music system to play patriotic songs from old Bollywood films. Within a few days a stage came up with a mic for public announcements, speeches and poetry recitals. Young students from the Fine Arts Department of Jamia Millia Islamia took charge of the art work, printing and painting posters, making graffiti and putting up art installations. Volunteers

from NGOs pitched in with a medical centre and legal cell. As the crowd swelled, packets of the now infamous biryani started arriving from nearby eateries to be distributed at mealtimes. As in any organic protest, individuals and small groups started volunteering, taking charge and assuming responsibilities. Soon fluid structures started emerging from the initial chaos, but it was clear that there was no leader, organiser or, as the government would like to call it, ‘mastermind’. Nusrat Ara, 54, joined the protest on that dark night of 15 December—which became, in an unexpected and magnificent turn of events, a glorious new dawn. Nusrat’s son had been injured in the police crackdown in Jamia. He called her and told her not to worry. He said he would be spending the night with some friends and would be back the next morning. She was worried sick and too restless to stay at home, so she wrapped herself in her burqa and walked out onto the street. She saw young men sitting on the road, raising slogans of ‘Azadi’ and ‘Inquilab’. She spent the night standing on the pavement and watching, and almost without realising it, she became part of an iconic protest. She had no formal education but a month into the protest, she had started speaking better than any television expert on constitutional guarantees and individual rights. ‘At the time of elections we were all citizens and were identified by our voter ID cards. Today they are trying to differentiate between citizens on the basis of religion. We will not allow that. We are grateful to this government for bringing us out of our homes, and now that we are out we are never going to go back to that life of anonymity,’ she said, her lips pressing against the black cloth that covered her face. Here she was, a seemingly ordinary burqa-clad woman, unapologetic about her identity and her faith and not afraid to lay claim to her country and her democratic rights. What could be more natural, and yet, what could be more revolutionary? ***

SCENES FROM A PROTEST: DECEMBER 2019JANUARY 2020 It is just after 8 p.m., and bitterly cold. Inside the main tent at the protest site, scores of women of all ages, alone or with their young children, have gathered to demand that a law that grants or denies Indian citizenship on the basis of religion— and targets Muslims specifically—be withdrawn. Some of the women wear the Tricolour, their country’s flag, as a scarf or a bandanna. Some others have wrapped it around themselves like a protective armour, a shield that gives them the strength to stand up to a powerful and hostile regime. They raise slogans demanding equality and freedom from injustice. A school teacher declares that if anyone comes asking for proof of her identity, she would give her name as ‘Hindustani’ (Indian), her father’s name as ‘Bharat’ (India) and her mother’s as ‘Swatantrata’ (Freedom). And she would give her date of birth as 15 August 1947. Behind her, a poster urges people to be fearless and speak out: ‘Jo baat kehte darte hain sab, tu wohi baat likh (Write down the words that everyone is afraid to speak)’. A six-year-old accompanying his parents recites a poem: ‘We’ve set out to save the country, come walk with us / We’ve set out to save Jamia, come walk with us / We’ve set out to save the Constitution, come walk with us.’ A student, who never had a Muslim friend before she got admission into an M.A. course in Jamia, is at the protest because ‘people always defend their own community, but this is about humanity’. Her parents worry about her safety and tell her there’s no reason for her to join the protest because she’s Hindu, the CAA and NRC won’t affect her. ‘But still I’m here,’ she says. ‘We [students] are the future. If we don’t protest, who will?’ * Sarvari, 75—with snow-white hair, broken, paan-stained teeth, wrinkled neck—is one of the ‘dadis’, or grandmothers, of Shaheen Bagh who have been at the protest site from the beginning. A

resident of Deoband in Uttar Pradesh, she moved to Delhi two years ago after her son got a job in the city. She had planned to spend the rest of her days in his little flat when she heard about the CAA and NRC. Like many others who were born before Partition, Sarvari doesn’t have a birth certificate. She never received any formal education, so she cannot offer a school-leaving certificate, either. Her husband is no more, and no papers exist to prove his ‘ancestry’. And her own documents are scattered, which means that not only will her own citizenship come under the scanner but also her children’s. On most evenings, Sarvari can be found sitting and chatting with other women on a low charpai near the makeshift stage inside the main tent. ‘We are celebrating our freedom and we are fighting to ensure that this freedom is not taken away from us,’ she says. Even as she rejoices in her newfound identity there is a tinge of regret about not having spoken out earlier. ‘We did not say anything when they destroyed our mosque or when they brought in the law against Triple Talaq, but now Modi seems to have lost his way. Had we spoken out earlier, they would have never dared to bring in this CAA and NRC.’ ‘We are paying the price of silence,’ agrees 90-year-old Asma Khatoon, another ‘Dadi’ from the protest. ‘I was still quite young when the Partition of India happened and I have little recollection of how difficult it was for my family to live through it, but I will not let this country be divided again.’ The thin film of cataract in her eyes, her sunken, toothless mouth, the corns on her knuckles, the chipped fingernails and the broken green buttons on her old sweater do not do justice to her fighting spirit. ‘We did not say anything when Babri was demolished because we thought if one house of God is destroyed, ten others will come up. God will punish them in a manner he deems fit,’ she says. ‘Now Modi has forced us to come out and sit here and we will not move till he gives us a written assurance that his government is going to withdraw CAA, NRC. I don’t care if it takes six months, one year or two years, I will keep sitting here.’

This nonagenarian is determined to spend the rest of her days fighting for the cause of equality. Her courage and resilience give hope to younger women who huddle around her to listen as she speaks. * The microphone crackles as a young singer presses his mouth a little too close to the metal. Behind the stage, young volunteers manage a roster of speakers and artists who want to address the crowd. As the protest has grown bigger and older, there has been a flurry of performers queuing up for the makeshift stage—just a large table against a backdrop of posters with images of freedom fighters ranging from Gandhi, Ambedkar and Bose to Sarojini Naidu, Bhagat Singh and Ashfaqullah Khan. Local poets and activists, aspiring politicians and Bollywood stars find themselves on an equal footing before the diverse audience. All speakers and performers are judged on the basis of what they bring to the stage, their views and ideas, and not their star power. A little further away from the spotlight, sitting on a dusty red and blue carpet, amidst a sea of women, is Gul Bano. Dressed in a flowing black burqa and an animal-print headscarf, the fiftysomething Bano has been coming to the protest every day carrying a laminated sepia-toned photograph. ‘This is our great grandfather, his name was Gumaan,’ she says. ‘I even know his grandfather’s name. It was Jhallu. Jamman was his son and Jamman’s son was Gumaan, the man in this photograph. Gumaan’s son was Mustafa whose son was Tahir whose son is Hasrat whose son is Ubaid whose son is Hummad—who is my grandson. We’ve been here for at least eight generations. Our ancestors are buried in this land. Why should we go to Pakistan? If we did not leave in 1947, why would we leave now? This is our country. We will live here and die here.’

Photos courtesy Nazes Afroz. * Despite a massive hate campaign launched by the BJP-led government and its supporters, the protest at Shaheen Bagh only grows stronger. People from different parts of the country pour in to express their solidarity and support. In early February, a group of 450 Sikh farmers from Moga and Bhatinda districts of Punjab took private buses to Shaheen Bagh and joined the protest for a week. Chanda Singh, 72, with a flowing white beard and bright blue turban, is the vice president of the Bhartiya Kisan Union Ekta Grahan. He is one of the spokespersons for the contingent from Punjab, and he does not mince any words when he explains why he and his comrades have made the trip to Shaheen Bagh. ‘The Modi government has been trying to discredit this protest claiming that women are being forced to sit on the streets while the menfolk are sleeping in their razaais. People from the government claim that these women are being paid 500 rupees a day to sit here. They have called this place mini-Pakistan and said that these protestors are part of the tukde-tukde gang. Ministers have been saying that the people who have gathered here will rape Hindu women and vandalise the homes of Hindus. We have come here to defeat this misinformation campaign against Muslims.’ Chanda Singh’s short speech is met with a loud applause inside the small yellow tent under the foot overbridge across the road where the protest is being held. There is a sense of camaraderie here that is at once heartwarming and reassuring. Muslim and Sikh men exchange skull caps and turbans and pose for selfies in response to the prime minister’s statement that troublemakers can be identified by their clothes. A little distance from this tent, a community langar is being prepared. A group of women roll, flatten and fry pooris and a few men stir the vegetables cooking in a huge pot. The long queue outside the designated kitchen area proves that food and hunger have no religion.

Harinder Bindu, 38, is in charge of the giant teapot. When not serving steaming hot tea, she can be seen holding forth with a group of local women who have all come to love and admire her for leading the women’s contingent from Punjab. ‘We came prepared for any eventuality. We do not care if the Delhi Police arrests us, registers FIRs against us or attacks us with lathis. What we value most is the love that we have got from the people of Shaheen Bagh. It doesn’t feel like we are in an alien place, it feels like home,’ Harinder says. Momina, a local resident, cradling an infant in her arms, smiles in response. ‘I’m very grateful to our sisters and mothers who came all the way from Punjab to give us support. We are honoured. They are here for us and we will always stand up for them.’ With citizens like these, India seems safe. * There are several young mothers who have been bringing their infants and children with them to the protest. Government spokespersons and right-wing television channels have accused them of using their children as political tools, a charge which, the women say, makes them more sad than angry. Most of these mothers belong to poor and lower-middle-class nuclear families and have no one they can leave their children with. And staying at home, they say, is not an option. Ambreen, 26, who has been bringing her three-month-old infant with her, says it is important for her to participate in the protest because she wants to secure a safe future for her child. ‘First we have to save our country and our Constitution, then we will start worrying about our children.’ It may sound dramatic but these are not empty words. It is a promise these mothers have made to their children. And their resolve has not gone untested. It has been a bitter winter for 24year-old Nazia, who lost her four-month-old son Mohammed Jahaan on 30 December. He died of exposure to the cold. Nazia says she started bringing her little one to the protest on the 18th of December. She came every night, from the tiny shack built with plastic sheets, tin and cloth that is home to her, her husband who is an e-rickshaw

driver, and their three children. ‘I was breastfeeding [Mohammed] and could not leave him behind.’ She doesn’t pretend she isn’t shattered, but she won’t stop coming to the protest. ‘This is a battle I’m fighting for my children. What kind of future will I be able to give them if my husband and I are thrown into a detention camp?’ The protest at Shaheen Bagh offers dozens of examples of the sacrifice, courage and resilience of ordinary Muslim women who have spent almost their entire lives in meek submission—as women, as Muslims, as individuals trying desperately not to fall through the cracks in a country where poverty and destitution are rampant. An organic protest like theirs is only possible at a place like Shaheen Bagh. These protestors are mainly homemakers with domestic duties to fulfil. They prepare meals, sweep and swab the house, wash clothes, feed their children and then come to the protest site. The reason they are able to participate wholeheartedly is that the protest is taking place next door. They can slip in and out of their homes whenever required, at any hour of the day or night, and do not need money or assistance to travel. Sirens that have been placed inside the locality are sounded in case of any emergency and the result is instant—women throw on their burqas and naqabs or simple dupattas and rush out. Such is the nature of this home-grown protest that the site has become an extension of their homes. * It is 3 a.m. and the cold seeps into your bones. A fog is drifting in. But there are at least a few hundred people out on the road, chanting slogans, singing songs of liberation, lighting candles and waving the Tricolour in the air. And a large number of women are still sitting inside the tent, writing a new chapter in the country’s history with their unique protest. A young woman is putting up a poster: ‘Yeh ladi hum sab ki hai.’ This battle is for everyone of us. ***

THE SITE Ghettoes in our country are like open secrets. Everyone knows they exist, and that the quality of life they offer is dismal, but no one wants to know how they came to be and why. They are like invisible pockets of ‘problem’ people that are best avoided with a traffic diversion. Outside of Okhla, no one had ever heard of Shaheen Bagh before it became the Tiananmen Square of anti-CAA protests. Beyond the protest site, behind showrooms of high-end fashion brands offering heavy factory discounts, is a congested residential colony which is an extension of the Jamia Nagar ghetto. Boundaries between colonies that are part of this ghetto are fluid and no one can exactly tell where Shaheen Bagh ends and Abul Fazal begins or where Abul Fazal ends and Batla House begins. Narrow lanes with open drains, piles of garbage, low-hanging electrical cables and rows of hawkers parked in front of small shops —all the trademarks of a bustling ghetto are present here. The smell of kababs, roasted peanuts and dust greets you as you are carried in by a small sea of pedestrians weaving their way between cars, motorcycles and rickshaws. The skyline is marked with tall, often haphazardly designed buildings on both sides, webs of wires, hoardings and flags. It is not that Shaheen Bagh is a poor neighbourhood or a slum. Between Hero Honda motorcycles and Bajaj scooters, you will also spot Toyota Corollas and Ford Endeavours. Among rows of small houses and smaller flats, you’ll find the occasional, beautifully done-up independent bungalow. It is not so much economics as social and cultural marginalisation that has forced people—almost entirely Muslim—inside this ghetto. People who live here have not chosen Shaheen Bagh because of the infrastructure that it offers, or rather fails to offer. They have chosen this address for the safety it provides. But this was not how Shaheen Bagh was supposed to be. Sixtyone-year-old Shariq Ansarullah, who set up the colony in the early 1980s, recounts how he purchased eighty bighas of land from the Pradhan of Jasola village for a sum of fifty thousand rupees to set up the colony. He then roped in a senior town planner to map the low-

lying area which was flooded with sewage water from the Okhla sewage plant. They waded through knee-deep slop taking measurements to carve out roads, residential plots, schools and mosques. ‘I showed the land to almost 3,000 people over ten years and out of them 300 bought plots here. I was hopeful that they would stick to our design but they made all sorts of alterations, covered roads and carved out smaller plots. People bought land around the eighty-bigha plot that I had purchased and sold it on in small chunks. The original design was completely lost.’ Over thirty-five years later, Ansarullah has packed up his property business and keeps himself busy with his Shaheen Public School that offers affordable education to local boys and girls up to class eight. The boys’ wing and the girls’ wing of the school face each other on either side of a road that was meant to be wider. From the outside, the complex looks more like a fortress than a school with high walls, thick iron grills and concrete meshes. Ansarullah has not participated in the anti-CAA protest in a big way but is proud to be associated with the people living here. ‘I had named the place “Shaheen” after the falcon, which is a proud and self-respecting bird. It does not attack animals on the ground but hunts mid-air. Allama Iqbal had once said that he wants Muslims to live like the Shaheen. I am glad that the people of this locality are finally living up to the name.’ Down the road from Shaheen Public School, past rows of eateries selling everything from chicken tikkas, mutton seekh kababs and momos to samosas, gajar ka halwa and gulab jamuns is a small establishment called Mansoor Bakery. This small corner shop which sells cakes, pastries and cookies has sustained Israr Ahmad’s family for the last thirty-five years. As he packs a large chocolate cake in a box and draws flowers with whipped cream from a cone made out of newspaper, Ahmad recounts the challenges he had to face when he first set up shop. ‘Back in the early 1990s when I first came to Shaheen Bagh, it was like a swamp. Instead of roads there were dirt tracks filled with pools of drain water and empty plots of land which served as garbage dumps.’ It was obviously not a dream location for a bakery but this was all he could afford at the time. ‘I came to Delhi

from Kannauj with my parents thirty-seven years ago. My father bought a house and set up a bakery in Paharganj. Business soon picked up but Advani’s Rath Yatra changed everything for us. Communal clashes became the order of the day and the environment became too toxic for us to continue living there.’ Like most others, Israr Ahmad also come to the ghetto in search of safety. He couldn’t afford to buy property in Zakir Nagar and Batla House, both well-established Muslim-majority localities, and was forced to choose neighbouring Shaheen Bagh. Today he is a proud resident of the locality and a strong supporter of the anti-CAA protest. ‘We needed a protest like this. For so many years we did not say anything. They took away our masjid, they criminalised Triple Talaq, they made us stand in long queues after demonetisation and have been targeting Muslims in the name of cow slaughter. We remained silent because we did not want any sort of confrontation, but now the situation has completely gotten out of control. Our silence should not be taken as our weakness.’ Ahmad’s business has taken a hit because of the protest but he doesn’t mind the loss. He says it is a small price for freedom—from fear and discrimination. Thirty-year-old Muzaffar Khan, who runs Tiger Gym in the area, echoes the sentiment. The MBA graduate claims that footfall in his fitness centre has gone down by almost 65 per cent since the protest began, but he has no complaints. ‘I am not bothered about money. I started this business because I am a fitness enthusiast and I wanted people here to take an interest in health and fitness. This protest is about the health, safety and security of our country and our Constitution. There is nothing more important than that.’ Like Tiger Gym, Bridelook Beauty Parlour also wears a deserted look. Run by 38-year-old Yasmeen, the parlour is located in the basement of a rundown building next to Shandaar Halal Mutton & Chicken Shop. It boasts of four relaxing chairs for facials, a waxing table and a private room for full-body treatments. Yasmeen had always dreamt of setting up her own parlour but it wasn’t until recently that she was able to realise her dream. After her daughter turned ten, she converted a room in her apartment into a parlour. Four years later she bought a small shop in the basement of her

apartment building and went professional. ‘I was always passionate about hair and make-up but did not want to pursue my dream at the cost of my daughter’s upbringing. She needed me and I wanted to be there for her.’ After her daughter started going to school, Yasmeen enrolled in a beauty programme at VLCC. Yasmeen feels her hard work and prayers paid off when her daughter managed to get admission in NIFT Bangalore, a premier institute for fashion design. ‘She has made me so proud. I want her to have a career and to be financially independent.’ Yasmeen’s business too has taken a hit because of the antiCAA protest at Shaheen Bagh. Several clients who used to drive in from Noida stopped coming after the Kalindi Kunj route was blocked by protestors. Women from the neighbourhood have begun spending all their free time at the sit-in protest. But Yasmeen, too, has no complaints. In fact, she herself is an active participant who makes it a point to spend a couple of hours every evening at the demonstration. As a mother who had to put aside her professional aspirations for years after the birth of her daughter, Yasmeen has a sympathetic view of the mothers who have been taking their children with them to the protest site. ‘What is wrong with taking your children with you? After all, nowadays many working women bring their children to their workplace. Expecting women to stay at home and not follow their heart is unfair and regressive.’ Sameena, 24, who works at Bridelook as Yasmeen’s assistant is in awe of her employer. ‘I used to feel scared of going to crowded places but now I have started feeling more confident. Whenever Madam goes to the protest here, she takes me with her. I have also been to Jamia with her on two occasions.’ A resident of Rae Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, Sameena moved to Delhi three years ago after her marriage. She is still getting used to life in the big city, and the manner in which protests are being dealt with in her hometown and in Delhi have been a huge learning experience for her. ‘There is a townhall near my parents’ house [in Rae Bareilly] where some local women tried to emulate the Shaheen Bagh protest. They were barely able to sit for a few hours when they were threatened with lathis and

removed by cops. Compared to Uttar Pradesh, we are able to do and say so much more here.’ And then you realise how empowering the protest has been for the women of Shaheen Bagh. For Nusrat Ara, for Sarvari, for Asma Khatoon, for Gul Bano, for Sameena and many hundreds of others in Shaheen Bagh and nearby areas, and for millions of others like them across India. Regardless of what becomes of their movement, whether the government agrees to withdraw the CAA or not, this moment, this realisation, this taste of freedom will always belong to them. * Not all businesses are suffering because of the protest. The eateries in the locality are thriving, thanks to the large number of visitors from across Delhi—mostly activists, journalists and students. Zaika, located barely 500 metres from the protest site, bustles with hungry customers. Photographers and journalists, lugging heavy cameras and tripods, gather around a large pan where a couple of young boys are turning out egg-and-seekh-kabab rolls with great speed. Rafat Jamal, the proprietor, who opened the restaurant twelve years ago, says business has never been as brisk. He frequently sends packets of biryani and other dishes to the protest site as an expression of his support for the movement. ‘This protest is very important, because for the first time our very existence has been questioned. We may have our documents in place but there are lakhs of uneducated, homeless people who have no paperwork. Where will they go? We have everything but they don’t. There was no need for the government to bring in this legislation. They should have focused on the economic situation and law and order problems. CAA is merely an attempt to distract people.’ Even as he openly talks about his political views, Jamal is wary of journalists spreading misinformation. ‘The media can either ruin the atmosphere or help us to make this protest stronger.’ He says he can understand the anger of commuters affected by the traffic blockade but insists that it is the need of the hour. ‘People are

inconvenienced, yes, but it is important to fight for change. When the government enforced demonetisation and implemented GST, lakhs of people suffered. But we were told that it was necessary for the betterment of our country. Similarly, we may have to face a few hardships in this area but the protest will go a long way in safeguarding the fundamental rights guaranteed to us by our Constitution.’ The level of political discourse on the streets of Shaheen Bagh can put all the television news studios to shame. But then, it isn’t ignorance and incompetence that are behind the shocking state of news, especially television news, when it comes to the anti-CAA protests. It is active hate, bigotry and propaganda encouraged by the government. There have been brazen attempts by senior journalists and news anchors to demonise Shaheen Bagh. Some have even gone a step further and tried to provoke young volunteers at the protest with inflammatory statements. Deepak Chaurasia, a senior editor with News Nation, and Sudhir Chaudhary, editor-in-chief of Zee News, are prominent among those who have misrepresented and demonised the protest. Fortunately for the people’s movement against the CAA and NRC, the residents of Shaheen Bagh have emerged stronger and more resolved every single time. A ghetto that was once invisible has today found its place on the world map. Women who had spent their lives living in the shadows of their fathers, brothers and husbands have become the face of a powerful protest. No one in Shaheen Bagh would have dreamt that they would become the architects of one of the most significant civil rights movements in the history of independent India. Or that the prime minister and home minister, the two most powerful men in the country, would evoke the name of their humble neighbourhood to win votes during an election. ***

TERROR: FEBRUARY 2020

In the run-up to the 2020 Delhi Assembly elections, the BJP ratcheted up its vilification campaign against the Shaheen Bagh protest. The prime minister and home minister showed the way, and their party-men followed, painting the protest as a threat to the country and the protestors as terrorists in disguise. From Amit Shah asking Delhiites to press the button on the voting machine so hard that the current reached Shaheen Bagh, to Anurag Thakur inciting them to ‘shoot the traitors’ was but a small step. The women and men of Shaheen Bagh were not intimidated. They refused to be provoked and kept their protest civil, inclusive and free of anger and hate. ‘Our fight is not about this election,’ they said. In the end, the BJP suffered a rout—while this did not mean that a vast majority of the people of Delhi supported the Shaheen Bagh protest, it did prove that hate-speeches and communal campaigns can’t always win elections. Nor can they defeat a people’s movement. Shaheen Bagh endured, and continued to showcase the best of India’s tradition of secularism, liberalism and ethical, non-violent resistance. It was reminding India that its Independence began with the vision and promise of an enlightened democracy where everyone would be equal, and that this vision had been sullied but that it was possible to fight for it. It was reclaiming what seemed to have been irretrievably lost. And for this, Shaheen Bagh would be punished with terror. It wouldn’t be done directly. Shaheen Bagh was too visible. So, less than two weeks after the BJP lost the Delhi elections, more vulnerable, less visible Muslim-majority localities in the city where similar protests had emerged were targeted. Members of the BJP and its associate organisations unleashed hate and propaganda against the protestors, inciting violence in the presence of police officers. Anti-CAA protestors in northeast Delhi were baited and attacked, clashes erupted between opposing groups, and armed mobs who had been mobilised in advance were brought in to kill and loot with impunity. Under the now familiar cover of ‘riots’, a massacre was executed. The police stood by. Even by official figures, which are almost always doctored, fifty-three people were killed—shot,

stabbed, burnt alive. Of the fifty-one whose identity could be confirmed, at least thirty-six were Muslim. The message to those protesting a brazenly undemocratic law, demanding their most basic democratic right as Indian citizens, was loud, clear and brutal.

VOICES FROM SHAHEEN BAGH FEBRUARY-MARCH 2020 Seemi Pasha Asma Khatoon, 90. One of the ‘Dabang Dadis’ of Shaheen Bagh. She is extremely articulate and has clear ideas about what she wants from this protest—although, as with most senior citizens, her advice is not taken very seriously. I interviewed her a few days after the violence and killings in northeast Delhi. Q: There has been rioting and arson in northeast Delhi. More than fifty people have been killed. There have been lots of rumours that Hindutva gangs may target Shaheen Bagh next. Are you scared? A: If I was scared I would not be sitting here. What should we be afraid of? We would not have started this protest if we were scared. (We are interrupted by a group of boys who claim they don’t want anyone to say anything about the riots in Delhi. I try to reason with them but they are adamant. I try to persuade Asma Khatoon to continue but she refuses. After a long argument, the volunteers agree that she can speak about the protest but not about the violence.) Q: Since when have you been sitting here in protest? A: For the last two months. Q: How and when did you decide to join the protest? A: When students were beaten up in Jamia and the buses were set ablaze, I was there. Then people started leaving for Jantar Mantar. I also went along with them. I saw a large crowd and heard speeches

being made. I heard everything and came back here. They asked me to speak. Everyone liked what I had to say. Then some people took me to a TV studio. I spoke there as well. Modi is asking everyone for documents. I asked him to show his papers for the last five generations—[can he] show them? He has brought in these dark laws—CAA and NRC. If he takes them back then we will get up and leave. Till the time he does not withdraw CAA and NRC we will not move from here. Q: Did you ever think that the protest at Shaheen Bagh will become so big? A: No. Q: How many hours a day do you spend here? A: I stay here the whole day and the whole night. I go back home in the morning, I have a cup of tea, and an egg and a glass of milk and then I come back here by 8 or 8:30. My lunch and dinner comes from home and I eat my meals here in the tent. Q: Why does your food come from home? Do you not like eating food that is served here? A: No, I can’t eat outside food. I have high blood sugar. I cannot eat biryani-viryani. Q: What are the problems that you have had to face in the days and months that you have been participating in the protest? A: This hardship is nothing, I will only be able to rest peacefully after my hard work has borne fruit. After pain comes joy. What should I tell you about my problems? Someone who is used to staying at home has been sitting out in the bitter cold and rain—of course it is not easy. Why are you asking me about my suffering? What can you do to make it better? Everyone keeps asking me to talk. I have been talking and talking and talking on TV. The blood in my veins has dried up with all this talking. My skin has turned into leather but we have not been able to achieve anything. Q: But your voice is being heard across the world?

A: It only makes sense if Allah listens to our prayers, listens to my voice. Q: Do you really think that the government will withdraw CAA? A: Of course it will. Allah will put mercy in Modi’s heart. Everything is up to Allah. Without His will no one can do anything. Not even a leaf can move without Allah’s permission, humans have no standing before Him. Q: Do you have faith in this mediation process that has been started by the Supreme Court to clear this roadblock? A: Allah can change the hearts of men. Without His will, nothing can happen. Q: If the Supreme Court agrees to the set of demands that protestors here have placed before it, will you be ready to empty out half of this highway? A: No. No one will move from here. We will not let any part of this road be opened. The police had blocked alternate routes near Kalindi Kunj. They have opened that route now. This road will not be opened. Q: Why is it that Muslims have remained silent till now? Why didn’t they speak when the Babri Masjid was demolished or the Triple Talaq bill was passed or Article 370 was abrogated? A: We are being punished for our silence. If we had spoken out earlier then it would not have come to this. We have told the court to give us a favourable judgement like they gave others in the Babri Masjid case. My expectations are tied to the courts. I have faith in the Supreme Court. Q: You are so articulate. Why didn’t you speak out against injustices earlier? A: We did not want to say anything. We held our peace. We have come out now because the situation has become intolerable. We cannot keep quiet anymore.

Q: You are ninety years old. You have lived through the Partition of India. What do you remember about that? A: I was fifteen-sixteen years old. What I remember is that whoever wanted to leave the country left. There was a lot of bloodshed and violence. People used to look at Congress Party supporters with a lot of suspicion. Q: Where are you from? A: I am from Sitamarhi district. Nanpur is the nearest police station and Raipur is my home. Q: How and when did you come to Delhi? A: I came here to see my granddaughter when she was born and I got stuck here. It is not easy for someone like me to stay in Delhi. Q: Why is that? A: I am not used to living in small houses. Delhi is all about small houses and tall claims. Q: What about your husband? A: My husband is no more. He died seven years ago. Q: Who are you living with here? A: With my son. Q: Did you ever go to school or receive any sort of formal education? A: Hum alif-be bhi nahi padhe (I didn’t even learn the alphabet) but a maulana sahib taught me how to read the Quran. Q: How many children do you have? A: I have four boys and four girls. They are all married and well settled. I have close to forty-five grandchildren. I had pure and unadulterated food during my days. You people are consuming poison. Which is why the difference in our energy levels. Your generation cannot match us in strength. My bones are stronger than yours.

Q: Till when will you stay here [in Shaheen Bagh]? A: I will sit here for as long as Prime Minister Modi makes me sit here. *** Kahkashan Riaz, 30. She ran a small school at the protest site near the Shaheen Bagh bus stop. The bus stop itself had been converted into a public library which attracted hundreds of people every day. Kahkashan is a housewife who is pursuing her Masters in Urdu literature from Jamia Millia Islamia as a private student. She has twin daughters who are eight years old. She made headlines for her speech before the interlocutors who had been sent by the Supreme Court to mediate on the possibility of opening part of the road that had been blocked by the protestors. Kahkashan spoke to me on two occasions: on 19 February, after the first meeting with the interlocutors sent by the Supreme Court, and on 27 February, three days after violence erupted in northeast Delhi. Some excerpts:

The reading corner at the Shaheen Bagh bus stop. Photo courtesy Nazes Afroz. 19 February 2020 Q: When did you decide to join the protest at Shaheen Bagh? A: I have been coming here from the very beginning.

Q: You gave a beautiful speech and left the interlocutors in awe. What made you stand up and speak out today? A: When someone speaks from the heart, whatever he or she says has greater impact compared to someone who is merely reciting a memorised speech. We have been sitting here for so long and no one has bothered to come and speak to us. So many emotions had been building up inside me and I needed to tell them exactly how I felt. I was not just speaking for myself, I was speaking on behalf of all these women who have been staging a protest for the last two months. The Supreme Court has sent its mediators to discuss the roadblock but not the CAA. All the conversations are about how the road has been blocked and there are traffic jams. They want this road to be cleared up. I had a conversation with my fellow protestors and we talked about whether our protest would become stronger or weaker if we were to clear this road. Everyone was of the opinion that if our demands are not being heard here and no one is taking note of the difficulties we are facing, we will be completely forgotten if we vacate this site or are forced out of here. So many other protest sites have come up after Shaheen Bagh but none of them are as prominent as us. Everyone is suffering because of this roadblock— those who are in favour of the CAA as well as those who are against it. It is the government’s job to ensure that issues raised by both sides are resolved. If the government solves our problem, [other] problems will automatically get resolved. Q: What is your impression of the interlocutors who have been sent by the Supreme Court? A: We liked their approach. They were not trying to impose their ideas on us. They asked us for our opinion and they were interested in hearing our demands. Things cannot be resolved if they do not allow us to speak and keep talking themselves. All these speeches that ‘we won’t back down even an inch’ [comment made by Amit Shah], allegations that hum gaddaar hain [we are traitors] will not get anyone anywhere. The mediators wanted to hear us, which is why we have faith in the Supreme Court. We have no faith left in this

government but despite this loss of faith we have hope. I spoke about how the government and its ministers are trying to tarnish our protest and attribute false motives to our movement; they are using bad language for us but we still want them to come here and talk to us. Q: Why are you still hopeful that the government will engage with you? A: If we lose hope, we will lose ourselves. You need hope to stay alive. If everyone thinks that your life is meaningless then there is no point in living that life. Every human being is living with some sort of hope in his heart. The current dispensation may be against us but we are still hopeful that they will talk to us. Q: Why do you have faith in the Supreme Court? A lot of people here are very upset about its Ayodhya verdict. A: The Supreme Court did agree that there was a mosque in Ayodhya which was illegally destroyed. In that sense the verdict was in our favour, but when it came to deciding who gets what, they were a little unfair. The Supreme Court took away our land from us but we did not come out on the streets to protest. If that plot of land had been awarded to us, there would have been widespread bloodshed and violence and I can say this with utmost confidence. The people on the other side cannot be trusted at all. Look at the kind of language they use. We say ‘Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Isayi, aapas mein hain bhai-bhai’ [Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians are like brothers] and they say ‘Desh ke gaddaaron ko, goli maaro saalon ko’ [shoot those traitors and swines]. You can judge their mentality with their slogans and our thought process by the slogans that we have been raising. Maybe the Supreme Court knew that there would be violence on the streets if we got control over the disputed site. Whatever happened was for the good. Q: How did it feel when Sanjay Hegde, one of the interlocutors sent by the Supreme Court, said that even his children, who are studying

in some of the best law schools in the country, cannot speak as well as you? A: When someone is suffering, her pain starts to reflect in her words. Those who are not able to articulate their feelings as well have not seen the kind of hardships we have. Women like me had never come out on the streets like this. I had never even shown my face in my WhatsApp profile picture. Today I have come out on the streets, my face is uncovered and I have started speaking to the media. This has not been very easy for me but it is all right. They say that Muslim women are forced into submission. This is incorrect. Islam sees men and women as equals and they have both been given equal rights. When we are needed, we will come out of our homes, but if we are not needed we will be happy to stay indoors. Whenever we are required to speak out, we will speak out. If our efforts are not required, then why should we come out of our homes? Members of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights recently came to Shaheen Bagh to check on the children. These children come here with their mothers and no one can take care of their children as well as a mother. What do these people want to check? We sing the national anthem every morning. What do they want to see? Are they checking to see whether or not we have changed the words of the national anthem? When we raise the slogan ‘Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Isayi, aapas mein hain bhai-bhai’, is there something wrong that we say? I agree that the children might not be able to understand a lot of things that are being discussed at the protest site but how does that matter? I think they are absolutely safe. Q: Tell me a little bit about yourself. When and how did you decide to join the protest? A: I have been coming here from the very beginning but earlier I would just come and sit with the women under the tent. I did not come on to the stage directly. When the students of Jamia started their protest on 13th December, I was present there. Even on the 15th of December, when the police crackdown happened, I was in Jamia. The protest at Shaheen Bagh started the same day but I did

not come here. After three or four days I found out about this protest. I do not live here. I live in Abul Fazal enclave which is a little further away from here. I was more involved in the protest at Jamia initially because I am studying there and I am attached to the university. When I came here I realised that more people were needed at this protest. The women who were staging a protest here were sitting on the streets to raise their voices against CAA and NRC, but what made them come out of their homes? They stepped out of their homes after the police brutally assaulted children inside the university library. They blocked this road because they were angry. I cannot speak on behalf of everyone but I am of the opinion that these women would not have come out of their homes had the students not been assaulted. There is no justification for targeting children who were inside the library, children who were studying and had nothing to do with the protest. It is not that targeting protestors can be justified either, because we have the right to protest. But the police claimed that the protestors had stones in their hands. What about the children in the library? They did not have stones in their hands, they had books. This is why the protest started. The ladies here realised that the police crackdown was not just a standalone incident of violence. It is part of a process where our citizenship will be questioned. The government says that only one section of society is staging a protest here. It is not just about one religion. You tell me, how will a Hindu who has been left out of NRC prove that he is not a Bangladeshi but an Indian? Where will he get documents from? Where will a Hindu or a Christian or a Sikh get documents from? They will also have to prove that they are citizens of this country. In fact, CAA grants citizenship to only people of three countries. How will these people who have no documents prove that they belong to one of the three countries whose ‘persecuted minorities’ are being granted citizenship? How will they prove that they are Bangladeshis who want Indian citizenship? It will be as humiliating for them as it will be for me to be asked to prove that we are residents of this country.

Q: What part of the country are you from and where did you receive your education? A: I am from a place called Bahadurgarh in Hapur district in Uttar Pradesh. I was born and brought up there. I studied in Bahadurgarh till class ten and then moved to Aligarh Muslim University, from where I finished my schooling. After that I got married and moved to Saudi Arabia. I enrolled in Jamia Millia Islamia as a private student. I used to come to Delhi every year to appear for the exams. Two years ago I moved to Delhi. Q: Where do you leave your children when you come to the protest site? A: I leave them with my mother in my house. My in-laws are no more and my mother helps me out with the children. My husband has two other siblings. My sister-in-law is married and my brother-in-law lives in another city. My husband and I live with my parents. I have the full support of my family. My father also comes here with me in the morning and he stands outside the tent with all the other men. I come inside and sit with the women. All these statements that the men keep sitting in their razai [quilt] while the women stage protests are baseless. The women at least have a place to sit. The men have to stand outside. The men have been contributing equally to this protest. 27 February 2020 Q: Have you visited the riot-affected areas? A: We went to Jaffrabad on Monday [24 February] and it was really crowded. Imagine, the area between our tent till the foot-overbridge was filled with men. On the other side of the road were as many women and in the middle was their stage that had been damaged. We visited the protest site but we did not go towards the area where rioting was taking place. About a kilometre away from the Jaffrabad protest is the site of the Seelampur protest but the people in Seelampur are sitting on the pavement and not the road. Their

protest is much smaller, with barely twenty-five to thirty people, but in Jaffrabad there were close to ten thousand people. Q: You told me you spoke to women protestors who were injured? A: The women told me that the police tried to forcibly evict them. They threatened to drive their cars over the protestors so the women lay down on the road and asked the cops to drive over them. There were barricades surrounding the protest venue and the cops started driving into them. Some of the barricades fell on the women and many of them received injuries on their arms and legs but they refused to move. After riots broke out and the streets were empty, the police dismantled their tent and removed everything. When I spoke to [the women], they had joined the Seelampur protest. Q: Are you scared that something similar might happen in Shaheen Bagh? A: We are not scared because we know that people in northeast Delhi were killed inside their homes. The rioters placed cylinders inside their homes and set them ablaze. This means that even those who are inside their homes are not safe. If we are destined to die now, we will die even inside homes. The time for staying at home is over. People need to start coming out of their homes. Q: Do you know that the High Court judge who held a midnight hearing for the riots case has been transferred? A: We know that. He’s been packed off to Punjab. We should not be surprised. The administration is being controlled by those who were responsible for the 2002 Gujarat riots. What can you expect from them? They have the required experience and they are repeating the same in Delhi. It is not like they will hesitate or be ashamed about riots. They have no integrity or basic humanity. They are trying to create differences between Hindus and Muslims but they do not even care about Hindu lives. There have been more Muslim deaths and Muslims have suffered more losses, but it is not as if Hindus have not suffered. Ultimately there are human lives that are being lost but they do not care. We are upset about the deaths of Muslims

and we are equally pained about Hindus being killed. Imagine the plight of the family whose son’s body was pulled out from a drain. Q: What do you plan to do about your school here? A: We have realised that our school is at a very vulnerable spot. We are situated next to the bus stop and are completely exposed. If anyone wants to attack or throw something at the protestors, we will be hit first. The library can easily be set on fire. We are now trying to figure out if we should move our school to the other side of the road. We have our homes on this side of the road and if anything happens we can run into the by-lanes without having to cross the entire width of the road. We also want to stay as close to the main tent as possible but we do not know where. We can’t just set up our school in front of the showrooms here. We had tried earlier but the shop owners told us not to. We do not want to do anything without getting permission. Let us see what happens now. *** Prakash Devi. She is a resident of Karol Bagh, actively involved in the protest at Shaheen Bagh, was one of the women who addressed the interlocutors sent by the Supreme Court on 19 February 2020. In the middle of her powerful speech where she lashed out against those who had labelled Shaheen Bagh a ‘mini-Pakistan’, she also made the crowd laugh by saying, ‘Woh kehte hain ke hum biryani khila rahen hain. Hum ne toh nahin kaha ke hum hunger strike par baithe hain. Jo roti khaate hain woh roti khayenge, jo aaloo khaate hain woh aaloo khayenge aur jo biryani khaate hain woh biryani khayenge. Iss mein problem kya hai?’ (They say we are distributing biryani. Well, we never said we’re on a hunger strike. Those who eat roti will eat roti, those who eat potatoes will eat potatoes and those who eat biryani will eat biryani. Where’s the problem with this?). She told the interlocutors that she was glad the apex court had taken suo motu cognisance of a child’s death because of exposure to cold weather at Shaheen Bagh, and wondered why the court had not

taken cognisance of the police brutality on students of Jamia Millia Islamia.

A poster at the protest site reads: The colour I belong to is tricolour not saffron #not the happiest colour. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Q: You made a very powerful speech that day. Tell me a little more about yourself. A: I’m an ordinary housewife. I keep myself busy all the time. Sometimes I provide tuitions to children in my neighbourhood who are struggling with school work. I also try to do whatever social work I can. Q: You live in Karol Bagh. How and when did you reach Shaheen Bagh? A: I was heartbroken when I found out about the police brutality on students of Jamia Millia Islamia. Then I started coming here. Q: Are you connected with the university in any way? Are you an alumnus? A: My daughter studies here. She is pursuing her Masters in Arts from Jamia. I’m not saying that I came here because my daughter is here. I was genuinely very upset about the manner in which cops attacked students and assaulted them. On the 15th of December, when the police attacked students, I also reached the police headquarters at ITO to participate in the protest demonstration there. I started coming to Shaheen Bagh regularly but I would sit quietly in the back rows. When students of Jawaharlal Nehru University were attacked, I went there as well. It is in my blood to raise my voice against any sort of injustice. I cannot spend my life locked up inside my house. I believe that we have a responsibility towards our society. If we sit quietly and do not raise our voice, we will be like living corpses. Whenever I see injustice, I raise my voice. I feel it is my duty to do so. Q: Have you always lived in Delhi? Tell me a little bit more about your background.

A: I was born and brought up in Delhi. My parents live in this city. I married into a family that is based in Odisha. My husband and I have always lived here but he is currently working in Madhya Pradesh. We had a love marriage. I’m living here because of my children’s education. Q: Where did you receive your education? A: I went to a school in Trinagar where my parents lived. I went to Bharti Mahila College in Jhandewalan. Going to college changed my life. Before college, I had never boarded a bus alone and never travelled alone around the city. I was a very simple girl. I would go to school and come back home. That was my life. When I was six or seven years old, the JP [Jayaprakash Narayan] movement started. I was very young and I was really influenced by everything that was happening around me. A lot of people went to jail, including residents of our locality. My parents were very socially and politically active. My father owned a garment factory and my mother was a housewife. My mother had not received any formal education but she was a responsible citizen. She took care of our house and of anyone else who needed help. Woh bahot dabang theen…jisse kehte hain dhadaku. [She was fearless], but she was also very sweet. I contested the student body election in my college and I won. We used to organise a lot of protests in our college days. We raised funds for our college building and we also went on strikes. I enrolled myself in a Masters programme but I could not complete it. I have done several language courses because I like to study and educate myself. I love reading. I have read novels by Premchand, Manto and other Indian writers. I have also read translated versions of Chinese and Russian novels. Q: How did you reach Shaheen Bagh and decide to become a part of this protest? A: Before 15th December I had no idea that a place called Shaheen Bagh existed in Delhi. I had never come here before. When this movement started, I asked people where Shaheen Bagh was and I came here. The first time, I came alone. There weren’t too many

people here at that time. There were barely fifty or sixty women sitting in the tent and about forty people standing outside. I came here, spent some time and went back home. After that the incident at JNU happened. We did not come here for almost five days after that. I went to JNU every day to support the students who had been targeted by goons. I started coming here regularly from the 12th of January and I have been here ever since. Q: Do you come from Karol Bagh every day? Isn’t it difficult? A: I used to travel back and forth every day but not anymore. Now I go back home once a week. I spend the day at the protest site and at night I sleep at the house of any of my Muslim friends. I did not know any of them when I came here and now they are like family. They take care of me, they invite me to have meals with them and have opened their doors for me—quite literally. I go and sleep in their homes like it is my home. I’ve received so much love and affection here. It feels like we were never strangers. I’ll tell you what is so special about Shaheen Bagh. There have been days when this protest site has been flooded. One day there were at least one lakh people here. I’m giving you this example because I want you to understand the culture here. There is a tea stall nearby and there are toilets that have been installed close to it. So many times I’ve walked through massive crowds and not once has anyone laid a finger on me. No one has ever touched me or brushed against me. At any other crowded place like a carnival or a market, it is impossible for a woman to move around without getting jostled. Even I’m not spared despite my age. This safety and respect that I found in Shaheen Bagh has changed my life. I know this is a Muslim-dominated area. I’m not biased against any religion but from childhood you are told that they [Muslims] are different. When I came here, I realised that there are no differences. We are the same people. I’ve been here sixty or seventy days and I have never smelt alcohol on anyone’s breath. When I go to the washroom, I cross hundreds of men but I’ve never smelt any alcohol. Sometimes I have to use the restroom at three or four in the morning. There are people who will come and check if I’m all right. They call me ‘Didi’ [older sister] and tell me that

they will stand guard outside while I freshen up. Where else can you find this sense of security? I’m a Hindu in a Muslim neighbourhood and I feel completely safe. There’s no sense of fear. Q: The government and right-wing organisations claim that this protest has brought together all the traitors. How do you respond to something like that? A: I have only one response: khisiani billi khamba noche… [They’re like a frustrated cat that hasn’t caught a mouse]. When this movement started the government made all sorts of allegations. BJP spokespersons claimed that women are being paid to sit here or that the crowd comes here to eat free biryani. They said all sorts of things. That the men are lying comfortably under their quilts at home and are forcing their women to sit on the streets. They’ve said such filthy things about us, but despite that the protest continued peacefully. Who is a traitor? Do you call someone who is fighting for her rights a traitor? Are people who are demanding employment traitors? We are fighting to protect our Constitution and the secular nature of our democracy. How can we be traitors? They are just frustrated. Q: Do you have faith in the Supreme Court? A: We placed our arguments before the court’s officers. They listened to us for three days. A few conditions have been placed before the court. We want the Supreme Court to give us in writing that it will take full responsibility for our security. If it is able to do so, then we are ready to open half the road. There has already been an incident of shooting here and at Jamia. What kind of security can we expect from the police? We respect the court and we will abide by its decision. Q: What do you have to say about the riots that took place in northeast Delhi? A: I will not call them riots. I will call it a targeted massacre of one community. Those who carried out the violence were rioters…they don’t have any religion. The official death toll that has been shared

by the government currently stands at forty-three and there are a lot of Hindu names in it. Even in this violence, there are multiple examples of Hindus saving Muslims and Muslims saving Hindus. This brotherhood and solidarity were able to conquer hate. What more will you [those responsible for the violence] do to break the country? Will you destroy our peace when even in the midst of this violence there are praiseworthy examples of brotherhood? You did not want it but despite your best efforts there is peace. Q: The Aam Aadmi Party came back to power in Delhi with a thumping majority. Are you satisfied with its response to the riots? A: I am so disappointed with the Aam Aadmi Party. We voted them back to power. I asked my family members to go out and vote for AAP. After the results, AAP’s true face has been revealed and it is extremely saddening. They can give free rides on the metro, provide water and electricity free of cost, but human lives are not free. You [Kejriwal] could have issued a statement on day one, condemning the riots. We would have loved you for that. But you did not open your mouth. We gave you love and we placed our trust in you but you betrayed us.

IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT, AZADI…* FRAGMENTS; DECEMBER 2019 TO MID-FEBRUARY 2020 Sarover Zaidi and Samprati Pani On 11 February, results day of the Delhi Assembly elections, the road to the protest site in Shaheen Bagh was filled with protestors with black bands around their faces and placards saying, ‘Aaj maun dharna hai. Hum kisi party ko support nahi karte hain.’ (Today is a silent demonstration. We don’t support any political party.) The day before, students from Jamia Millia Islamia had been thrashed, abused and detained by the police to prevent them from carrying out a peaceful march to the Parliament. It is more than sixty days since the women of Shaheen Bagh have been demonstrating against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the National Register of Citizens. They have reiterated again and again that no political party backs them, nor do they support any political party. No political party has come forward to have a dialogue with them till date. Was the silence of the protestors on February 11 a technique, a protest or a voice saying that you can’t silence us? This set of fragments from December 2019 to the present** is our attempt to think through what it means to live in a city of dissent and a city under siege. The essay is as much about the making of the iconic protest site of Shaheen Bagh as about emergent forms of life, publics and place-making in a city, and a nation, being reconfigured by the normalisation of barricades.

A friend from faraway writes to me to find out the names of the artists who have made the posters, installations and other artworks at Shaheen Bagh. I tell her that there are so many of them and yet no one person in particular. Everyone is doing something—painting, drawing, welding, writing, making. Whose idea, whose imagination, whose materials, whose labour, whose dissent has gone into what? What transformed construction debris into words, a Wikipedia page into a political banner, paper boats into hope, a road into a zone of care and freedom? The Delhi Police faced a similar dilemma when it

wanted to speak to the ‘organisers’ of the protest—who are the leaders, who are not, who are the protestors, who are not, who are the supporters and who are the spectators. Where does the protest begin and where does it end? Does it begin from across the Yamuna in Delhi and end in Mumbra in Maharashtra? How many worlds does it create in its mimesis and alterity?

Shaheen Bagh is a sit-in, it’s a candlelight march, it’s a women’s space, it’s a library, it’s a metro station we had never been to. It’s a hangout zone, it’s a bus stop, it’s a night market, it’s an outpost. And it’s got parents with children and children with parents, it’s got teenagers and grandmothers. It’s got Sikh farmers from Punjab, it’s got Defence Colony, Mayur Vihar and Amroha. It’s got musicians, moongphali walas, democracy walas and family-outing walas, it’s got the south Delhi walas and the east Delhi walas and the selfie walas. It’s got Musalmans and Hindus, hipsters and dharam walas, secularists and post-secularists, photographers and film-makers. It’s got feminists and born-agains, sceptics and believers, it’s got Shias and Sunnis, it’s got Jamia and Aligarh Muslim University. Even the Japanese came on some days. It’s got elites and super elites, communists and welders, traders from Seelampuri and poets from

Kashmir, actors and dancers, it’s got working women, school teachers, beauticians and historians. It’s got Ambedkar and Gandhi speaking from the same dais.

It’s a cold winter night and another cold winter night, it’s many cold winter nights. It’s a legal electricity connection, a first house, it’s my uncle’s house, it’s an incrementally settled neighbourhood, a power of attorney house deed, a home loan, a political self. It’s erasure; it’s a coming out. It’s Facebook Live, Twitter feeds and Instagram stories, recording, archiving and circulating history as it is being made. It’s a home, a daily routine of sending kids to school, cooking and taking turns for household tasks, it’s a women’s protest, it’s shyness and anger, it’s ‘I have never spoken in a public place’, it’s ‘I have always been a housewife, but I am here’. It’s got lovers, ex-lovers, future beloveds, young first dates and old couples, making their way through and becoming the protest. It’s got songs, candlelight, mobile phone torchlights and flags, and more and more flags. It now has a nihari wala and an espresso wala. It’s got book nerds, armchair warriors, youth leaders and not-so-youth leaders. It’s conversations with Babasaheb and Bismil at the detention booth. It’s got angry young men and angrier young women. It’s got gentleness; it’s got shyness. It’s a road, a backyard, a mohalla, a mela, a movement, a metonym, a zenana, a qasba. It’s a city. It’s a public square; it’s a circle of friends. It’s two boys in the gully cursing the young wannabe poets. It’s the besuras and the sur walas. It’s a soundscape, a camerascape.

And even when the mic stops working, it’s still shouting out clearly, ‘Azadi’. In Manto’s story ‘Toba Tek Singh’, the madman lies in the no man’s land between two sets of barbed wires, muttering and swearing, ‘Upar di gur gur di annexe di bedhiyana di moong di daal of di Pakistan and Hindustan of di durr phitey mun,’ reflecting an incoherence that was possibly the only response to the bizarre travesty that the Partition was. The madman laughs at the nonsensical marking of the border, the splitting of a people into two parts, an affliction that did not and will not end suffering in the futures of the split nations. Was the Partition ever completed or did it continue to inhabit our cities, towns and villages in the form of religion- and caste-based neighbourhoods, working-class slums and Muslim ghettos?

Was the nation cast in these continuously repeating barbed wires, barricades and walls?

The madman outside Irwin hospital is explaining to no one his own histories of the city and of the police breaking people’s heads. He raises his hand up towards the sky and says, ‘They did this in the Emergency, then they did it in 1984, and now…they have done it again.’ His immediate reference is to the police brutality that has taken place at Turkman Gate, Daryaganj and Dilli Gate, this evening, as part of curbing the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. He’s moving between past state brutalities and the current one, imaginary speeches by dead politicians and the foretelling of futures, which he ascribes to the film star Rajesh Khanna, ‘Rajesh Khanna ne bola tha…yeh hoga’ (Rajesh Khanna had said this would happen), turning the current moment in Delhi to a predicted one. A few days later, he walks up to me and says, ‘I know what you are looking for…if you ever need to buy life insurance, contact my uncle in Kanpur…’ This incoherence, truth telling and dark futures are evocative of our movement into the singularity of the madman. With no forms of insurance left on our identities, we are caught in a fixed code, where we cannot be anything else, except the enumerated self of our names, our parents’ birthplaces and our religious identity.

Can we be anything but singular madmen and madwomen of the new partitions of the present and the future? We are walking from Jamia to Shaheen Bagh, with candles and songs, and friends and strangers. The wind is very cold on our faces. The wind has been colder this year, but everyone is walking, coming out, standing in protest. A protest that has finally broken class barriers, gated communities, ghettos, and maybe even our fears. Maybe this is a fold in the ordinary; maybe this is the only apparatus we have. People are handing out candles, managing traffic, walking, singing, drifting apart and together at the same time, but hundreds are here, and thousands elsewhere, each doing what they can do, each turning up where they can. A group of young men pull out a long flag of India—we are walking under it, holding it up. It feels like a wedding, it feels like a funeral. Teenage boys chant ‘Azadi’, and the older women walking with them also join in. We are all friends, we are all strangers, we are all insiders, we are all outsiders, but we are all we have and each is the apparatus of the protest. We are on our way to Shaheen Bagh and have gotten off the cab somewhere near a row of shops but are not sure which route to take to the protest area. It’s around 10 p.m. There are some men milling around a food joint and we ask one of them about the way to the protest, just as we would ask the way to an address, of a house or a shop. The man and others we stop to ask as we make our way into the alleys of the neighbourhood give us directions to the protest. When we return from the protest, way past midnight, we in turn give directions to people, on foot, in electric rickshaws, cars and cabs, to reach the protest site. It’s a way we are all seeking.

As I am walking around the protest site, both inside the enclosure reserved for women protestors and around it, strangers strike up conversations with me, asking me where I have come from, thanking me for being there when they realise I am not from any of the neighbouring localities, bringing me tea and biscuits, asking me if I have eaten dinner and at what time I ate. It’s heart-warming, it’s disorienting. It’s like I am home. We are looking for a friend who is also looking for us. We borrow a Tricolour mounted on a crooked wooden pole from a little boy and wave the flag hysterically, while screaming, over the din of songs, chants and speeches, asking our friend on the other side of the

phone to look out for the flag. The little boy insists on coming here every night, his father tells us. It is he who has put together the flag. Our friend finds us and we return the flag to the boy, thanking him. It’s about finding friends in the city.

I am standing with friends, old and new, on the chalees futa road (40-feet road), sipping tea and talking politics and protests, despair and hope but also mundane matters of struggling with writing deadlines, what to cook for dinner and when this winter will end. All the while my eyes are trying to keep up with the buzz around me, the brisk business of restaurants, dhabas and chai shops, even a few kirana shops, in the middle of the night, the kids selling colourful polka-dot balloons, the continuous stream of tiny processions, young

boys on bikes with the Tricolour painted on their faces and flags in their hands, middle-aged men walking quietly in a line holding up posters in their hands, girls chanting ‘hum kya chahte…azadi’ slogans, fathers walking with daughters, a couple walking holding hands, the forever smiling chaiwala keeping track of the endless orders for tea, the dhaba worker’s arms moving swiftly as he kneads aata, the strains of a song coming from somewhere close, mixing up with the laughter and chatter around me. It’s familiar; it’s new. I know I have been here before. I know I have been here before elsewhere. I know I have been here in a different time. It’s a folding in of numerous chai ka tapris across the city that I’ve haunted with friends. It’s a folding in of nights of freedom spent with friends and strangers in Jawaharlal Nehru University in the 2000s, even as I was studying in Delhi University by the day. It’s a folding in of numerous protests, past and present, ragtag and massive, of citizens taking to the street.

Photo by Shiraz Hussain. Courtesy the authors. It’s a folding in of the fantasy city where no place or time or idea is out of bounds.

It’s the end of January and the roads around my house are exploding with police in riot gear. The police buses came on 18 December 2019 and haven’t left since then. Their numbers have only swollen since then, as have the number of barricades. Barricades don’t allow any protest march to extend out from the two exits of the road outside Jamia into the city. The ghetto and its protestors are not to contaminate the city. Each time there is an attempt to march towards the Parliament or Gandhi Smriti, thousands of police prevent it from moving beyond this area. The daily presence of the police, with different kinds of weapons—guns, rifles, lathis and tear gas—that they are quick to use again and again, has become the new normal. In the police attack on protestors on 10 February 2020, many students claimed that the police had released a chemical that was not tear gas, causing nausea and fainting. The state has normalised its apparatus of control through the rampant imposition of Section 144, the clamping of Internet services, lathi-charges and beatings, large-scale detentions of protestors, denial of legal and medical aid to detained protestors, giving goons a free hand to beat, maim and shoot at students. This is the ordinary city, here and now, and not the place that can’t be named. Are we to accept the barricades, the busloads of gun-toting police and the use of excessive force as the new ordinary? Does the folding in of the protest into the ordinary through repeated marches, banners, sit-ins, speaking up make the protest lose its impact as the analysts claim? Perhaps the protests have run their course in providing material for TV debates, academic papers, artist projects and hate speeches, so the people need to try something new. Perhaps, chanting the Hanuman Chalisa? Has difference finally set itself in a quiet repetition? Has the apparatus of the state figured how to enumerate these differences? Are we fighting elections for schools and not for the rights of the protesting students? Is protest the only apparatus left that can march in the street, create the street and hold together democracy? Do we exist because we are alive or because we hold a piece of paper or a

flag in our hands? Is repeating the chant of freedom our beauty, our bravery or our naiveté? ________________________ *All photos in the essay courtesy the authors, except where

indicated. **15 February 2020, when this piece was posted on the site Chiragh

Dilli.

I FOUND MY COUNTRY IN SHAHEEN BAGH Mustafa Quraishi Children in high school get awards like Mr or Miss Popular. In Delhi’s Modern School, Vasant Vihar, in the year 1997, I was given the Jai Hind Award. I was the only one in my batch of 150 who wanted to join the defence forces. I wasn’t being a ‘nationalist’ or a ‘good Muslim’. I didn’t think about these things back then, and I had nothing to prove to anyone. I wanted to fly helicopters for the army, and the idea of defending my country appealed to me. There was another decision I’d made back then. While most of my batchmates—Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Isaai— wanted to leave India and make a life in the West, I wanted to stay on and live like a firstclass citizen. This was home, I could live here as I liked. I owned India, and India owned me. Cut to 2019, when a right-wing government was voted back to power with a huge mandate, despite its openly communal agenda. For the first time, I looked up the Internet for information to emigrate to some place in Southeast Asia. Many friends have been leaving, not wanting their kids to grow up in an India that we had never imagined would become a reality. I still haven’t had the spine to fill up the forms, though. In a conversation with my sister-in-law, I told her I would shift out of India with a very, very heavy heart if at all I was compelled to do so to save my life. One of my closest friends still urges me to be pragmatic and leave before it is too late—‘Jaan hai toh jahaan hai,’ he tells me. ‘What use is anything when you’re dead?’ Both my sister-in-law and my friend are ‘Hindu’. I mention their religion because it is now the new normal. (Or maybe I mention their religion as a kind of insurance. Unlike a Patel or a Kapoor who emigrates and becomes a

much-admired NRI, a Quraishi who even thinks of emigrating is a traitor. The fact that I have Hindu relatives and friends who care for me and want me to find a safe future outside India might keep the mob from my door.) I may have the resources to emigrate. But millions of Indian Muslims don’t have this luxury. Would I be able to live with the guilt of my privilege? And then I think—why should I leave? Isn’t that exactly what this regime wants? So then, should I end up living as a second-class citizen in my own country? How is that better than being a second-class citizen somewhere else? Questions are all I seem to have these days. And few answers. As I write this, parts of northeast Delhi are burning in riots. ProCAA protestors accompanied by the police vs anti-CAA protestors. To put it simply, Hindus, aided by the police, vs Muslims. Houses, shops, schools, places of worship, anything belonging to Muslims is being burnt down. Muslims are being lynched. Hindus are being stabbed and shot, too, but it makes no sense to try and be ‘balanced’ here, because that would be dishonest. It would mean falling into the trap set up by the people who have engineered the riots. There is no doubt that a majority of those who have been killed and injured are Muslim, and almost every house and shop that has been looted and set on fire belonged to Muslims. Often, a shop owned by a Muslim has been burnt down while a shop right next to it that is owned by a Hindu has been left untouched. A viral video sums up the plight of Indian Muslims today: a group of battered Muslim men lying helpless on a road, surrounded by seven or eight Delhi police personnel. The policemen are abusing the men for demanding ‘azadi’ and forcing them to sing the national anthem. While one policeman films the ‘punishment’ on his phone, his comrades in uniform kick the men and hit them with lathis. The taunts of ‘Ajaddi, hain, Ajaddi?’ are a reference to the anti-CAA protests that began in Shaheen Bagh. Muslims have been opposing the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the National Register of Citizens because the two together give the government the power to

decide which Muslims, if any, can continue to be Indian citizens. Indians of every other faith are safe. To the Delhi police, which takes orders from the Union government, opposing this injustice is not only a criminal act but also treason. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that seventy-three years after Independence we would be discussing the citizenship of India’s Muslims instead of all that really matters. I never thought about being Indian, I always just was—it’s like breathing. To have your citizenship questioned is to have your life-breath taken away. The Muslims of India, from all corners and of all backgrounds, are protesting in unison for the first time in the history of the Indian republic because this is an existential moment for all of us. And this time we aren’t backing down. We aren’t taking any more of the hate lying down, we aren’t taking the ‘Go to Pakistan’ jibes anymore. We are done with the hate and the fear and the constant questioning of our patriotism. This is what Shaheen Bagh showed me. I still have many questions, few answers, but in Shaheen Bagh I found my country again. I reclaimed my citizenship. *** The Shaheen Bagh protests started after the brutal police crackdown at the Jamia Millia Islamia university on the night of 15 December 2019, when the mothers of some students who were injured decided to block a road in protest. I first came to Shaheen Bagh two weeks after that, on the night of 31 December. At the stroke of the midnight hour, over ten thousand people sang the Indian national anthem, with their mobile phone torches switched on and held up above them. Imagine the air reverberating with a ten-thousand-strong chorus of ‘Jana Gana Mana’. I don’t usually celebrate the coming of a new year, but this celebratory protest and assertion of identity was a thrill I had never felt before. It is something I will hold on to for a long, long time. Since that night I have been a regular at the Shaheen Bagh protest. I decided to document everything about Shaheen Bagh—the people, the slogans and posters, the graffiti and the barricades, the

confidence and the camaraderie, the determination and defiant hope despite the possibility of a police crackdown on the peaceful protestors or a violent attack by Hindutva goons. The best part of these anti-CAA-NRC protests is the complete polarisation of society—into those who believe in the Indian Constitution and value it, and those who don’t and want to destroy it. I’m thankful to the Gujarati duo, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, for uniting Indian Muslims and Indians of other faiths who are secular— even the secular fence-sitters. As a friend said recently, Shaheen Bagh has ‘separated milk from water’. Many friends, or those we always thought were friends, are no longer our friends. Walls have come up within families and some loved ones have moved away. Perhaps it’s better to have no friends than to endure superficial relationships. The right-wingers seem to be upset not only by the spontaneous protests but also by the coverage of the protests, whether on social media or in the international media. (I say ‘international media’ because much of the Indian media has been sitting in the lap of the BJP since 2014.) I’ve been posting my pictures of Shaheen Bagh on Instagram and other social media platforms regularly, and I’ve been abused and threatened routinely by supporters of the BJP. I’ve been warned that members of my family would be abducted and killed. I sometimes wonder why the trolls are so angry with people like me. They should be happy that most of India’s mainstream photographers, excepting those who are Muslim or left-leaning, have not covered these protests. One famous Instagram photographer said, ‘My choice of omitting this protest doesn’t make me any different from what I am or was.’ He doesn’t say why he has decided to ‘omit’ this protest. It is a conscious decision to avoid an event of national significance, so why not tell us the reason? And why not tell us what he ‘is or was’? This is no time for fence-sitting. You either support the Indian Constitution or you don’t. You either want India to become a Hindu rashtra or you don’t. We all make our decisions. Mine is to keep covering the Shaheen Bagh movement as long as it lasts. It says something about my country that I want to hear. It gives people threatened with

a kind of extinction a means to survive. Or at least to go down fighting. After the violence in northeast Delhi, where a similar protest was used as an excuse to bring in gangs of rioters, Shaheen Bagh is tense. But many of the women are determined to continue their protest. The carnival-like atmosphere is gone but there is still some optimism, and I wait for a new energy to revive the old spirit of Shaheen Bagh. *** Meanwhile, images come back to me as I write: I’m photographing behind a barricade and a boy stops me, saying, ‘Permission nahin hai.’ I ask whose permission I need to take, and he says, hand pointing to his chest, ‘Humaari.’ He’s one of many boys and young men, a majority of them unemployed, who have developed a nice confidence at the protest. They’ve found a sense of purpose because suddenly they can be useful. Whether it is managing the crowds and helping visitors, or making and serving tea, or sweeping the main road, or patrolling the ‘borders’ of the protest site 24x7, everyone has been allocated a job. * Barring a handful, journalists are nobody’s favourites in Shaheen Bagh. For days, I’m viewed with suspicion and feel shut out. After a month of photographing the protest, night after night, sleeping in my car when I was too tired to stay on my feet, the ice is finally broken. A young man comes with a message—I’ve been invited into one of the meeting rooms at the site. They want to hear my thoughts on media coverage of the protest. So I don’t need permission anymore. I’m free to go anywhere I choose, photograph anything I want. ‘Yeh toh humaare hain,’ a young man says. ‘He’s ours.’ And I suppose I am. *

A three-year-old child who should be learning ‘A for Apple’ is shouting ‘Azadi’. It is both heartening and disheartening. * There’s a cafe in Shaheen Bagh, a very nice one, the only one where you can get a decent coffee or a ginger lemon tea and some snacks. It’s called the ‘frustrated revolutionaries cafe’ because many failed and wannabe politicians gather here, scheming to somehow get on to the stage at the centre of the protest site. Those who are determined to keep them out also gather here. Everyone knows everyone else, and rival groups discuss plots and counter plots within inches of each other! * I’m strolling near the police barricades one night. I stop to look at the police jawaans trying to keep warm in the horrid January cold. Some of them are sleeping in their bus, without blankets or pillows. Away from their families, on duty 24x7. What would their frustration levels be? A constable standing under a streetlight is watching me. I wave. I don’t expect a response, but he waves back. * A group of protesting aunties are out on a walk to stretch their legs after hours of sitting on the ground. I follow them with my camera. Just past ‘Border no. 9’, they stop and pose next to a group of paramilitary women soldiers. Both groups have their faces covered, though for different reasons. Both sides look at each other, like neighbours who want to get to know each other. * The 24th of February. Riots have erupted in northeast Delhi. Many people had been expecting this after the inflammatory speeches by some BJP leaders targeting Muslims who had been protesting

against the CAA and NRC in Jaffrabad and Seelampur. I should be in those burning streets, recording another dark period in our history. But I don’t go there. I come to Shaheen Bagh instead. In the cafe, the mood is sombre. Everyone looks dazed and battered. I open my laptop to continue this essay, and I find myself thinking back to an incident from almost two decades ago. I was in Hyderabad in 2004, posted there as an Associated Press photographer. Police officers from Gujarat were in the city and there was news that they had killed a local Muslim boy accused of terrorism. The boy’s funeral procession turned violent. Police cars accompanying the procession were the first to be targeted, followed by photographers and reporters. A group of men saw me taking pictures and surrounded me. I was pummelled and then hit repeatedly on the head with a rock. I would have been killed, but for my identity card which fell out of my pocket. Someone picked it up and discovered that I was a Muslim and I was spared. There were blood clots in my head and on my face, it took me weeks to recover. That experience is the reason why I can’t bring myself to cover communal riots. I don’t want to be lynched for being a Muslim, and I don’t want to be spared for being one. So I keep to Shaheen Bagh. I hear of the murder and the looting, of the police being openly partisan, of bodies being recovered from drains. I should go away, I should never come back. But I can’t. Maybe Shaheen Bagh will give me my country back again. *** Postscript Shortly after I wrote this piece, the Covid-19 pandemic reached India and changed the world as we know it. Many people, including some who have been part of the anti-CAANRC movement from the start, believed that the pandemic had made the protest at Shaheen Bagh unsustainable. The risk of the virus spreading was too great. Appeals were made that the protest should be called off.

Whatever anyone may have felt, it was for the women who started the protest to decide whether to withdraw it or not. There had been appeals even earlier, before and after the northeast Delhi massacres, to end the protest, and at least on one occasion most of the women had decided to do so. But in the end one faction had managed to dissuade everyone. This time, however, they were all agreed that despite the Coronavirus outbreak, they would continue their sit-in, taking all the precautions they were required to take. At the protest site, hand sanitizers began to be used frequently, and the women decided to reduce their number to five. The protest was only symbolic by now, and no threat to anyone’s safety. Early on the morning of 24 March, before the national lockdown —which would be announced only that evening—a huge contingent of Delhi police cleared the site, pulling down all the tents and temporary structures, including a 40-feet map of India. Shortly afterwards, all the slogans and graffiti on the walls and on the road were painted over. The state had moved in, not so much to contain the threat of the Coronavirus but to stamp out a peaceful protest and erase every sign of it. But the protest has already changed the narrative on citizenship. It is now an idea, and ideas cannot be easily erased. The women of Shaheen Bagh will return. And when they do, I hope that they will find a new form of protest, one which will make people of all faiths who believe in true democracy active, rather than passive, participants in the fight for equality and secularism. Because after the Coronavirus has been contained, the virus of hatred and intolerance will still need to be defeated.

All photos courtesy Mustafa Quraishi

HOW SHAHEEN BAGH BECAME A SYMBOL OF DIALOGUE AND SOLIDARITY Zeyad Masroor Khan As the dadis, the grandmothers, of Shaheen Bagh manoeuvred their way out of the bustling crowd, past the barricade that separated the sitting area from the stage and moved towards the podium on the afternoon of 1 February 2020, there was a surge of excitement among the reporters and camerapersons standing on the sidelines. The women, some in their eighties and nineties, went on to unfold a 60-feet banner with the Preamble to the Constitution of India printed on it. They held it across the breadth of the tent where they had been sitting day and night through the worst Delhi winter in decades. Below the immortal words that promise to secure for every citizen of India ‘Justice, Liberty and Equality’ were hundreds of messages of love, determination and solidarity from people who had risen in protest against a citizenship law that violates the very spirit of the Preamble. Behind the dadis were portraits of Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Subhash Chandra Bose and other leaders of the freedom struggle. There were also portraits of the iconic revolutionaries Bhagat Singh, Ashfaqulla Khan and Ram Prasad Bismil, and a sign that proclaimed: ‘Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Isaai, aapas mein hain bhai, bhai’ (Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Christian, we are all brothers). A burqaclad woman holding a mic shouted out the slogan that had become a favourite of the masses since mid-December 2019: ‘Aawaz do, hum ek hain’ (Say it out loud, we are one). Her voice echoed across the protest site. The women sitting around the stage repeated the

slogan, children clapped and the men gathered at the edges of the tent cheered. Photographers jostled to click photos. Suddenly, there was a loud bang somewhere in the distance. All hell broke loose. Men cheering seconds ago started to run. In the panic, someone shouted, ‘BJP wale aa gaye’ (The BJP men have come). The woman-in-charge rose immediately to try and calm things. ‘Don’t run. It might lead to a stampede,’ she said repeatedly. Chaos and confusion reigned for a couple of minutes, before everyone eventually slowed down and a stampede was averted. At the barricades, a few hundred metres away from where women and children sat proclaiming their right to remain citizens of India, a man had fired a shot towards the protest site. The man, later identified as Kapil Gujjar, the son of a dairy businessman from Noida, was eventually overpowered by policemen. As he was led away, Gujjar kept shouting: ‘Is desh mein sirf Hinduon ki chalegi, aur kisi ki nahi’ (Only the will of Hindus shall prevail in this country). The contrast with the slogans of the protestors he had come to gun down was stark. As men near the barricade cursed the policemen for their late action, a woman came running, inconsolable and screaming, ‘Give me one chance to talk to that boy who thinks we deserve to be shot. I will explain to him what we are protesting for,’ she said, as tears ran down her cheeks. ‘Give me just one chance,’ she kept saying, until people around her hugged her and convinced her that she couldn’t talk to the shooter, he had been taken away by the police. This woman was among the hundreds assembled at the Shaheen Bagh protest that afternoon to send copies of the Preamble to the 303 Members of Parliament who had voted for the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), which seeks to grant Indian citizenship to refugees of all major religious groups from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan except Muslims and Jews. For these peaceful protestors it was a way of reminding their elected leaders that they had failed in their duty to protect the ‘Liberty of Thought, Expression, Belief, Faith and Worship’ guaranteed to every citizen and resident of India by the nation’s Constitution.

This was not the first time Shaheen Bagh had tried to initiate a conversation with the government and with people on the other side of the ideological divide—politicians and ordinary supporters of the CAA, including those who wanted to gun them down. The historic sitin by the dadis and other women of Shaheen Bagh was as much about attempts to initiate a dialogue with an oppressive regime as it was an act of resistance by perhaps the most vulnerable of India’s citizens today. Ever since the protest began on 15 December 2019, the women had conveyed umpteen times to the media and the political class that they were waiting for the government to respond to them, they wanted to talk to the government, they wanted to be heard. They feared that the CAA might be used to make them aliens in their own country. Why else were people being asked to prove their citizenship in the country of their birth for a National Register of Citizens (NRC) that would not recognise existing documents like the Aadhaar card, or even the ID card which gave them the right to vote? When the home minister of the country, no less, had said that first the NRC exercise would be carried out across the country and only then would the CAA be implemented, what could it mean except that a class of ‘doubtful’ citizens would be created and then the CAA would be used to grant citizenship to everyone except Muslims? Their apprehensions were genuine. They had explained why. But the government refused to listen to them. Barely two days after the firing at Shaheen Bagh, Prime Minister Modi described the protests as a ‘conspiracy’. *** Shaheen Bagh sits on the side of a highway near Delhi’s border with Noida. It is a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood with narrow, dusty lanes, densely packed houses and shops, tall apartment buildings blocking the sunlight, and tangles of electricity wires and cables above nearly every street. It is a congested neighbourhood where the smell of kababs drowns out the stench of garbage collected in the corners and overflowing drains. Most outsiders

wouldn’t even be aware of its existence, unless they went there to buy defective clothes from the factory outlets that line the highway. Even before it became a national symbol, this locality had always been a complex, cosmopolitan potpourri. A place where university students and those who work in fancy offices in Noida and Okhla live and mingle with daily wage workers, maids, mechanics, waiters, owners of hole-in-the-wall shops, home factories and roadside food stalls and bakeries. With most of its inhabitants educated to varying degrees, politically aware and sensitive to media narratives, the locality represents that section of Indian Muslims who are more progressive than most believe them to be, but who still struggle to rise up the social ladder. Many of them are acutely aware of their democratic rights and the tenets of their nation’s Constitution —a fact that sets them apart from their relatives in Rampur, or Purnia, or Darbhanga; even Allahabad or Aligarh. Assembling every evening at the tea shops and food joints under the low-slung hightension wires, they have always been typical street-smart, confident Delhiites. They were not unaware that their act of blocking the highway that ran along their locality would be used to paint a narrative that anti-CAA protestors like them were a violent, dangerous lot intent on hurting the national interest. It did not surprise them that in order to feed this narrative and discredit their protest, the Delhi and UP police barricaded other roads around the locality that could be used by commuters from surrounding areas as alternative routes. Despite this, and in an atmosphere where Islamophobia was rampant and anyone critical of the government was certified a traitor, the protestors carved out a unique path for their resistance, carrying their movement forward by stressing on the principles of love, fellowship and peace, and by using the instruments of the Indian Constitution to articulate their vision. To beat a powerful media machinery bent on demonising them, they worked hard to find innovative ways to take their message to the nation. In a matter of days, Shaheen Bagh became the symbol of antiCAA protests and the inspiration for a women-led civil resistance movement unlike anything India had seen since Independence. That

the women were Muslim, and both underprivileged and privileged— at least economically— was truly revolutionary. Many other Shaheen Baghs led by Muslim women cropped up in other parts of India. The protestors were self-aware, they knew that as long as they occupied public spaces and remained visible, inclusive, nonviolent and unafraid, the movement would keep getting stronger. Along with national and international attention, this approach also brought a huge responsibility. They were now the representatives of Indian Muslims—if anything bad was said from their stage, the community as a whole would suffer, the attacks on the principle of secularism would become more vicious, and blame would eventually come to their door. But at every point of time, Shaheen Bagh knew what to say, how to say it and whom to say it to. They tried to reach out to those in power through songs, slogans, placards and, on one memorable occasion, through postcards.

On 18 January, the protestors wrote postcards to ‘Mr Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, 7 Lok Kalyan Marg, New Delhi’. Through these postcards, they invited Modi to come to Shaheen Bagh, to join them for a cup of tea, witness their resolve and listen to them—to their ‘Mann Ki Baat’. Calling him for a ‘chai pe charcha’ at Shaheen Bagh, the protestors invoked phrases and symbols that Modi himself had used in the run-up to his 2014 elections. Men and women, the old and the young, wrote their messages on pale yellow postcards—some inviting the leader of the world’s largest democracy to have biryani at their home, others requesting him to show the same concern for Muslim women that, according to him, had led him to ban Triple Talaq. Huddled in groups with their pens, pencils and a willingness to communicate with their Hindu nationalist leader, the protestors sat under the canopy that had become an open-air home to thousands from their locality and elsewhere, and scribbled messages of friendship, seeking dialogue.

The postcard below by Noor Aisha, a woman protestor, reminded the prime minister of the role her forefathers had played in the struggle against colonial rule: ‘I, Noor Aisha, am an Indian citizen. Did anyone ask our ancestors for proof of their identity when they were fighting for India’s independence? So why do I have to prove my citizenship now?’ Another woman used an Urdu verse to address the PM: ‘Modi sahib, why should you think that storms will scare us? / We are used to rowing our boats in typhoons.’

A message written in Hindi addressed to ‘Modi ji’ said: ‘Please stop CAA, NRC and NPR. Please don’t divide India. We really love India.’ Another postcard referred to the PM’s motto during the 2019 election campaign: ‘How are CAA and NRC in the spirit of “Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas”? Mazhab nahin sikhata aapas mein bair rakhna. Hindi hain hum watan hai, Hindustan humaara’ (Religion does not teach us to hate one another. We are the people of Hind, Hindustan belongs to us all). A young college woman advised the PM to be pragmatic, if nothing else. ‘Dear Prime Minister,’ she wrote, ‘foreign investors have withdrawn support, obviously not without reason. Please introspect and use your position wisely, conscientiously and sincerely.’ A boy studying in the sixth standard in a neighbourhood school wrote: ‘Dear Modi Uncle, I’m a student of class 6. When I study civics, I study the sentence that India is a diverse country. Now I will have to say that India used to be a diverse country, because I can see from your actions that India will not be a diverse country in the

future.’ An old woman who had been sitting at the protest site through freezing nights was more forthright, chiding the mighty PM as only a dadi can: ‘Assalamalaikum. It has been 35 days since the women of Shaheen Bagh have been protesting here. But not a louse has moved on your ear.’ Then there were poets, artists, singers and students who used the postcards to express themselves artistically. Some drew portraits of Muslim reformers like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, while others painted stirring images of the gutsy women of Shaheen Bagh. One artist simply wrote ‘Azadi’, another wrote in beautiful calligraphy: ‘Aa jao, ya chale jao’ (Either come, or go away). As evening turned to night, the protestors kept writing. Soon there was a shortage of postcards. A little girl with two ponytails wrote one of the last postcards in torchlight: ‘Why doesn’t Pradhanmantri ji love the words written in our beautiful Constitution?’ To all these postcards, the BJP spokesperson Shahnawaz Hussain had this reply: ‘Why would Prime Minister Modi go there? There are protests going on at multiple places across the country. Does that mean the prime minister will go everywhere?’ he told Al Jazeera. *** In late January and early February, as Delhi was witnessing the most communally charged election campaign in its history, a lot of hate was directed at Shaheen Bagh. Without a major poll plank to counter the popularity of the Aam Aadmi Party and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, the Bharatiya Janata Party made the anti-CAA protests, particularly Shaheen Bagh, their major poll plank. Their campaign was focused on polarising the residents of Delhi on religious lines by painting Shaheen Bagh as a protest exclusively by Muslims, funded by ‘terrorists’, for ‘Jinnah wali azadi’—the ‘freedom to be Jinnah’ and partition India once again for a new Muslim homeland. On 27 January, the union home minister, Amit Shah, exhorted voters in Babarpur in northeast Delhi to press the button on the

electronic voting machines with such force that ‘the shock is felt directly in Shaheen Bagh’. The next day, BJP MP Parvesh Verma referred to the Shaheen Bagh protestors as ‘rapists and murderers’ from whom only the BJP could protect people. The same evening, a video of India’s junior finance minister, Anurag Thakur, inciting people to ‘shoot the nation’s traitors’ went viral on social media: ‘Desh ke gaddaron ko,’ he said, and on cue people from the crowd cried out, ‘Goli maro saalon ko.’ To the abuse and violent threats, Shaheen Bagh responded with flowers. On 2 February, they organised a programme called ‘Goli Nahi Phool Barsao’. Several women held placards that said: ‘Desh ke un pyaron par, phool barsao saaron par’ (Shower flowers on all those lovely people). On the same day, members of some extremist Hindu organisations assembled outside the protest site with plans to attack it. Amid shouts of ‘Jai Shri Ram’ and ‘Goli maaro saalon ko’, they tried to provoke neighbouring Hindu residents to storm the protest site. Some artists at the site met to find ideas to counter this hate with reason and amity. Within an hour, they had placed a bouquet of roses near the barricades along with a banner that said, ‘Aao Baithen, Baat Karein’ (Come, Let’s Sit and Talk It Out). But the vitriol did not stop. Within a few days, the BJP released two nakedly communal promotional videos that branded Shaheen Bagh as the hub of anti-national elements and the BJP as the only party that could deal with them and safeguard the nation’s culture and development. Shaheen Bagh answered this campaign with a campaign of religious solidarity. On 6 February, just two days before the elections in Delhi, the protestors organised ‘Jashn-e-Ekta’ to ‘celebrate love, equality and unity’ and show that people cutting across faiths supported their movement. A multi-faith ceremony of ‘mantras, hymns, kirtan and qirat’ was attended by Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Christian priests. It was a unique sight to see a Hindu havan being organised in a Muslim-majority locality—with bearded men in skull caps running around to find ghee, garlands and agarbattis. It began with Hindu pandits reciting vedic hymns in a prayer for peace. Hijab-clad women

sat around the havan fire and repeated the hymns after the pandits. In the celebratory spirit, many Muslim men and children joined in, chanting ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ and ‘Jai Shri Ram’, reclaiming the slogans from Hindutva fanatics who have corrupted the words and use them as war cries. In the middle of all this, one of the pandits wore a skull cap and shouted, ‘Did a skull cap bring down my social status? Am I not a Hindu anymore?’

The Jashn-e-Ekta celebrations at Shaheen Bagh. Photo courtesy Himani Singh. The Hindu ritual was followed by Christian nuns singing hymns and reading passages from the Holy Bible. They had translated the hymns praising Jesus into Urdu and everybody chanted along with them. A Christian priest danced among the protestors as photojournalists went happily berserk taking his pictures. After that, Sikh granthis read from the Guru Granth Sahib and raagis sang Gurubani to the music of a harmonium and a tabla ferried to the protest site on metro, rickshaw and foot. The glorious day when Shaheen Bagh showcased India’s secular and diverse culture ended with messages of peace from the Quran and qirat recited by a maulvi. A Muslim woman draped in a

saffron sari and wearing a tika stood beside him. Everyone assembled for a dua to promote brotherhood and sisterhood in the country. At one point a man wearing a turban, kurta and churidaar pajama took the microphone and said: ‘Our Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said protestors could be identified by their clothes. Now we ask: Can you identify us by our clothes?’ The audience applauded and shouted out, ‘No!’ This multi-faith prayer was covered by almost all the major newspapers and TV channels and eventually made it to the popular prime-time show hosted by Ravish Kumar. Shaheen Bagh’s message of solidarity reached millions. The BJP later ended up losing badly in the Delhi elections. The day of the multi-faith prayer was an illustration of the essential spirit of Shaheen Bagh—the reason why it had emerged as a magical centre of solidarities; a place where people from different classes, faiths, ideologies, educational backgrounds, professions, gender identities, castes and regions stood together for the same cause: protecting the Indian Constitution. It was a place where a bindi-sporting Hindu woman sat alongside a Muslim woman who flaunted her hijab without fear or embarrassment; where a Muslim man with a long, flowing beard rubbed shoulders with a cleanshaven left-wing student; where women who worked as managers in corporate offices in Noida and Gurgaon raised the same slogans as men who worked as butchers in the galis of Batla House and Shaheen Bagh. The shining light of solidarity brought together a battle-hardened activist from CR Park, an elite writer from Golf Links, a Dalit migrant from western Uttar Pradesh, a farmer from Punjab, a nun from Kerala. A few days before the Delhi election, when tension was at its peak following reports that a goon squad claiming allegiance to a Hindutva group was planning an attack on the protestors, 300 Sikh farmers boarded buses from Moga, Sangrur, Mansa and other towns of Punjab to stand by the protestors in Shaheen Bagh. They were stopped and detained by the police some 3 kilometres from their destination. Pretty soon, a number of Muslims from Shaheen Bagh gathered outside the police station to guarantee the safety of their

Sikh brothers who had travelled miles to protect them at their most vulnerable moment. Amid calls of Muslim men shouting ‘Jo Bole So Nihaal’, the police eventually released the farmers and moved them to a gurudwara in Hari Nagar. In the middle of the night, the protestors rushed back home to cook dinner and deliver it to their Sikh comrades. The following night the indomitable Sikh men and women finally arrived at the Shaheen Bagh protest site to a warm and rousing welcome. It was one of those unforgettable moments when the fact of being Indian, being human, fills you with pride and optimism and moves you to tears. The most surprising to some observers was the solidarity between the orthodox Muslims and the progressive, nonreligious Muslims—groups that are generally at each other’s throats. Though it was a big cultural shock for an orthodox Muslim or Imam to see the stage occupied for musical performances by young people wearing Western clothes— left-wing students from JNU singing songs of revolution and women with short, streaked hair dancing to a poem about feminist unity—they never objected. It was this complex cultural conundrum which ultimately made Shaheen Bagh what it was. ‘They have come to support our cause, we must respect them,’ was a line often repeated at the tea stalls frequented by traditionbound Muslim men of the locality. The only thing that the Imam of the mosque, the student from the nearby Jamia university and the boy who worked at a factory outlet cared about was their common cause —not to be denied citizenship of the country where their ancestors were buried. It was a collective fight for existence. ‘They will annihilate us if we don’t show unity now,’ a protestor said after Amit Shah’s statement that the government would not retreat even an inch. It was also a unique moment for the men—most of them steeped in patriarchal values—to be on the sidelines of a movement led by women. They only tried their best to make the women feel safe. A woman friend told me, ‘Each time I’ve come to Shaheen Bagh, I’ve come across men who have bent over backwards to make space for me to pass through and get to the area designated for women—safely. Not one inappropriate glance, not one inappropriate

touch. For a woman, as regressive as it may sound, this means a lot.’ In the end, it was the women who decided who would hold the dais, who would perform and what to say to the media who came there. But that kind of power came after a lot of sacrifice. After all the protest-tourists who thronged the square in the evenings went back to their homes, to their warm blankets and room heaters, there were just a few hundred women holding the fort: sitting out through the cold winter nights wrapped in shawls and thin blankets. Even when it rained heavily and there was the risk of illness, these women continued to sit and protest for everyone’s constitutional rights. Of course, they decided everything together. At its peak, Shaheen Bagh was a symbol of women’s solidarity like no other. On 9 February, a day after the Delhi elections, six female Urdu poets decided to show their solidarity with the women leading the movement. A poetry reading, ‘Mushaira-e-Mohabbat’, was organised in Shaheen Bagh. Everyone was invited, the invitation communicated with a Wasif Dehlvi couplet: ‘Bujhte hue charagh farozan karenge hum / tum aaoge to jashn-e-charaghan karenge hum’ (We’ll make the dying lamps blaze again / If you join us, we’ll have a festival of lights). The six poets—shayaras—Aleena Itrat, Rashida Baqi Haya, Dr Waseem Rashid, Salma Shaheen, Razia Haider and Tasleem Kausar—came together to encourage the protestors by reciting some of their finest revolutionary poetry. But destiny had other plans. Minutes before the mushaira was supposed to begin, the mic at the protest site stopped working. A local boy was sent running to Jamia Nagar to find a sound-repair man. The shayaras—who usually recite their verse on the grand stages of national and international events, at high-brow gatherings of powerful socialites and at official functions for Parliamentarians in Delhi—were told to wait for an hour, perhaps more. They sat patiently on plastic chairs on the sidelines while crowds milled around them. After an hour, the mic was fixed. Everyone began to cheer. Then there was a power failure—the first time this had happened since the protests began. For a total of three hours, six of the most celebrated shayaras of India, in their elegant

saris and gold jewellery, sat prepared in front of the audience, and to the surprise of the embarrassed organisers, they uttered not a single word of complaint. ‘We can wait the entire night. This is a historic opportunity to recite our poetry in front of these brave women,’ one of them told an apologetic organiser. As the darkness deepened, people in the audience took out their mobiles and illuminated the canopy with their phone torchlights. It was a magical moment; no technical difficulty would kill their spirit. Finally, a generator was arranged and ‘Mushaira-e-Mohabbat’ began. The anchor of the event, Waseem Rashid, herself a resident of Shaheen Bagh, got the attention of the audience with the first verse of the evening: ‘Shaheen banke saare zamaane pe chha gayin / Pardanasheen auratein sadkon pe aa gayin’ (They’ve become falcons and prevailed over the world / Veiled women have arrived on the streets). Her second sher completely won over the audience: Apna haq chheen-ne ko nikal aaye hum apne aanchal ko parcham bana hi liya. Koi tabdeel karne chala tha jise Us tirange ko humne bacha hi liya. Dekhiye aap himmat toh shaheen ki Aasmanon pe kabza jama hi liya. (We have emerged to take our rights back We have made banners of our scarves. They thought that they could change it; We have saved the Tricolour from dishonour. Behold the courage of the falcon! It has made the entire sky its dominion.) Aleena Itrat recited poems about police atrocities on Muslim boys and the significance of women protestors leading the movement: ‘Sirf beton ki qurbaniyon se ab na lahrayega tiranga / Hind ki betiyaan aa gayin hain, ek naya inquilab aa gaya hai’ (The sacrifices of our sons alone won’t hold the Tricolour aloft / The daughters of

Hindustan are here, the revolution is here). Her senior, Rashida Baqi Haya, slammed the government for endangering people’s unity for political gains. She said to a roaring audience: ‘Bikti rahengi kab tak majbooriyaan humaari / Sauda karenge kab tak ye rehnumaa humaara?’ (How long will they trade in our helplessness? / How long will our leaders sell us for their profit?) *** By mid-February, the protests at Shaheen Bagh had gone on for two months—longer than anyone had imagined. It was an astonishing achievement, and yet a protest fatigue had set in. The solidarity displayed in the initial phase was beginning to weaken. The citizens’ movement had now begun to be undermined by groupism and infighting. Media coverage had also begun to thin and focus had shifted to the results of the Delhi elections, which Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP had won by a landslide. Then came Valentine’s Day. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to spread the message of love again—the sentiment that had defined the Shaheen Bagh protest from the start. But there was a catch. The 14th of February was also the anniversary of the Pulwama attacks. So, a sombre event was planned for that day to pay tribute to the soldiers who had lost their lives, and ‘Valentine’s at Shaheen Bagh’ was shifted to 13th February. Posters put up to announce the event extended an invitation to the prime minister to come to Shaheen Bagh and celebrate the festival of love with people who had been wanting to meet and have a conversation with him for two months. The day began with some protestors holding heart-shaped cutouts with ‘PM Modi please come to Shaheen Bagh’ written on them. Photos of this invitation trended on social media all day. In the evening, a band came to the site with drum sets, electric guitars and large speakers. The musicians were accompanied by a chorus of students and some local residents and protestors. It was announced that they would sing a ‘love anthem’ for the prime minister. A hush fell over the audience. The song began, and at first there was

stunned silence, but soon everyone joined the chorus, even the venerable dadis! As Valentine’s Day slipped into evening, Shaheen Bagh came alive in an extraordinary celebration of love—tender, fierce, vulnerable and defiant all at once: Sardi aake chali gayi Garmi zyada door nahin Hum to aas mein baithe hain Modi tum kab aaoge (Winter has come and gone Summer is at the door We’re still waiting in hope Modi, when will you come?) We say no to CAA We say no to NPR Hum to thaan ke baithe hain Modi tum kab aaoge (We say no to CAA We say no to NPR We’ve made up our minds, we’re waiting Modi, when will you come?) Kaagaz laao, Pattar laao Angoothe ki chhap lagao Kehte khud ko Hindustani Toh apni pehchan batao (‘Bring your papers, get your documents Put the mark of your thumb right here You say that you are Indians Well, what’s your proof of identity?’) Hum apni pehchan batayein? Tum apni pehchan batao

Hum apni pehchan batayein? Tum apni pehchan batao (What’s our proof of identity? What’s your proof of identity? What’s our proof of identity? What’s your proof of identity?) Sardi aake chali gayi Garmi zyada door nahin Hum to aas mein baithe hain Modi tum kab aaoge (Winter has come and gone Summer is at the door We’re still waiting in hope Modi, when will you come?) Mahilaon ka naara hai Bharatvarsh humaara hai Nahin sahenge datey rahenge Ye kaala kanoon hatao Nahin sahenge datey rahenge Ye kaala kanoon hatao (Women are speaking, loud and clear: This land is ours, we’re Indian Enough! We won’t be swept away So scrap your black law Listen! We won’t be swept away So scrap your black law) Ye kaala kanoon hatao Ye kaala kanoon hatao Ye kaala kanoon hatao Ye kaala kanoon hatao

(Scrap your black law! Scrap your black law! Scrap your black law! Scrap your black law!) Sardi aake chali gayi Garmi ab bhi baqi hai Seena taan ke baithe hain Modi tum kab aaoge (Winter has come and gone Now there’s summer to deal with We’re sitting here, we’ll bear it all Modi, when will you come?) Modi tum kab aaoge Modi tum kab aaoge Modi tum kab aaoge Modi tum kab aaoge (Modi, when will you come? Modi, when will you come? Modi, when will you come? Modi, when will you come?) Immediately after the performance, there were shouts of ‘once more’ from the audience, to which the band obliged. Everyone joined in again, repeating every line—even the media contingent was tapping their feet. The mood was electric. Thousands were singing together, calling the prime minister of India to their historic protest. The oppressed were singing to the oppressor in love, wanting to see him, to talk to him. Later, the protesting dadis came on the stage to unwrap a surprise gift for the PM—a giant red teddy bear holding a placard: ‘Modi Tum Kab Aaoge?’ ***

None of these overtures of affection moved the ruling political class. The leaders of the BJP kept threatening violence and making hate speeches against the protestors, the electronic media kept projecting them as traitors. The state’s response to the protests came less than ten days after Valentine’s Day. On 23 February, a mob of goons aided and abetted by policemen attacked all the anti-CAA-NRC-NPR protest sites in northeast Delhi, subsequently followed by violence in many Muslim colonies in the area. Like a snake slithering on, unstoppable, precise, devouring its prey, the violence moved through very specific neighbourhoods in the northeast of Delhi, destroying them and then moving to the next target. Muslims were killed, and Hindus too— when fires are lit, they can’t always be controlled. Or perhaps unintended targets are not unintended after all; every death is part of a plan. And so the fire raged. People who lived in underprivileged localities bore the brunt. It began on the evening of 23 February with Maujpur, Karawal Nagar and Babarpur. The following day it engulfed Kardampuri, Gokulpuri, Seelampur, Jaffrabad, Chand Bagh and Shivpuri. On 25 February the fire reached Brahmapuri, Shahdara, Durgapuri, Gamri and Bhajanpura. The protestors who had gathered at different sites in northeast Delhi to demonstrate against the CAA and occupy roads came from these very localities. In addition, the protest sites at Khureji, Khajuri and Hauz Rani too were attacked or destroyed by the police, and leaders of the protests were hunted down and arrested on charges like ‘attempt to murder’. Many Muslims were identified by their beards, others were asked to drop their pants to show whether or not they were circumcised. They were beaten and bludgeoned to death with rods and lathis. In many instances, people were shot at point-blank range. The slogan ‘Desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maaro saalon ko’ now rang in the streets of Delhi as a soundtrack to savagery. Children saw their fathers being butchered in front of their eyes, their homes set on fire, their brothers slashed and left to bleed and die in drains. Many schools and hospitals in Muslim areas were set on fire, nineteen mosques were demolished. Eventually, fifty-three

Delhiites lost their lives, a majority of them Muslims. That is the ‘official’ figure. Many witnesses and observers of the carnage put the figure at over 100. We’ll never know the true numbers. Several hundred others were injured, rendered homeless and made destitute. As Delhi burned for days, the police stood as spectators. More than 19,000 emergency calls were made to the police, but they never came. On the other hand, videos of policemen helping the rioters could be seen on social media. The tragedy and terror of those days is painfully clear in a video of a family under attack. In the video, Mohammad Idris Saifi and his family can be seen on the roof of a building that has been set on fire by a mob that can be heard shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram’. A child is crying and screaming, ‘Abbu, fire brigade ko call kar do’ (Daddy, call the fire brigade). His mother is saying the same thing. ‘Abbu, fire brigade ko call kar do,’ the child keeps repeating in terror. A man’s voice says, ‘Chup raho, aaj koi phone nahin uthega’ (Be quiet, no phones will be answered today). There’s a loud bang. The child goes quiet and then starts praying to Allah. The carnage was allowed to continue for three days. It was as if the state wanted revenge on its own citizens for demanding the rights enshrined in their own Constitution. There was no remorse expressed. Neither Narendra Modi nor Amit Shah spoke or tweeted about the people massacred on the streets of the national capital, just a few miles from the Parliament. Not a word. And no relief was announced, either. Only a few protest sites survived this cycle of violence, most prominent being Shaheen Bagh, the place where the movement for justice began. On 7 March, Kapil Gujjar, the Shaheen Bagh shooter, was given bail. Upon reaching his village, he was felicitated for his ‘brave act’ of firing on unarmed protestors amid shouts of ‘Jai Shri Ram’. Gods, humanity, the nation’s Constitution— they can all be dishonoured with complete impunity in today’s India. ***

By mid-March, another emergency gripped the country: the Covid-19 pandemic. The mainstream media, especially the Hindi media, found another opportunity to target Shaheen Bagh. It was portrayed as a place where the virus would breed among the thousands of antinational, intransigent and unhygienic Muslims intent on destroying India. Almost every news channel suppressed the truth that the women of Shaheen Bagh had responded to government directives and reduced the numbers at the protest site to just five. On 22 March, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for a ‘janata curfew’ and asked people to stay indoors, many of his supporters took out rallies and processions, flouting all the guidelines of social distancing. However, Shaheen Bagh complied. Respecting the prime minister’s directive, only five women sat at the site, and the rest left their slippers there to show that they would return to continue their sit-in protest whenever they could do so. But the authorities did not respect this decision to put the protest on hold. On the morning of 24 March, hundreds of cops arrived at the site in trucks and began dismantling it, despite protests by the local residents. As the army of cops marched down the streets, breaking down art installations and removing banners, posters and flags, labourers they had hired erased all the graffiti, the paintings, the protest slogans. They loaded the replica of India Gate and the giant map of India onto police trucks, to be disposed of in some barracks. Men in bulldozers crushed the portraits of Ambedkar, Gandhi, Maulana Azad, Bhagat Singh, Subhash Bose that hung on the makeshift walls and mowed down the medical camp and the media centre. They broke down the chai kiosk which served watered-down tea to women protestors when they sat awake on winter nights guarding their protest and the idea of India’s democracy. The cops were determined to efface every sign of the Shaheen Bagh protest. In a final act of erasure, they removed the famed canopy that had seen some of the most revolutionary speeches in defence of democracy and liberty that India had heard since Independence. Women who tried to resist the police were detained. In the end, the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, never went to Shaheen Bagh. There would be no dialogue.

Part Two

THE IDEA OF SHAHEEN BAGH

THE MESSAGE Nayantara Sahgal The message is clear: Indians will not submit to another Partition. Citizens of a multi-religious, multicultural nation, they are refusing to be partitioned into Hindus and Others and have made it known by their countrywide resistance to the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and related measures which target Muslims as outsiders. The rejection of a citizenship law based on religious identity has triggered an uprising like no other since the fight for freedom. Protests began after the Act was passed in Parliament and students at Jamia Millia Islamia, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Aligarh Muslim University were attacked for opposing it. Reacting to the brutality, a group of women started a peaceful sit-in at Shaheen Bagh on 15 December 2019, proclaiming the right of all Indians to Indian citizenship, and within days their number had grown to the hundreds, then thousands. Men and women of communities not affected by CAA made common cause with them. The sit-in burst its bounds and became a phenomenon crossing frontiers and differences, just as the national movement for independence under Mahatma Gandhi had done. But the extraordinary features this time are that this is a women’s movement, mainly Muslim, leaderless and spontaneously sprung. Something new has happened. Ordinary women of no political background or experience have brought politics down from the distant heights of power to the street, where the issue in question cannot be ignored.

Photo by Ananya Singh, courtesy The Citizen. The young, old and the very old who sat through bitterly cold days and nights for over three months in a massive satyagraha included working women and university students, but mainly housewives who had never stepped out of their homes unaccompanied, some with children who could not be left alone at home. There may have been some among them who crossed frontiers of their own by stepping out and demonstrating by their presence that there was no going back to submission under patriarchy or any unjust law or any unequal book of rules. It is not the first time Indian women have claimed the public/political space. The anti-CAA movement continues a great tradition, and makes it greater. In 1930, Gandhi broke the British government’s Salt Law and its ownership of India’s salt by walking from his Sabarmati Ashram to the seaside at Dandi to manufacture salt. His example was widely followed. In Bombay a group of women went to Chowpatty on the day that Gandhi picked up a handful of salt

at Dandi. They were led by Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya and joined by housewives carrying clay and brass pots and pans, and ‘chulhas’ to make salt. Later they sold it outside the Bombay Stock Exchange and the High Court. An interview records that Kamaladevi walked into the court and asked the magistrate to buy ‘the salt of freedom’. Salt—a necessary ingredient of food associated with every kitchen— had become a symbol of revolt that brought women from the domestic to the public space. Sarojini Naidu, the first Indian woman to become president of the Indian National Congress, led the second march to the government-owned Dharasana Salt Works, a site where unarmed marchers pledged to non-violence had been savagely attacked by armed police, leaving battered and bloodied bodies on the sand. Sarojini Naidu figures in the stone sculpture of the Salt March in Delhi, along with another woman, Matangini Hazra, who came from a village in Bengal, and was shot dead some years later by a British police officer during the Quit India movement of 1942. There was no going back after 1930. Women came out into the streets to join civil disobedience in ever larger numbers, marking the beginning of their participation as a force in politics. They picketed foreign cloth and liquor shops, organised boycotts of British goods and took out ‘prabhat pheris’, early-morning processions. Recalling those times, the British Quaker Horace Alexander remembered: ‘Day by day the streets of Bombay would be livened in the early morning with their songs of freedom…Women could be found all over the city…Many of them had never taken part in public life before.’ In the streets they faced brutal lathi charges and a record number of them were imprisoned during the civil disobedience campaign in 1932. Leaders among them, including Satyavati Devi (Swami Shraddhanand’s daughter) and Perin Captain (Dadabhai Naoroji’s granddaughter), not content with picketing and boycott, demanded and seized a greater role in the rebellion. In 1932, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit presided over a crowded public meeting in Allahabad where the independence pledge was taken. She was arrested and sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment, the first of her three imprisonments under British rule.

The enlightened democracy that these brave activists fought for is in peril. Divide and rule is now policy. The slaughter of Muslims goes unpunished. Democratic institutions are under ferocious attack. In effect, we live in a police state where those who disagree with the ruling dispensation do not have recourse to justice. Not surprising, then, that huge numbers assembled at Shaheen Bagh and cried ‘Enough is enough’, or that civilised voices across the country have supported them. At a time when our constitutional rights face extinction, the tradition of Indian women in politics has taken a spectacular stride forward in their defence.

MAHATMA GANDHI WOULD HAVE APPROVED Harsh Mander Over a hundred years have passed since a battle was launched for the soul of the ancient land of India. At stake was the country which the people of this land would together build after the British left its shores. This was the time when Mahatma Gandhi returned from South Africa to join India’s freedom struggle. During his leadership of three decades, a majority of Indians—Hindu, Muslim and people of other faiths—shared his vision of a country resolutely inclusive and humane; a country in which people of every belief and ethnicity would be equal citizens with equal rights. This ideal was the very foundation of the Constitution of the new republic, crafted under the care of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. But this goal was bitterly contested by the Hindu Mahasabha, founded around 1915, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded in 1925. Their vision for India was of a nation exclusively for India’s Hindu majority, in which Muslims and Christians would be ‘allowed’ inclusion only as second-class citizens. Though less explicitly enunciated, people of disadvantaged castes and tribal ethnicities would also be lesser citizens. The turbulent combat eventually took a toll of over a million lives, including that of Gandhi, and caused perhaps the largest cataclysmic displacement of human populations in history. Over seventy years later, India finds itself at a decisive phase of this same battle. The country is led today by men who have spent all their adult lives as staunch members of the RSS. They believe their time has come—to remould India into the muscular and majoritarian nation of their imagination.

This did not happen suddenly. The corrosion began in the early decades after Independence. The 1980s and ’90s, in particular, saw vast fractures crack India’s plurality: communal massacres, regressive mobilisation against the rights of Muslim women, a violent mass campaign led by the RSS to destroy a mosque in Ayodhya, demonisation of the Muslim, and construction of a sense of permanent grievance in the Hindu people. Since 2014, however, India has hurtled far more rapidly downwards to become a country increasingly dangerous and unwelcoming to minorities, especially its vast Muslim populace. Fear and hate have become inseparable from public life, both for minorities and for those who stand with them. Elected leaders flaunt hate speech, legitimising and valorising bigotry and violence. Crowds gather to lynch Muslims and Dalits in the name of protecting the cow, and proudly post videos of the lynching on social media. In the mid-summer 2019 elections, the BJP government led by Narendra Modi won an expanded mandate despite economic collapse, mounting farm distress and rising unemployment. This has been interpreted by the leadership as a mandate to implement their alternate vision for India as a land only for Hindus. A pivotal step in this project was the creation, in December 2019, by law for the first time, a hierarchy of citizenship rights based only on religion. Under constant siege, battered and weather-beaten, the edifice of India’s Constitution has still endured so far. However, if the government is allowed to implement the new citizenship law—the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), 2019, which guarantees automatic citizenship to immigrants of all major faiths except Islam— it is clear that India’s constitutional structure will cave in. The Constitution will not need to be rewritten, it will be subverted, and its soul, which is also the soul of the Indian republic, will be annihilated. A new nation will emerge from its rubble— wrathful, majoritarian, and inhospitable to its minorities. The CAA weighs upon tangled contestations of belonging and rights: Who belongs to India, and on what terms? And, indeed, whom does India belong to? Citizenship ultimately is the right to have rights. Who in this country should have rights, and from whom

should these be withheld? The answers to these fraught questions were settled within the humanist and inclusive framework of the Indian Constitution, whose central premise is that religious faith has no bearing on eligibility for Indian citizenship; India belongs to its Muslim, Christian and Parsi residents as much as it does to its Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains. It was questions of belonging and religion-as-politics that tore India apart in 1947. The Muslim League regarded religion as key to citizenship; therefore, India was not one but two nations—Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the Hindu Mahasabha leader, concurred. But the architects of our Constitution firmly rejected this idea, and the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, declared, ‘We accept as Indian anyone who calls himself a citizen of India.’ By introducing the CAA, the Modi government has deliberately revived the fears, anxieties and hatreds of Partition. In effect, it endorses the two-nation theory by creating a hierarchy of citizenship based on religious faith, and excluding Muslim immigrants from this hierarchy. The moral fig leaf offered is that this law intends to provide refuge to people suffering religious persecution in the neighbouring countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. If religious persecution was truly to become the yardstick for eligibility for Indian citizenship, then few neighbours are more tormented than the Ahmadiyas in Pakistan who face death for even worshipping in a mosque, the Rohingya battling genocide in Myanmar, and the Uighurs held in internment camps in China—all of whom the CAA excludes. Until 1987, to be eligible for Indian citizenship it was sufficient for a person to be born in India. Then, spurred by populist movements, mainly in Assam, alleging massive illegal migrations from Bangladesh, citizenship laws were amended to additionally require that at least one parent should be Indian for a person to be regarded as a citizen of this country. In 2003 the law was further amended by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government to prescribe not just that one parent should be Indian, but also that the other should not be an illegal immigrant. This amendment also prescribed the creation of a National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC) as an instrument to

identify ‘illegal immigrants’. Further, to identify ‘illegal citizens’, a National Register of Citizens (NRC) would be prepared. The rules then specified that to compile the NRC, first a National Population Register (NPR) would be prepared as a comprehensive national record of residents, and from among them the executive would identify those who are ‘doubtful citizens’. And not just the government but even other citizens would be empowered to identify ‘doubtful citizens’—which, in effect, would allow communal targeting by non-state organisations like the RSS. This is the project that the present Indian regime is taking forward. The CAA 2019 is the harbinger of the NRC. By passing this law, the Modi government is clearly messaging that if people of any identity except Muslim are unable to produce the required citizenship documents for the NRC, they will be accepted as refugees and given citizenship. This means that the real burden to prove that they are Indian citizens, after a pan-India NRC has been prepared, will be on Muslims, because only they will risk statelessness. Most Indians would find it impossible to muster the required documents to prove their citizenship, but only document-less Muslims will face the prospect of detention centres, or being stripped of all citizenship rights. The Indian Republic was built on guarantees of equality and non-discrimination. The creation of potentially stateless persons exclusively because of their religious identity would mark the demise of India as a secular republic; it would be the decisive end of the Republic founded by the men and women who won us our freedom. *** But millions of Indians stood up to defend the secular, democratic Republic of India. The enlightened and inclusive vision of Gandhi and other leaders of the freedom movement was anathema to the likes of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and those who hold power in India today seem determined to prove that Savarkar and Jinnah were right, and Gandhi was wrong. They say

the NRC is necessary for completing the unfinished business of Partition. They believe that Partition will be complete only with the transfer of Muslim Indians to Pakistan and Bangladesh, and of the Hindus from these nations to India. They see Hindus as persecuted and trapped in the Muslim-majority countries in our neighbourhood, as well as in Muslim-majority Kashmir. They never acknowledge the daily discrimination that Indian Muslims wrestle with. Instead, they demonise the community as a security threat to India, as violent, disloyal, intolerant, misogynistic and reproductively irresponsible. In spirited denial, hundreds of thousands of Indians have now made it abundantly clear that they reject this ideology. They want to complete the unfinished business of the freedom struggle, and heal the wounds of Partition. Immediately after the CAA was passed in the Parliament, spontaneous protests began in every corner of the country. Youthful, middle-aged, elderly and working-class protestors took to the streets in peaceful demonstrations, every day, for over three months, to say no to divisive agendas. This will be remembered as a luminous, extremely significant moment in the journey of the republic, because the protests—of which the sit-in demonstration in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh became a shining emblem—are, at their core, popular moral assertions founded on fraternity, of the kind we have not seen in India for a long time. For over a hundred days, people were pouring into the streets offering hope, solidarity and reassurance to those threatened by the politics of hate and fear. The protests marked a collective rejection of the toxic politics of the right. The ruling establishment has responded with its well-used playlist of attempting to communalise and discredit the protestors; to confuse people with falsehoods; and to deploy crushing state force. But this time none of it has worked. The police brutalised students in the two national universities identified with India’s Muslim heritage— Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University. But the same night that news filtered in of injured Jamia students rounded up in police stations in Delhi, large crowds gathered in the cold night outside the Delhi Police headquarters. They refused to move until the early hours of the morning, when the police was forced to

release the students. Students and faculty from more than fifty universities around the country held demonstrations in their support. As the protests grew, drawing people from all walks of life, and the authorities cracked down hard, picking up hundreds and charging them with sedition, lawyers kept vigil every night outside police stations where the protestors were detained. The prime minister taunted the protestors, saying he could identify them by the clothes they wore, in an unmistakable reference to their Muslim identity. In response, people of every identity joined the protests, mingling with their visibly Muslim fellow-citizens, all waving the national flag, holding defiant posters opposing division and celebrating unity. Carol singers in Kerala wore skullcaps and hijabs while singing Christmas songs. A young Hindu man travelled from Jabalpur to a protest in Delhi, stripped in the cold to his boxer shorts, and then asked the prime minister to recognise him by his clothes. In recent years, for the first time, I had found my optimism ebbing. My personal politics has always been grounded in a dogged, even naïve, optimism of the inevitability of human goodness, and a belief that hatred and tyranny will not prevail. But during the Karwane-Mohabbat journeys we made to families stricken by lynching, we found no remorse among the people, mostly young men, who had been part of the mobs that had attacked Muslims and Dalits with an inexplicable ferocity and cruelty. They had proudly videotaped their brutal slaying of defenceless persons. No one had come forward to save the victims from the mobs. As for the police, it routinely encouraged the mobs and criminalised the victims. The BJP was able to politically marginalise the Muslims by uniting every other religious group and caste in a pact of hate against them. Almost every other mainstream political party also began to see Muslims as a political liability. I began to dread that India was trapped in a long, dark night. But the anti-CAA protests, led by women and young people of all faiths, that celebrate Hindu-Muslim unity and the equal rights of Indians of every identity, have reignited my hope. I’m sure many millions across India feel infected by the same optimism.

Many observers speak about the dangers of fascism, and the eerie echoes of Nazi Germany in India today. The similarities with Nazi Germany are indeed many. But Germany in the 1930s never saw the kind of pushback that India has witnessed in recent months. Muslims and non-Muslims came together in civil resistance. Communalism and bigotry have not gone away, of course, as the vicious anti-Muslim prejudice during the Covid-19 outbreak has proved yet again. However, the popular movement against the CAA, NPR and NRC has not only dispelled much of the darkness but also shown us how hate can be countered, and how ordinary citizens can challenge untrammelled power. In every one of the protests, there were Muslims walking, standing, cheering in the company of non-Muslims; confident, joyous, unafraid to be themselves. It has greatly reassured Muslim citizens that the attempts to reduce them to the orphans of Partition shall fail, that vast numbers in this country reject the divisive imagination for India of the Hindutva right, that this remains the India of Gandhi and Ambedkar, whose pictures are raised high in every protest. I have travelled to protests inspired by Shaheen Bagh and led by Muslim women in different parts of the country. Everywhere, I found the mood electrically festive. Less protests, these were more celebrations of the reassurance that India still is equally their country. This same sentiment permeated rallies of lakhs I addressed, where men in skullcaps and women in hijabs joyfully waved the national flag, shoulder to shoulder with Indians of other faiths. There have been three icons at every protest—the national flag, the national anthem and the Preamble of the Constitution. With these, India has begun to reclaim the idea that to love one’s country and one’s religion, one does not have to hate any other; that true patriotism and faith include the love of all humanity. The protests have certainly led to perceptible unease in the establishment. The Uttar Pradesh administration declared war on its Muslim citizens, shooting protestors, imposing huge fines on them, storming into and ransacking their homes and assaulting everyone in sight, including children, the sick and the elderly. Delhi burned in a communal carnage ignited by brazen hate-mongering by the highest

leaders of the ruling BJP. The prime minister tried to defend his government, claiming that his government never spoke of a national NRC, whereas Home Minister Amit Shah had announced it repeatedly in Parliament and outside, and linked it with the CAA, signalling unmistakably that Hindus would be protected but not Muslims. The prime minister also said that India has no detention centres, whereas I have entered these hell-like centres in Assam, and Shah himself announced that states had been asked to build detention centres across the country—and indeed, construction of such centres is underway in many states. As I see it, the protests have already won. They have succeeded in rendering a national NRC highly improbable. Even allies who cynically voted with the ruling party in support of the CAA have now announced, influenced by the popular revulsion, that they will not implement the NRC. Those who worry about the success of movements like Shaheen Bagh mistake the character of the resistance. It is a gross error to view this merely as a battle against the CAANRC-NPR trinity. It is a rebellion against the audacity of a government asking citizens to prove that they belong. It is a warning that the government must listen to its people. It is a spontaneous rising against discrimination and violence, and the dangerous project of militarist Hindutva nationalism. It is an uprising against a government which crushes and demonises students, dissenters and minorities. It is the rejection of its failures to address the hopeless realities of everyday life, of joblessness, farm distress, violence against women and a broken economy. Its paramount success is that it is the first national movement for Hindu-Muslim unity after Mahatma Gandhi was taken away from us. Indeed, it is a movement for the unity of people of various religious and caste identities. When poor Sikh farmers camp through bitterly cold nights in Shaheen Bagh to prepare langar for their protesting sisters, it represents the triumph of what is finest in our civilisational traditions. ‘We have seen the suffering of 1947,’ one Sikh farmer said. ‘We want to ensure that this never happens again.’

The movement has also re-politicised students in universities across India. For too long, most universities had become sterile sites deprived of both political and ethical reflection. Today students are teaching their elders not to hate, showing the way to a more caring and equal country. The final triumph of the movement is that it has compelled the reluctant, morally ambiguous non-BJP parties to take a stand to defend the Constitution and India’s secular character, which they were willing to betray for petty considerations. A flawless NPR-NRC is an unimplementable project. Its real aim is to push all of India’s Muslims, and with them all vulnerable and dissenting groups, into permanent dread of when they could be disenfranchised and interred in detention camps. When it returns, in whatever form, after the lockdown declared to contain the Covid-19 pandemic is lifted, the Shaheen Bagh movement must not only continue to ask for the withdrawal of the CAA, but also put pressure on state governments to refuse to implement the NPR. It is also time for many more citizens to join the movement. It would be unconscionable for a movement to defend the Constitution for every single Indian to ride only on the shoulders of India’s Muslims who would be most brutally targeted for their non-cooperation, as the riots that ravaged northeast Delhi in February 2020 have proved. Regardless of when or how the visible protests against the amended citizenship regime are resumed, they have already demonstrated conclusively that there is no hegemonic consensus in support of the idea of a Hindu Rashtra. Like a sudden flash of brilliant light in a stormy night, the revolt led by students and working-class Muslim women across the country broke through the darkness which had shrouded this land. The fact that the revolt began with students reassures us that our young have the moral fibre to fight for the kind and equal country that the leaders of our freedom movement had imagined and made great sacrifices for. Mahatma Gandhi would surely have approved.

OCCUPYING STREETS WOMEN IN THE VANGUARD OF THE ANTI-CAA STRUGGLE Zoya Hasan From the middle of December 2019, Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh neighbourhood emerged as a nationwide symbol of resistance against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), National Register of Citizens (NRC) and National Population Register (NPR)—a combination of law, policy and census exercise designed to destroy the secular foundations of the Indian Constitution. Shaheen Bagh was the epicentre, from where the protest spread to towns and cities across the country. There were numerous demonstrations, marches, sit-ins or occupy actions by citizens. Independent India had never seen anything like it. What exactly is the nature of the law that is being resisted? Through the CAA, for the first time there is a fast track to Indian citizenship for six designated groups from three neighbouring Muslim-majority countries: Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. All the designated groups are religious minorities in those three countries—however, minority and persecuted Muslim sects like the Ahmadiyas of Pakistan and the Hazaras of Afghanistan, or individuals persecuted on the basis of gender, sexuality, political beliefs or ethnic identity, regardless of their faith, are not included in the list. Which indicates clearly that the CAA is a communal law that aims to single out only, and entirely, the Muslim community. The CAA is closely related to a key project of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)—namely, the NRC, which may deny citizenship to certain sections of the Indian people and strip them of their rights. Despite protestations to the contrary, the NRC remains a crucial part of the

BJP’s bid to declare India a natural home of Hindus, and Hindus alone. Justice A.P. Shah, former chief justice of the Madras and Delhi High Courts, has noted that ‘the combination of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the National Population Register and the National Register of Citizens is designed to deprive Muslims of equal rights under Indian law and in Indian society’. This strategy needs to be seen in the larger context of the Narendra Modi-led BJP government’s policies towards minorities, reflected in the criminalisation of Triple Talaq, the abrogation of Article 370 and the clampdown since early August 2019 in the Kashmir Valley. It also needs to be understood in the context of the discourse of hate that was encouraged just before and after the 2014 national elections, which has led to an increase in violence, including lynchings, against Muslims in recent years and brought a terroraccused into the Indian Parliament. The CAA is not a standalone law. The home minister, Amit Shah, has repeatedly underscored two things: one, the NRC exercise conducted in Assam in 2019 will be extended to the rest of India; and two, the CAA will be implemented first, and only after that, the NRC (‘Understand the chronology,’ he said plainly). The CAA is a safety net that will ensure citizenship of all non-Muslims, and not just the lakhs of Hindus declared illegal migrants after the NRC exercise in Assam, something that the BJP had not expected. The NRC’s objective is to divide the people domiciled in India into two categories: citizens and illegal migrants. The CAA’s objective is to safeguard, prior to the nationwide NRC exercise, the citizenship of all Indians except Muslims. After this, any government will be able to legally single out Muslims for investigation because the only category of immigrants likely to be declared illegal will be Muslims. Consequently, the CAA-NRC has evoked a much sharper reaction than the annulment of Kashmir’s constitutional autonomy, criminalisation of Triple Talaq and the Supreme Court verdict on the Ram Mandir-Babri Masjid dispute. The possible linking of NRC and CAA—the guaranteed linking, in fact, if we remember the repeated and deliberately aggressive declarations by Amit Shah—has provoked concerns about the

likelihood of targeted disenfranchisement. It has touched off anxiety fuelled by fears that the Act could effectively deny citizenship to Muslims, as well as the sense that this is part of the long-term agenda to turn India into a Hindu state. The CAA is the most critical component of this project that has been gathering pace since 2014. Three core elements of the Act directly compromise and breach India’s constitutional commitment to secularism, liberty and equality: First, the CAA directly contradicts the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution, specifically Article 14 and Article 21, which guarantee equality before the law and the right to life, respectively. Second, while it claims to grant citizenship to all religious minorities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, the Act excludes, as we have seen, persecuted minority Muslim groups from these countries. It also does not provide citizenship to persecuted minority communities from other neighbouring countries and regions such as Sri Lanka, Bhutan (both officially Buddhist states), Myanmar (Buddhist majority) and Nepal (Hindu majority). The Rohingyas of Myanmar, therefore, can find no home in India. The CAA thus brazenly violates the Constitution in introducing a religious test of citizenship. Third, the CAA combined with the NRC will require even existing citizens to prove their citizenship through appropriate documents (related to birth, marriage, naturalisation, etc.), which effectively makes us all subjects, and not citizens of a democratic republic. As the human rights activist and lawyer Kalpana Kannabiran has noted, ‘Citizenship by any definition is not a dole to be handed out by rulers to compliant subjects, nor is its grant an alms deed to be distributed at whim.’ But Narendra Modi and Amit Shah—and their alma mater, the RSS—do not think so. The purpose of the CAA is to unmake India as we know it; to make it a ‘conditional’ democracy. Not surprisingly, then, the passage of the Act has led to countrywide agitations against it, and an emotional and intellectual resistance that continues even when protest rallies and gatherings have been suspended, as of mid-March 2020, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Public protests are not uncommon events in India. But the scale of protests this time has been much bigger despite police violence, ban on assemblies, arbitrary arrests and detentions, widespread Internet shutdowns, extreme surveillance by security agencies, vigilante violence, hate speeches and a pogrom, disguised as a riot, in northeast Delhi. That people have not been frightened by repression is remarkable, indicating that the pall of fear that had descended soon after the Narendra Modi-led BJP government came to power at the centre in 2014 has been lifted. This is strikingly reflected in the wit and humour of posters, slogans and memes. Earlier, political humour and satire was the preserve of big writers and humourists; today ordinary citizens are lampooning politicians of the ruling regime and their divisive playbook.

Importantly, these protests are spontaneous—the largest and most widespread in decades. But unlike the JP movement of the 1970s or the anti-corruption movement of 201213, these protests are not led or directed by politicians, political parties or larger-than-life activists with political ambitions or covert political backing. This time, diverse civil society organisations and public-spirited individuals

have led the protests (with the partial exception of West Bengal and Kerala). A placard outside the Park Circus Maidan in Kolkata read: ‘No CAA. Welcome to Park Circus. Kindly leave your political party affiliation and banner outside the gate.’ Individual leaders from Opposition parties have spoken at these protests, but they’re certainly not in the vanguard. We cannot overestimate the importance of this movement. These are no ordinary protests; they have demonstrated a new vocabulary and grammar of resistance as a form of civil disobedience. Most protests worldwide involve an assertion of the interests of beleaguered groups and marginalised identities. But those protesting against the CAA are not driven by self-interests; they’re not demanding, for example, reservations or jobs. In other words, people on the street who rejected the CAA were not there for sectional or sectarian reasons, but to fight for an ideal of equality articulated during the national movement and formalised in the Constitution. Moreover, many of the protestors are unlikely to be affected by the CAA or even the NRC, yet they have been protesting to make a point of upholding the principles of equality and solidarity. And most remarkably, the loudest voices of dissent have come from women. An activist in Lucknow risking arrest by posting videos on Facebook to expose police attacks on protestors. A student in Mumbai holding up a poster demanding basic freedoms in Kashmir. Young lawyers making an anti-CAA banner of a bedsheet and hanging it from their balcony during Amit Shah’s rally in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar. A Jadavpur University student tearing up a copy of the CAA. Women, young and elderly, at various protest sites reading out the powerful words of the Preamble to the Constitution, the Samvidhan, where ‘the people of India’ resolved to secure to all citizens of the democratic republic ‘JUSTICE, social, economic and political; LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; EQUALITY of status and of opportunity; and to promote among them all FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation’. Everywhere it is women who are in the vanguard. They have been the life and soul of the resistance against a law that undermines all the principles and aims articulated in the

Preamble. In protest after protest, it is women who have been shouting ‘Azadi’ slogans and ‘Inqilab Zindabad’, invoking the Samvidhan, singing the national anthem or ‘Saare Jahan se Acchha Hindustan Humaara’ or Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s revolutionary poem ‘Hum Dekhenge’.

A woman in an anti-CAA protest in Mumbai carrying a poster that reads: Jab Hindu Muslim Razi, Kya Karega Nazi. No CAA NRC. Photo courtesy Twitter. We have never seen such a sustained and collective pan-Indian civil society mobilisation dominated by women, not even during the freedom movement. Nor have we seen this scale of women’s mobilisation around non-gender issues and in complete defiance of state and police violence. It is striking that women are out on the streets for a cause that is not women-specific, that is not about sexual harassment or domestic violence. The gender-driven political assertion is epitomised by the protests in Shaheen Bagh, which began in mid-December 2019, when hundreds of women blocked a main road to demonstrate against the new citizenship law and police violence at Jamia Millia Islamia. Local women took turns to keep the site occupied day and night. The sit-in regularly attracted thousands of people. It drew

people from across the city and the country and from all age groups, classes and communities. It is this multiplicity that has given strength to the resistance. Above all, it has been a non-violent protest throughout, despite concerted attempts to defame and discredit it. Shaheen Bagh became, and continues to be, an iconic symbol of resistance—a prime metaphor of a national protest against the government’s tinkering with citizenship laws that threaten to make many Indian Muslims stateless. Not just Shaheen Bagh but Ghantaghar in Lucknow, Park Circus in Kolkata, Gateway of India in Mumbai, Town Hall in Bengaluru, Sabzibagh in Patna, Iqbal Maidan in Bhopal, Albert Hall in Jaipur and several other places became iconic sites of an entirely unprecedented non-violent civil disobedience in the history of free India. The massive presence of women is, of course, the most notable aspect of these protests. But no less significant is the emergence of Muslim women as the strongest voices against the prospect of a Hindu Rashtra. Their support has sustained protests in multiple locations in dozens of towns and metropolises. In their breadth and depth, these protests remind us of the freedom struggle when large numbers of women responded to Mahatma Gandhi’s call to participate in the national movement. Women from all backgrounds came onto the streets to lend heft to the national movement at crucial moments. In August 1942, Gandhi gave his final call to the nation to rise up against the British at the Gowalia Tank Maidan in Bombay. When the Quit India protests began, the British arrested Gandhi and other prominent Congress leaders. It was then a young freedom fighter, Aruna Asaf Ali, who unfurled the Tricolour at Gowalia Tank Maidan, galvanising millions with this powerful act of protest before she went underground. In the weeks that followed, women played a significant role in continuing the movement. But there’s one crucial difference: this time women are not responding to the call of male leaders. They are the leaders.

The women at Shaheen Bagh. Photo by Ananya Singh, courtesy The Citizen. What is it about this historic moment that propelled lakhs of women to occupy the streets? For a start, it has something to do with more women entering schools, colleges and workspaces, and more women leaving their homes in small towns for education and work in big cities which offer greater freedom, exposure and the camaraderie and friendship of other women outside their families. According to the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) for 2016-17, women constitute 48.6 per cent of the total enrolment in colleges and universities. The transition is summed up in the comments of a protestor from Pratapgarh (UP) now studying for a PhD in Jawaharlal Nehru University, who spoke to Ankita Dwivedi Johri of The Indian Express: ‘I am not a protestor, just an ordinary student,’ says the PhD student as she settles down on one of the stools outside Ganga Dhaba at

Jawaharlal Nehru University, wolfing down a plate of Maggi. She is just back on the fortified campus after a protest at Mandi House…‘My education has helped me understand what is right and what isn’t, and I speak up when it’s important to,’ she says, adding that it is the smaller battles that she faced—‘and won’—at home and outside, while growing up, that inspired her to come out and protest…‘Education opened up my mind, and that is also the reason why so many women are seen in protests now.’

Women are also against the CAA because it poses the existential threat of disenfranchisement, detention and deportation. The question of who belongs being decided on the basis of ‘citizenship’ defined by documentary evidence creates a threat to the very foundations of their existence. As a young homemaker on a round-the-clock vigil against the CAA-NRC-NPR at Park Circus Maidan told the Telegraph, her vigil was a ‘struggle for existence’. At a practical level, women, especially poorer women, are likely to suffer disproportionately from the CAA and NRC, which require documents that most of them would not have. It is well known that women generally tend to have less documentation in our deeply patriarchal society and political and bureaucratic culture, and are thus more excluded from the ambit of governance and administration. Rizwana Bani, a daily wage labourer, told the BBC that she was losing pay by being at Shaheen Bagh day and night but had no choice because she was scared of what the law could entail for her and her family. ‘We don’t know where and how to get those documents which will prove our citizenship,’ she said. ‘We’re being divided on the basis of religion. We are Indians first and then Hindus or Muslims.’ Another protestor, Firdaus Shafiq, who said she had never stepped out of home unaccompanied before, said, ‘We’ve been forced to protest because of the government. If we fail to prove our citizenship, we would either be put into a detention centre or banished from the country. So it’s better to struggle for our rights now.’ Her words echo the concerns of many others, who fear the CAA could endanger their citizenship if it is used in conjunction with the NRC.

What has brought women from different ages and communities together is the experience and apprehension of discrimination. However, their involvement in the protests that we have seen across the country was not only about the discriminatory Act but also about fighting for the future they imagined for themselves, their children and India. ‘See, this is not a community-specific issue. It is not about reservations, or Triple Talaq, or Muslim personal law. It is about the very existence of Indians and the Constitution. If the Constitution is safe, so are Muslims, Hindus and Christians. The government has put the burden of proof on India’s citizens,’ argued a Jamia student activist in her testimony for the report ‘Unafraid: The Day Young Women Took the Battle to the Streets’. If there’s one thing that interviews and comments on the street have revealed, it is that ordinary women are speaking with a profound sense of social responsibility, clarity and resoluteness. ‘I won’t leave this country, and I don’t want to die proving I am Indian,’ 70-year-old Aasma Khatoon told a BBC journalist at the Shaheen Bagh sit-in. ‘It’s not just me. My ancestors, my children and grandchildren—we are all Indian. But we don’t want to prove this to anyone.’ Lakhs of women like her have dared to speak despite the risk of facing vilification, physical attack or boycotts for disagreeing with the dominant narrative. Their interventions and speeches emphasise the perils of narrow nationalism and religious chauvinism. They have understood the political game plan of the RSS-BJP and Modi-Shah dispensation better than most of us. Their mobilisation is driven by a strong democratic spirit to fight a government increasingly seen as authoritarian, divisive and majoritarian. The women’s position is unambiguous: Constitutional discrimination is not acceptable. They believe that the changes in the citizenship law undermine the Constitution of India. For this reason, they have chosen the Constitution itself as the instrument to assert their citizenship as Indians. For them, citizenship is not merely the right to vote; it is much deeper. We are voters on the day of voting, but we are citizens every day. It is this fundamental notion of citizenship that women seek to reclaim—the idea of citizenship as birthright.

Muslim women have been vocal in asserting their belonging to the nation based on their deep association with this land—the land of their birth. Reporting on the seventy-first Republic Day celebrations at Kolkata’s Park Circus Maidan, Kavita Panjabi wrote in The Wire: A republic truly comes of age when its women too claim it. The 71st Republic Day of India marked a proud year for this nation when its republic truly came of age. When millions of women begin to insist that the state is a matter of res publica, a public affair, and not the private estate of rulers to decree as they please, then it marks a turning point in the history of the nation. When women take over public spaces in small towns and big cities across the country with the power we are witnessing today, then theirs is a force not to be underestimated; and when they claim in unison that it is their historical rooting in the soil of Hindustan that will determine their nationality, as well as the the place of their graves, then the authority of papers indeed does seem to decline… Asmat Jamil, one of the women who spearheaded the Park Circus women’s protest…evokes the Rowlatt Act of 1919: ‘As Gandhi had declared a struggle for azadi in 1919, and the chants of freedom rent every part of this country, so we too have declared azadi now— the freedom to lay claim to our own land.’

What has been most riveting about the anti-CAA struggle is the way in which symbols and slogans of secularism and constitutionalism have been reclaimed and reasserted by ordinary citizens. It is clear that these ideas have far greater resonance among large sections of our people than we might have imagined. Women’s resistance, especially, has been particularly forceful in bringing renewed attention to the Constitution, and it has been marked by an absence of religious and sectarian symbols. For the first time since the founding of the Republic, the Constitution has become the centre of public debate. ‘Save the Constitution’ is the rallying call that has defined conversation at all protest sites. This call testifies to the significance of the Constitution and how much we are shaped by it and why it can be used to challenge majoritarian, authoritarian governments.

By reading the Preamble to the Constitution, hoisting the tiranga and singing the national anthem, the women at the centre of the antiCAA protests have empowered Indian democracy in a way few people had imagined. It calls the bluff of every bully, bigot and autocrat disguised as a nationalist. Even when the women and students are off the streets, this gift that they have given an embattled India will endure.

MUSLIM HAIN HUM WATAN HAI HINDUSTAN HUMAARA Nizam Pasha ‘We will ensure implementation of NRC in the entire country. We will remove every single infiltrator from the country, except Buddha, Hindus and Sikhs.’

—Extract from Amit Shah’s election rally speech in Raiganj, West Bengal on 11 April 2019, posted (and later deleted) by the official BJP Twitter account ‘Pehle CAB hoga, Citizenship Amendment Bill hoga. Saare sharanaarthiyon ko naagarikta diya jaayega. Uske baad mein NRC banega. Issliye jo sharanaarthi hai, usko chinta karne ki jaroorat nahin hai, ghusbaithiyon ko zaroor chinta karne ki zaroorat hai. Aap chronology samajh leejiye. Pehle CAB aane ja raha hai. CAB aane ke baad NRC aayega, aur NRC sirf Bangaal ke liye nahin aayega, poore desh ke liye aayega. (First the CAB will come, the Citizenship Amendment Bill will come. All refugees will get citizenship. After that the NRC will be made. This is why refugees should not worry, but infiltrators certainly should. Understand the chronology. First the CAB will come. After the CAB, the NRC will come, and the NRC will not come for Bengal alone, it will come for the entire country.)’

—Amit Shah at a rally in Bongaon, West Bengal on 1 May 2019, just ahead of the Lok Sabha polls

Déja Vu Historians mark the passing of the Nuremberg Laws—the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Reich Citizenship Law—by the Nazi Government in 1935 as the beginning of the series of events that we know as the Holocaust. The Reich Citizenship Law defined a citizen of the Reich as ‘that subject only

who is of German or kindred blood’. No one was a citizen of Germany or had any political rights unless he or she had been granted citizenship papers by the Government of the Third Reich. The conviction that Germanic people were of the purest Aryan stock was at the heart of the Nuremberg Laws, and the regulations that followed these laws struggled to define who a ‘German’ was, especially when it came to individuals of mixed Jewish and German parentage. To begin with, persons with one or two Jewish grandparents were classified as German while those with three or four Jewish grandparents were classified as ‘full Jews’. Gradually, the laws became less and less tolerant of persons of mixed parentage—termed Mischling (mixedor half-breed)—and demanded absolute purity of blood. Children and grandchildren of Jews who had married Germans and, in some cases, had even converted to Christianity, and who thus far had seen themselves as German found themselves unable to pass the test and were denied citizenship. Under the Nuremberg Laws, an Ahnenpass, or ‘ancestor pass’, was issued to those found to be of ‘Aryan blood’. The pass was a record of the family tree of every single individual and entitled him or her to citizenship rights. In case you’ve missed the similarity, compare this to the National Register of Citizens (NRC) process in Assam, where the family tree of each individual was constructed to show whether his or her ancestors have been verified to be ‘of Indian origin’. This ancestry is reflected in the legacy data of each individual recorded in the NRC, and an extract of the NRC showing one’s name in the register alone entitles a person to rights available to a citizen under the Indian Constitution. In Nazi Germany, since the question of who qualified as a German came to depend on religion (Jewish or Christian), the Nazis had to rely on birth, baptismal, marriage and death certificates for issuance of citizenship papers. People scrambled to obtain these certificates, typically maintained in churches and government offices, to establish their relationship with German (meaning Christian) grandparents. In light of the experience of the NRC process in Assam, and with the issuance of the notification by the Ministry of

Home Affairs in December 2019 for the implementation of a National Population Register (NPR) throughout the country, as people scramble to collect birth certificates, ration cards and other documents establishing their connection with ‘Indian’ parents and grandparents, one cannot help but feel the shadow of history.

‘Aap Chronology Samajh Leejiye’ On 9 December 2019, Amit Shah introduced the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill—CAB—in the Indian Parliament. It was passed by the Lok Sabha the very next day, and a day later, by the Rajya Sabha. On 12 December, with President Ram Nath Kovind giving his assent, the bill became an act, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), 2019. To understand the CAA, which has led to unprecedented protests across India, one has to take the advice of the country’s home minister, Amit Shah, and understand the chronology. The first stop in the chronology is 1947 to 1950, the period that commenced with Independence and culminated in the ambitious document that we call our Constitution. The only reason this is relevant here is because the Constitution fixed 19 July 1948 as the cut-off date on which all persons who had migrated to India from the newly created nation of Pakistan were granted citizenship. Then came the oppression of East Pakistan by West Pakistan, which culminated in the 1971 war between India and Pakistan, and the independence of East Pakistan, thereafter known as Bangladesh. According to various estimates, between 8 and 9 million residents of East Pakistan/Bangladesh fled to India between 25th/26th March 1971, the date when West Pakistan commenced ‘Operation Searchlight’—a brutal military crackdown to suppress the Bengali nationalist movement in East Pakistan—and 16th December 1971, when the Pakistani Army surrendered to India after a thirteenday war. In 1978, during a Lok Sabha by-election for the Mangaldoi Assembly Constituency in north Assam, bordering Bangladesh, election observers noticed a sharp rise in the number of voters in the

constituency, suspected to have been caused by registration of migrants from Bangladesh as voters. This triggered what came to be called the ‘Assam Agitation’, a student-led movement demanding Assam for Assamese-speaking people and the expulsion of immigrants, particularly from Bangladesh. The movement saw several incidents of extreme violence, including the Nellie massacre of 18 February 1983 in which, even according to official figures, 2,191 Muslims suspected to be Bangladeshi immigrants were slaughtered in just over six hours. The violent agitation finally came to an end with the signing of the Assam Accord of 1985. The Assam Accord is a document remarkable for the fact that it was an agreement in the nature of a peace treaty signed between the sovereign government of India and a group of protesting student bodies. For this reason, its legal status was doubtful at best; so, the Accord was given legal status through Section 6A, introduced in the Citizenship Act, 1955, by way of a controversial amendment made in 1986 by the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress government. This amendment, via Section 6A, says that all persons who came to Assam prior to 1st January 1966 would be recognised as citizens of India. Those who came to India between 1st January 1966 and the midnight of 24th March 1971 would be removed from the electoral rolls but would be added back after ten years. The section is silent about those who came to India 25th March 1971 onwards, i.e., after ‘Operation Searchlight’ was launched in East Pakistan; but the underlying implication, which is expressly stated in the Assam Accord, is that they will be expelled from India as illegal foreigners. In 1986, taking a ‘serious view’ of that fact that ‘a large number of persons of Indian origin have entered the territory of India from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and some African countries’ ‘clandestinely’ and have taken up residence in India, the Rajiv Gandhi government decided to make the ‘provisions of the Citizenship Act relating to grant of Indian citizenship more stringent’. With these stated objects, the Citizenship Act was amended to do away with automatic citizenship by birth and insert a requirement that any person born in India after 1st July 1987 would be a citizen of India only if one of the parents was a citizen at the time of the child’s birth.

In 2003, the NDA government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee amended the Citizenship Act, this time to introduce Section 14A, which gives the central government the power to compulsorily register all citizens of India and issue national identity cards to them. It also brought in the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003, to operationalise Section 14A. It is under these provisions that a ‘nationwide NRC’ along the lines of the exercise in Assam is being sought to be initiated by the Narendra Modi-led NDA government. The constitutional validity of Section 6A was challenged before the Supreme Court in 2012 by Assam Sanmilita Mahasangh, an organisation of ‘indigenous’ people of Assam. By a 2014 order of the Court, thirteen questions have been referred to a constitution bench, including the question of what happens to persons who entered India after the cut-off date of 24th March 1971 but have been in India for over forty years (it is now forty-nine years, and counting). However, the bench to hear this matter has still not been constituted. So someday, after the entire population of Assam has been asked to demonstrate that they came to India before 25th March 1971—in an exercise that has taken years and hundreds of crores of the public exchequer, and in which lakhs of people have been declared stateless—the Supreme Court will sit to decide in hindsight whether that date had any constitutional basis and if those illegal migrants had acquired any rights by staying in India for nearly five decades, and in the case of the children of illegal migrants, for their entire lives. Applications filed for early hearing of the constitutional challenge were dismissed by a bench headed by Justice Ranjan Gogoi on 22 April 2019 by a mere one-line order saying it was not possible to direct an early hearing ‘at this stage’. The Vajpayee government in 2003 had also amended Section 3 of the Citizenship Act, the section that defines citizenship by birth, to add another prerequisite for the granting of citizenship. The section had originally read that any person born in India was an Indian citizen; after the 1986 amendment, it read that any person born after 1st July 1987 was an Indian citizen provided at least one of his or her parents was an Indian citizen. To this, now, was added another

dimension—that any person born in India after 3rd December 2004 who had at least one parent who was an Indian citizen would be a citizen only if the other parent was not an illegal migrant. This amendment brings about what I call the downward attribution of criminality, where the taint of illegal migration travels down with the bloodline. Contrast this with Section 4 of the Citizenship Act under which a child born outside India to an Indian and a foreigner is a citizen of India by descent. So, a child born in New Delhi to an Indian father and a Bangladeshi migrant mother is denied citizenship but a child born in Dhaka to an Indian father and a Bangladeshi mother is a citizen of India! This provision too was challenged before the Supreme Court and the matter referred to a Constitution Bench. Here again, the bench has not been constituted and the case hasn’t seen the light of day. Meanwhile, the NRC exercise in Assam continued. Next in the chronology is July 2009, when Assam Public Works, an NGO championing the cause of expelling ‘illegal immigrants’ from Assam, filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court asking for the names of illegal migrants to be deleted from the electoral rolls in Assam and for the NRC compiled in Assam in 1951 to be updated. On 20 July 2009, the Supreme Court issued a notice to the central and state governments in the matter. While thus far, there had been no move towards conducting an NRC exercise in Assam and identification and expulsion of illegal immigrants was taking place in the regular course under the Foreigners Act, 1946, shortly after being issued notice by the Supreme Court on the prayer of Assam Public Works for an NRC, the central government in November 2009 amended the 2003 rules to add Rule 4A, laying down the procedure for the conduct of an NRC exercise in Assam. However, the actual implementation of the NRC remained a contentious political issue and was therefore neglected by the Congress governments in both the Centre and in Assam. In April 2013, the Assam Public Works case came up before a bench in which the puisne (junior) judge was Justice Ranjan Gogoi. On the first day that it came up for hearing before this bench, the bench marked this matter as ‘part-heard’, meaning that it would now remain

with the same bench and would not be transferred to another bench. From then till his retirement in November 2019 (by which time he was the Chief Justice of India), Justice Ranjan Gogoi took over the implementation of the NRC in Assam and the exercise continued as a court-monitored exercise with the state-coordinator in charge of conducting the NRC reporting directly to the Court. Montesquieu’s theory, that separation of powers between the legislative, judicial and executive arms of government is essential for preservation of individual liberty, is supposed to be the philosophical basis of division of powers between Parliament, the government and the courts under our Constitution. The debate of where judicial review ends and encroachment by the judiciary into the domain of the executive begins has been never-ending in academic circles. However, this was a particularly stark case where the Supreme Court assumed all powers of the executive. Appointments and transfers of officials conducting the NRC exercise, day-to-day monitoring of the progress, even requisitioning of paramilitary forces for providing security while the exercise was being conducted, were all managed directly by the Supreme Court, often to the complete exclusion of the state and central governments. So much so that in 2019, the Election Commission indicated that the paramilitary forces and officials of the state administration deployed for the NRC exercise would have to be withdrawn for conduct of the general elections, but the Supreme Court refused and indicated that the NRC exercise must go on and could not be paused for the elections. It was for this reason, all the more, that eyebrows were raised and questions were asked when Justice Ranjan Gogoi formally transitioned from one of Montesquieu’s arms to another and joined politics upon his retirement from the Supreme Court, accepting nomination by the president of India to the Rajya Sabha. Meanwhile, the BJP fanned the religious polarisation caused by the NRC exercise and ‘infiltrator’, ‘Bangladeshi’, ‘illegal migrant’ became euphemisms for Muslims in every election campaign. The BJP swept to power in Assam in 2016 and then openly declared in the course of its campaign for the Lok Sabha in 2019 that it would conduct a similar NRC exercise in the rest of India as well.

On 31 August 2019, the final NRC for Assam was published. The claims of 19 lakh people were rejected, denying them citizenship of India and declaring them stateless, subject to appeals to be filed before a Foreigners Tribunal. But there was a problem. Of the 19 lakh people identified as illegal migrants in the Supreme Courtmonitored exercise, a large majority were reported to be Hindus. The BJP, now in power both in the Centre and in Assam, did not have the political capital to expel lakhs of Hindus, when the rhetoric that Muslims are illegal immigrants into this country has been the mainstay of its political discourse for years. Further, in a country where millions of people across the spectrum of class, caste and religion don’t have any documents that can establish their birth within the territory of India, an exercise that demands that people prove their citizenship by birth or descent would cause insecurity and unrest in all people, irrespective of their religion. This is not the political goal the BJP was aiming for. And so arose the need for a law that would solve the Assam problem by providing amnesty to Hindus identified as illegal migrants in the NRC exercise and also provide an assurance to the BJP’s largely Hindu vote base that they have nothing to fear from a nationwide NRC. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, was brought in to address both these problems.

The CAA: Its Effect and Constitutional Validity The CAA 2019 was actually not a standalone amendment. It was the last in a series of laws that were passed by the Modi government since the time it took office in 2014. The first in the series were two notifications issued on 7 September 2015 amending the Passport (Entry into India) Rules, 1950 and the Foreigners Order, 1948 that stated that Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians coming from Bangladesh and Pakistan who had entered India prior to 31st December 2014 were to be exempted from prosecution and punishment prescribed under these legislations for persons entering India illegally. Another

notification issued on 18 July 2016 extended this protection to persons from these six religions coming from Afghanistan as well. By orders dated 8 January 2016 and 14 September 2016 issued by the Ministry of External Affairs, persons from these six religions coming from the three countries were made automatically eligible for a long-term visa upon their entry into India. The orders also allowed them to apply for a visa if they were already illegally present in India. A Reserve Bank of India (RBI) notification dated 26 March 2018 permitted such persons to purchase property for residence as well as for business in India, something that is not otherwise permitted for foreigners. Another RBI notification of 9 November 2018 allowed them to open NRO Rupee accounts with Indian banks of the nature permitted for NRIs, i.e., Indian citizens who have taken up residence abroad. Finally, the CAA 2019 allowed such persons, i.e., Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians coming from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan, who had entered India prior to 31st December 2014 to apply for Indian citizenship. No explanation is available for the cut-off date of 31st December 2014. Why someone who came into India illegally from Pakistan or Bangladesh or Afghanistan on 1st January 2015 or thereafter is not on the same footing is not clear. Further, the period of residence required for persons from these six communities and these three countries to apply for citizenship was reduced to five years, down from eleven years, irrespective of when they entered India (meaning, and this is important, that the residence requirement is reduced for these communities irrespective of whether they entered India before or after 31st December 2014). Let us divide people into categories depending on the date of their entry into India and analyse the impact of the CAA 2019 on each category. Those who were already in India when the Act came into force—on 10 January 2020— are further divided into two subcategories: Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians who came prior to 31st December 2014 are given exemption from prosecution and are rendered immediately eligible to apply for citizenship; those who came after, can just ex-post facto apply for

visa under the long-term visa scheme to regularise their presence in India and can apply for citizenship on the expiry of five years from grant of visa. Needless to state, Muslims who entered India illegally at any time from these countries will be prosecuted and face imprisonment or deportation. The third category is of people who entered or will enter India from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Bangladesh after the CAA 2019 came into force, i.e., after 10th January 2020. Effectively, a person fleeing persecution from one of these three countries and looking to enter India will be asked his or her religion, information which thus far was considered private. If they are Muslim, they will be told to apply under the ordinary process where they may or may not be granted a visa, and if granted, the visa may be for such term as the issuing authority may think fit, and it may or may not be renewed on expiry. These visa holders will not be allowed to work and certainly not to buy property in India. If they manage to stay on that long, it will be eleven years before they can even apply for citizenship. However, if they subscribe to any religion other than Islam, then such persons will be granted a long-term visa under a fast-track process with minimum red tape, will be allowed to work, open a bank account and purchase property for residence and business in India, and at the end of five years, can apply for citizenship. It is clear that the CAA 2019 effectively offers an incentive to persons from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan to change their faith or declare themselves to belong to any religion other than Islam so as to avail these relaxed requirements. Now, ‘forcible conversion’ has been defined in various statutes in India as the offering of any allurement for converting from one religion to another. Prohibition of such allurement under anticonversion laws has been upheld by the Supreme Court as constitutional in Rev Stainislaus v. State of Madhya Pradesh, (1977) 1 SCC 677 on the ground that offering allurements on the basis of religion was a violation of the right to freely practice any religion of one’s choosing. It must be noted that the right to freedom of religion under Article 25 of the Indian Constitution is available to ‘all persons’ and not just to citizens. Meaning that even foreigners coming into

India have a right to freedom of religion. Therefore, the offering of incentives by the state to persons following specified religion and not to persons of other faiths in the same category even at the time of their entry into India would amount to violation of the freedom of religion guaranteed under Article 25. The more obvious challenge to the constitutional validity of CAA 2019 is Article 14 and the parameters for non-arbitrariness enshrined in it. While Article 14 is, going by its bare wording, the right to equality before the law or equal protection of the law, over time, the Supreme Court has read into it a prohibition against arbitrary state action. The twin tests prescribed by the Supreme Court while testing the validity of state action are that where the law classifies people into categories which are treated differently (such as giving a benefit to some and not to others, or punishing some and not others), the classification made must be reasonable and based on intelligible differentia and such differentiating criteria must have a rational nexus with the object sought to be achieved. First, under a secular Constitution, any classification based solely or primarily on a facet of the intrinsic and core identity of the individual, i.e., religious identity, will be viewed with suspicion and subject to greater scrutiny. Secularism has been held by the Supreme Court to be a part of the ‘basic structure’ of our Constitution and a law that discriminates on the basis of religion violates this unalterable, non-derogable basic tenet. The ostensible purpose of the CAA 2019 is to extend citizenship to persons belonging to communities facing religious persecution in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. The ‘Statement of Objects and Reasons’ appended to the Act cites historic migration and Partition and speaks of ‘citizens of undivided India’. However, Afghanistan never formed a part of India, even during British rule, whereas Myanmar (earlier Burma) was in fact a part of India and remained so even till the enactment of the Government of India Act, 1935 (the precursor to our Constitution). It was only in 1937 that Burma was separated and brought under a separate Burma Office by the British government. Therefore, if anything, we have a civilisational and constitutional responsibility towards the Rohingyas

of Myanmar, as the government of Myanmar has been found guilty of genocide by the International Court of Justice and the region is facing the biggest humanitarian and refugee crises in the world today. And if neighbouring countries with a history of religious persecution of minorities were being extended this benefit, there is no reason for excluding Sri Lanka and China. The religious persecution of Tamils in Sri Lanka and Buddhists in Tibet is welldocumented. Therefore, it is clear that there is no basis for selection of the three countries—Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan— except that all three are Islamic States. The government of India, in its reply before the Supreme Court, has defended the selection on the ground that all three countries have a state religion. This reasoning too is inconsistent, for it fails to distinguish Sri Lanka, which has Buddhism as its state religion and where Tamil Hindus and Muslims face persecution. Even within the three selected countries, the purported yardstick for the purpose of differentiation in the Act is the alleged persecution of religious minorities there. However, the law excludes other minorities facing discrimination or persecution on the basis of their religious belief, such as Shias and Ahmadiyas in Pakistan and the Hazaras in Afghanistan. The government, in its reply filed in the Supreme Court, defends this on the basis that these are ‘sectarian’ minorities and the Act aims to extend the benefit only to religious minorities. Now, this is a textbook example of a classification that is unreasonable and has no nexus with the object sought to be achieved, i.e., extending protection to persons suffering persecution on the ground of their religious belief in these three countries. Further, even this statement of defence is based on an incorrect premise, because Ahmadiyas in Pakistan are not considered Muslim and for an Ahmadiya to call himself or herself Muslim is a punishable offence in Pakistan. So, no matter which way one looks at it and which test one applies, it is clear that the selection is arbitrary. There is no doubt that the government is allowed room for play in matters of policy, particularly foreign policy. However, where state action is ‘manifestly arbitrary’, the courts, exercising their power of judicial review, can still strike it down. The challengers of the law are

therefore arguing before the Supreme Court that the differential treatment of immigrants fleeing religious persecution from the three enumerated countries, as well as differential treatment of immigrants from different neighbouring countries facing or fearing religious persecution, is arbitrary and does not pass the test of right to equality and equal protection of the laws granted to all ‘persons’ and not just to citizens under Article 14 of the Indian Constitution.

The Aftermath of the CAA 2019* Ironically, the unholy trinity of NRC-CAA-NPR, designed to place a question mark over the citizenship of Muslims in India, had the unintended consequence of reaffirming their Indian identity. Despite having chosen to stay in India after Independence, weathering the rising tide of communalism that Partition brought, Muslims in India have constantly had their patriotism questioned. With the rise of the political right, the public discourse of ‘nationalism’ was coopted by jingoism, toxic masculinity and communalism. Every bigot started referring to him/herself as a ‘nationalist’. At every step, Muslims were accused of being anti-national and told to go to Pakistan. All individuals, associations and collectives subscribing to liberal values were put in the box as not being patriotic enough or being soft on terrorists, separatists, infiltrators and sundry anti-nationals, most of which were synonyms for Muslims. Symbols are always vulnerable to appropriation, and the Tricolour became synonymous with these neo-nationalists, who carried it to their rallies and literally wore it on their sleeves. The image of the Tricolour flying at the march in Jammu taken out in support of men being tried for the brutal rape and murder of an eight-year-old Muslim girl in Kathua were seared in public memory. Naked prejudice and intimidation, lynchings in the name of cow slaughter, extrajudicial killings, absurd laws criminalising forms of divorce already rendered ineffective by the Supreme Court, 5 acres of land given to compensate the irreparable damage to the secular fabric of the nation caused by the illegal demolition of a 464-year-old mosque, abrogation of Article 370 and the ensuing clampdown in

Kashmir—none of these was able to awaken Indian Muslims and force them to leave the safety of their homes and take to the streets that have felt increasingly hostile and alien. Finally, with the CAA, the knife cut too close to the bone. The protests began in Jamia Millia Islamia; but a brutal police crackdown on the students on campus on the night of 15 December 2019 quickly spread the movement to Aligarh Muslim University and then to the rest of the country. The words of the ‘Aligarh ka taraana’ or the anthem of the Aligarh Muslim University written by Majaz Lukhnawi proved strangely prophetic in describing the role of Jamia Millia and AMU in the anti-NRC-CAA-NPR protests that soon gripped the entire nation: ‘Jo abr yahaan se utthega, wo sarey jahaan par barsega’ (The cloud [of revolution] rising up from here will rain down on the whole world). As news of the police action in Jamia spread through the surrounding neighbourhood that night, the residents of nearby Shaheen Bagh spontaneously emerged onto the streets and blocked the adjoining G.D. Birla Marg connecting southeast Delhi with Noida in Uttar Pradesh. Who knew at that time that this little-known congested Muslim suburb was heading towards international stardom? The protestors set up camp on the road and soon, a whole culture and routine emerged around the protests. Over the course of the weeks and months that followed, the number of women participating in the protests in Shaheen Bagh and all over the country increased steadily. The age demographic also changed—from a movement of university students to a movement of persons of all ages from all walks of life. Schoolchildren were seen waving anti-CAA banners from their buses, grandmothers came to the protest in wheelchairs. As the number of headscarves at the protest multiplied, the protest venues responded by becoming more gender sensitive. One of the two mosques on campus in Jamia was converted into a mosque reserved exclusively for women and its washrooms were set aside for their use. In Shaheen Bagh, a shamiana was erected in the middle of the road to provide some protection against the biting cold to the women who sat on dharna day and night, some of them with their young children. For a

community that is often accused of gender inequality, these were welcome signs that the churn was not just outside but also within. For the first time since the Modi-Shah combine came to power, there was nationwide opposition to the BJP government’s discriminatory and divisive policies and rhetoric. And this opposition did not come from any political party or individual. It came from the people themselves. Politicians, stars of popular culture, local and regional icons could be seen floating from one protest to another trying to find their own role in what was in the truest sense a people’s movement. The common Muslim man and woman had decided to wait no longer for this political party or that, this leader or that, to voice their concerns. Nor were they lamenting the lack of national leadership in their community. Men and women, old and young, took to the streets and decided to speak for themselves. Unlike the #notinmyname gatherings of 2017 to protest the lynching of Muslims in the name of Gau Raksha, where persons of all other communities came together (though on a much smaller scale) to say that they did not want atrocities against Muslims to be perpetrated on the pretext of ‘protecting’ Hinduism, this time, Muslims were not merely the object of the protest but led the movement from the front. The protests were marked by Muslims reclaiming India’s national icons and symbols. Men wearing skullcaps and women wearing hijabs waving the Tricolour, or even with the Tricolour painted on their faces, took over the streets and protest venues in practically every city in the country. Muslims no longer felt constrained to restrict themselves to pictures of Maulana Azad and Zakir Hussain to rally around. They were reclaiming national leaders as their own, as people who had fought for their freedom, the freedom that was now being sought to be taken away. Mahatma Gandhi, who of late had been heard of only when his assassin was glorified, once again became a symbol of resistance. Dr B.R. Ambedkar was reclaimed by ‘We, the People’, whom he gave the Constitution to, instead of being the reserve of one political party. And alongside these, as Hasrat Mohani’s ‘Inquilab Zindabad’, Bismil Azimabadi’s ‘Sarfaroshi ki tamanna’ and Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ‘Hum dekhenge’ became rallying cries again, it was a reminder that the

Muslims of the subcontinent are no strangers to the fight for civil liberties. While the Covid-19 pandemic has halted these protests, at least for now, their legacy will be a lasting one and will play a role in shaping the politics of dissent in India for years to come. It is a little-known fact that Allama Iqbal actually wrote two taraanas. One, which we know so well—‘Saare jahaan se acchhaa Hindustan humaara’ (Our Hindustan, better than all the world)—to imbue a national identity and sense of pride among the people of India, and the other, lesser known—‘Cheen-o-Arab humaara Hindustan humaara, Muslim hain hum watan hai saara jahaan humaara’ (China and Arabia are ours, as Hindustan is ours; we are Muslim, all the world is ours)—to engender a global Muslim identity and emphasise the stake Muslims have in India. In the course of the anti-CAA protests, Indian Muslims seemed to have fused the two to raise a new slogan—‘Muslim hain hum watan hai Hindustan humaara’. ________________________ *A version of this section appeared as an article in The Wire on 4

January 2020 under the title ‘For the First Time Since Independence, Muslims Have Emerged on to the Streets’.

ROKEYA’S CHILDREN IN PARK CIRCUS Nazes Afroz My first memory of Park Circus Maidan, on the eastern edges of central Kolkata, is from the mid-1960s, when I used to accompany my grandfather with my siblings and cousins to the children’s corner of the park in the evening. Four imposing mansions from the British era and the Islamia Hospital building stood at five corners of the Park Circus crossing; in the sixth was the main entrance of the park. As a small-town child visiting the big city, I was mesmerised by the serpentine stream of traffic—double- and single-decker buses, trams, yellow taxis, private cars and hand-pulled rickshaws—flowing from the seven roads of the junction into the giant roundabout. My 80-year-old grandfather, Abul Hayat, a frail, diminutive man in white khadi kurta and pyjama, with close-cropped white beard and hair, thick black-framed glasses and a wooden walking stick, would rest under the canopy while we children fanned out to play in the grounds. Later in my life, I would find out a lot more about Abul Hayat—that he was actually my father’s stepfather; that he was a Persian scholar and gave me my Persian name; that he had been one of the vice presidents of the Indian National Congress in Bengal; that he had gone to prison several times for taking part in the noncooperation movements against colonial rule; that he had once worked with Nehru in the All India Congress Committee; that he had authored a book titled Mussalmans of Bengal, which was published in 1966, the year he died; and, most importantly, he was so opposed to the partition of Bengal and India that he had quit politics after 1947. Much has changed at the Park Circus crossing over the past five and a half decades. I witnessed some of it, and a lot escaped me,

since I left the city in 1998. The grassy traffic islands have all disappeared, and a flyover sprawls like a boa constrictor next to the park, carrying cars from the city centre to the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass. But my early memories of the park crowded my mind as I stepped into it on a late Friday afternoon in January 2020. I had not expected to see the distinctive pagoda-shaped shed standing at exactly the same place. The shed, which used to be a shelter for the elderly and children, had been taken over by hundreds of Muslim women chorusing to a feisty young woman’s sloganeering opposing the National Register of Citizens (NCR), National Population Register (NPR) and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA). Asmat Jameel, one of the main organisers, lives in Doctor’s Lane in Taltala, not far from Park Circus. She explained how they were disturbed by the BJP-led government’s continuous push against Indian Muslims, and the Shaheen Bagh protests in Delhi, led by the local women, gave them the idea of starting something similar in Kolkata. They chose Park Circus Maidan as the site because it was one of the busiest crossroads of the city. A protest that started with a sit-in of a few women soon attracted attention of the local media, the city’s civil society, and was joined by university students and cultural activists. By the time I arrived in Kolkata a couple of weeks later, people in every corner of Kolkata were talking about the women of Park Circus leading the anti-CAA-NPR-NRC protest. This attention encouraged Muslim communities from other areas so much that women started pouring in in buses and trucks. They were carrying the Indian flag. Their slogans centred around saving the Indian Constitution. Posters and photographs of Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore, Subhash Bose, Abul Kalam Azad, Bhagat Singh, Chandrasekhar Azad and Mother Teresa draped the protest site. I remember seeing a woman in her thirties coming to the site with her two teenage daughters in their school uniforms; schoolkids shouting ‘Azadi’ in a rousing chorus; young women with babies in their laps; a group of elderly women looking determined to face any consequences. Farheen, a young teenage volunteer in a black burqa and a niqab, talked to me in Bangla even though she was from an Urdu-

speaking family. As someone who has just finished school and is yet to start college, her choice was simple: ‘I felt strongly that what was happening around the politics of citizenship was patently wrong and I couldn’t sit at home. I talked to my family—you understand that we come from conservative Muslim families and we need permission to come out of the house—and they readily agreed to let me come here. The only condition is that I have to return home at a certain time. Being able to take part in this protest as a volunteer is the most significant event in my life.’ Hundreds of youngsters like Farheen and women of her mother’s and grandmother’s age had come out to take part in any direct political action for the first time in their lives. In my gut, I felt that I was witnessing something immensely significant and historic. The protest was also proof that one of the things that make Kolkata a great city—and India a great country—is its diversity; it is not one city but many cities, and speaks in multiple tongues. One would think that the majority of the protestors at Park Circus would be Bengalis. But the language of their slogans, their attire, their speeches, all suggested that the majority were non-Bengali Urdu- or Hindi-speaking Muslims. Some of my Bengali friends, who happen to come from Hindu families, were a bit puzzled by the slogans in Hindi, or Hindustani, and even though they had lived in the city for years, I had to give them a lesson about the composition of the Park Circus neighbourhood. Of all the iconic neighbourhoods in the major Indian cities of the colonial period, Park Circus was the most cosmopolitan. It was a melting pot of cultures and languages, ranging from Bengali to Hindi, Urdu, Chinese, Punjabi, Jewish, Gujarati, Oriya, Assamese, Armenian, Anglo-Indian, Afghan and many others. Park Circus still remains the most culturally and linguistically diverse locality of any Indian city. It wasn’t surprising that it became a major site for demonstrations against a law that seeks to make India a homogenous and exclusionary nation. Had he been alive, my grandfather, Abul Hayat, would have rejected this vision and joined the protestors at Park Circus.

*** I became a journalist about a decade and a half after Abul Hayat’s death, and in this period my horizons were vastly widened by books, films and political events taking place around me. I became particularly interested in the great calamity that befell the Bengalis at the time of Indian Independence—namely, Partition. The ‘Great Calcutta Killings’ that started on 16 August 1946 lead to the dismemberment of a great province and its people— who shared the same language and culture—on the basis of religion, and the creation of East Pakistan and West Bengal. I learned that Park Circus witnessed some of the worst violence and killings between August 1946 and August 1947. In subsequent years, I would also learn that Pakistan was not the project of the Muslims of what is now West Bengal, who primarily lived in the districts and not the cities. Far fewer Bengali Muslims migrated to East Pakistan as compared to the Urdu- or Hindi-speaking Muslims who were migrants from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh and lived mainly in Kolkata. The Urdu- and Hindi-speaking Muslims of Kolkata and surrounding areas were victims of some of the worst Partition riots, and yet many of them made the choice to not migrate to East Pakistan and to stay put in the city which had been their home for generations. Having borne the brunt of the Partition riots, and subsequent riots of 1950 and 1964, the mainly non-Bengali Muslims of Kolkata moved into ghettos to find safety in numbers—ghettos like Rajabazar, Metiaburz, Ekbalpur and Tiljala. A corridor of about 10 kilometres stretching from Park Circus to Zakaria Street through the city centre of Esplanade became a greatly mixed area with pockets of Muslim concentration. As the process of segregation and the creation of the ‘other’ continued through the post-Partition decades, these ghettos became the mythical ‘little Pakistan’ or ‘criminal land’ for the city’s Bengali Hindu middle class. Visiting Kolkata as a child and later living in it as a high-school and college student, I saw the city change through the 1960s and ’70s, and I too changed radically. I had become an atheist by the time I finished school, and had developed an aversion to the display

of any sort of religious identity. I became an outsider in my community as I consciously stayed away from any event that had even the smallest religious overtones. But being a member of a Muslim family also meant that I remained an insider in a fundamental sense—an insider-outsider. And from this position, and as a journalist, I observed and came to understand the differences within Kolkata’s Muslim community. It was hardly homogenous. Bengali Muslims never formed the majority in any area in Kolkata; unlike the non-Bengali Muslims, they lived scattered in various parts of the city with a mixed population. I also became aware of a deep schism between Bengali Muslims and non-Bengali Muslims. In the same way that the Bengali Hindu bhadralok class felt superior to the ‘lower-class’ and ‘lower-caste’ Hindus, Bengali Muslims, who were mostly educated professionals, disdained and kept away from the non-Bengali Muslims who were usually either working-class or involved in trade and business. Although there were also quite a few educated professionals among the non-Bengali Muslims, there was hardly any connection even between them and the Bengali Muslim professionals. Given this background—the existence of different worlds, separated by barriers not only of religion but also ethnicity and class —I could not but feel hopeful about what was happening in Park Circus in the winter of 2019-20. The women and girls of Park Circus, Rajabazar, Metiaburz, Ekbalpur, Tiljala sitting in the grand, privileged, middle-class heart of the city—the area that has for long taken pride in its association with literature, cinema, poetry, art and culture—were not only drawing attention to a discriminatory citizenship law but were also exposing the invisible fault lines that existed in the city. They were also giving the Hindu majority of the city the chance to get to know the hitherto unknown ‘other’. One afternoon, as I was talking to the organisers at the protest site, I noticed a young, bright-looking woman in jeans, jacket and a black-and-white keffiyeh (the Arab scarf) walking in. After a while she approached me to ask when the Friday prayer was held as she had come to see the women offering it. She seemed a little embarrassed when I told her that the Friday prayer took place around mid-day and

she had missed it by a few hours. I understood that it was not the fault of this medical student—a non-Muslim, a resident of the extreme south of the city and studying in a college in north Kolkata— that she did not know when millions of her fellow Kolkatans offered their Friday prayers. She’d had no chance to find out in her twentyodd years of life. It was no different from the case of my deeply secular, progressive, left-minded friend who did not understand why the women at Park Circus were raising slogans and making speeches in Hindi or Urdu. Like the medical student and my friend, many others were coming to the Park Circus protest to show solidarity with the women and being exposed to a community about whom they had little or biased knowledge. Irrespective of what happens with the new citizenship law, this, at least, has been a positive outcome of the movement against it—not only in Kolkata but in other cities and towns across India. As a young person reading up on Kolkata’s and Bengal’s cultural history, I had discovered how Park Circus had been central to the modernising intellectual movements of Bengali Muslims in the first half of the 20th century. Led by the likes of Mohammad Lutfur Rahman, Qazi Imdadul Haque, Kazi Abdul Wadud, Mohammad Nasiruddin, Mir Mosharraf Hossain, Qazi Motahar Hossain and Begum Rokeya Sakhawat, the movements had changed the community, the city and indeed Bengal in significant ways—new ideas and new writing began to emerge; progressive magazines and journals began to be published; and Muslims were encouraged to educate themselves in order to catch up with the Hindu society that was already a century ahead of them. Most of these progressive intellectuals and reformers were natives of East Bengal (which later became East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh), but had been educated in Kolkata and lived in Park Circus. One of the early feminists of Bengal, the educationist and social reformer Begum Rokeya Sakhawat, defied unrelenting opposition from the larger Muslim society and started a school for Muslim girls. Visiting individual families in Park Circus, Rokeya gathered her first batch of students. Her Sakhawat Memorial School, founded in 1911, became the first major stepping stone for Muslim girls of Kolkata to

get a modern education. In 1905 Begum Rokeya published her novel Sultana’s Dream, in which she described a utopia where women were in charge of the land and men were relegated behind the purdah. Her utopia might never come true, but watching the women demonstrating against the CAA and NRC in Park Circus, the slogan ‘andar se azadi’ (freedom from inside) ringing in my ears, I felt that at last her ‘children’ were beginning to throw off the shackles of fear, diffidence and restrictive tradition that had chained them for too long.

All photos courtesy Nazes Afroz

THE SHAHEEN BAGHS OF UTTAR PRADESH Subhashini Ali Faced with the threat of expulsion into a No Man’s Land from where there would be no escape, the most secluded, perhaps, of Indian women became the most visible, the most audible, the most inspirational. For over three months—a period that may impact the Indian state and society more significantly than even the most hopeful of us realise—they were at the crest of an elemental wave of protest against a government determined to rob vast numbers of its citizenry of the most basic of their rights, the right to citizenship. The women of Shaheen Bagh emerged from their homes to define a new assertion and made much of India a land of Baghs and Parks and Maidans taken over by mothers and grandmothers, sisters and daughters coming out to be heard, seen and counted as equal citizens, claiming their birthright, unwilling to settle for anything less. Mohammad Ali Park and Ajit Nagar in Kanpur; Mansoor Park in Allahabad; Ghantaghar in Lucknow; Eidgah in Deoband; Yusufpur and Subzibagh in Patna; Tajnagar Maidan and Idgah Maidan in Samastipur; Manek Bagh and Bada in Indore; Hauz Rani and Khejuri in Delhi…and many, many more that I could not reach—everywhere, hundreds, often thousands, of women, Muslim women and a few young activists from other communities. All protesting against the CAA, NRC and NPR. At every protest, there were also men of all ages, but extraordinarily women were the indomitable force that gave each protest its strength and spirit. The determination and courage were the same everywhere, even if the numbers varied—thousands at one site, barely a dozen at another. The challenges and threats were different too. In Delhi, the

AAP administration stopped trying to argue with the women gathered at Shaheen Bagh, though ministers in the central government routinely insulted them and vilified their protest, and goons waving guns, shouting the new war cries of ‘Jai Sri Ram’ and ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’, found it surprisingly easy to come right up to the barricades and fire at the protestors. In Bihar, the dharnas continued undisturbed. In Indore and Bhopal, too, the women were left largely alone by the authorities.

Women at a protest site in Uttar Pradesh. Photo courtesy The Citizen. Uttar Pradesh, the land of Yogi Adityanath, was very different. In Mansoor Bagh, Allahabad, the proximity of the High Court seemed to keep police intimidation in check but elsewhere there was a permanent menace in the air. In Kanpur, the administration tried several times to get the women to vacate the protest sites. On one occasion, some of the men who had organised the protest agreed to ‘send’ the women home. Of course, the women had not been consulted and, of course, they did not agree. On 20 December 2019 police fired at people gathered at the Eidgah Maidan after Friday prayers to protest against the CAA. Three men died and several were wounded, but the women of Kanpur would not be intimidated and continued their sit-in protests. In Lucknow, the capital, Adityanath threatened to take revenge against protestors; to crush all those who continued to dissent and disobey. The police and administration knew that they were under the scanner and began to attack and harass the protestors. Terrible atrocities were committed: a retired police officer and a senior human rights lawyer were dragged to prison like criminals; a young woman was beaten brutally by male policemen and taken, bleeding, to jail; dozens of men of all ages were rounded up like animals, beaten and thrown into prison; a young man, a rickshaw driver, was shot and killed; policemen broke into and ransacked the homes of Muslims, kicked and beat the residents, even women and the elderly. At Ghantaghar, on several occasions, police surrounded the women who had assembled there to protest and tried to frighten them into leaving. The administration cut off the electricity at the site and did not allow the protestors to put up an awning to protect themselves from the bitter cold. Ironically, even the public toilet was kept locked for several days by a government that has little but the construction of toilets to boast about. Not satisfied even with all this, the police barged into the protest site one night and carried away blankets and packets of biscuits. Far from being intimidated, the women resorted to taunting them! Several of the prominent women

activists there, such as the two Rana sisters, daughters of the poet Munawwar Rana, had FIRs lodged against them and a brave young activist belonging to the Samajwadi Party, Pooja Shukla, was arrested and sent to jail. None of this forced the women to abandon their protest and retreat into the narrow lanes of Lucknow’s Old City that most of them inhabit. Their courage inspired many people across Lucknow who flocked to the site every day to demonstrate alongside them in solidarity. Like the lawyers from different communities who came in large numbers to thwart an attempt by the police to remove the women by force one evening. By occupying public spaces and making them their own, ordinary women in cities and towns all over India also succeeded in occupying the hearts and minds of even those who had voted for the very regime that wanted to disenfranchise and make homeless crores of Indians like the protesting women. Hundreds of thousands of such fellow-citizens, to whom these women were almost unknown, or merely ‘those Muslims’—and who were similarly unknown to these women—found that the women were no different from themselves; they were like mothers, sisters, aunts and friends anywhere. Strangers became familiars, fellow Indians, who could be loved and trusted. To an entire community of Indians, the sudden threat to their wajood—identity—and their watan—homeland— made much that was taken for granted very precious. The Constitution, the national flag—the tiranga—the national anthem are now as much part of their lives as the janamaaz and rehel—the prayer carpet and the stand for the Quran. The names of Ambedkar and Phule are now as familiar as those of Gandhi, Azad and Nehru. And to those who came to the sites of the anti-CAA and antiNRC protests in solidarity with the protestors, the hijab and the burqa were no longer odd and unfamiliar. They were the everyday clothes of newfound aunts, mothers, sisters and daughters. So much that had become part of dry ritual for too long has taken on new meaning and new emotion. Suddenly, singing the national anthem has become an expression of great emotion. Reading the Preamble of the Constitution, experiencing the wonder

of having given ourselves these inalienable rights—and not having received them as a favour from regimes and rulers—has given us the strength to stand up to violent pseudo-nationalists and despots dressed in the robes of democracy, and to refuse to let anyone take our inalienable rights away. The sheer exhilaration of shouting ‘azadi’, the joy that the sound of this word brings, the realisation that azadi is limitless and indivisible, the conviction that azadi, once won, can never be given up because nothing can take its place, nothing can compensate for its loss—this has been communicated to an entire nation, from the most bereft to the most privileged, in a way that has transformed us all.

WHY WOMEN ARE AT GREATER RISK WITH NPR/NRC Renuka Vishwanathan Early in February 2020, at the height of the protest at Shaheen Bagh and similar protests across the country, a series of tweets about the CAA, NPR and NRC gave me the shivers. The tweets pointed out with devastating clarity why these policies, particularly the preparation of a National Population Register (NPR) followed by the National Register of Citizens (NRC), would harm all women, irrespective of religion, region or social class. Let me share my worries here so that we all realise what we are up against. At first glance, a listing of Indian residents followed by transfer of the names of citizens to a separate register appears pretty innocuous. How can anyone deny us citizenship when we have been of this country since birth and have several pieces of paper to prove it? Most of us have voted several times on valid election IDs, some of us have passports to cross borders or driving licences to take our two wheelers and cars out on the roads, we pay taxes with PAN cards. We have registered sale or lease deeds for our residences and electricity, water and telephone bills to prove that we live here. Some of us have worked in or with the government of the country or are fighting for it at remote border posts. A few of us have represented the country at international fora and sports and other events. Nevertheless, every day, we are now officially told that none of these certificates will be treated as conclusive proof of our being Indian. The only incontrovertible proofs of citizenship are birth certificates for us and for our parents. Unfortunately, just a minuscule number of people who live in India have such documents. In case of doubt, the local bureaucrat preparing the register will presumably

take a final view using his discretion. With almost four decades of experience within the Indian bureaucracy, this is a thought that sends a chill down my spine. The situation will be particularly dire for women, caught up as they are within our patriarchal, male-chauvinist society. Girl children are less likely even today to have birth certificates made out in their names. Not only poor, often illiterate, mothers in slums and rural areas but also relatively better off mothers in middle-class urban homes are not valued for producing female children. As a consequence, they too undervalue their daughters. During village tours in Karnataka, I quickly learned to question the answers given by women when asked how many children they had. I discovered that very often they only gave me the number of sons. From this bitter experience, I taught myself to ask a further question: And how many daughters do you have? With conditions like these, the birth of a girl child is less likely to be confirmed by a valid birth certificate, even when the delivery has taken place in a government hospital. The next opportunity to obtain a valid ID comes when a child leaves school with a school-leaving certificate. But far fewer girls are enrolled in schools than boys and of these, only a small number are likely to become matriculates and get SSLC certificates. Those who do not complete this stage of education will not possess another important proof of birth in the country. Women of every social class, region and religion adopt their husbands’ surnames after marriage. All of us then must show the NPR bureaucrat the link between our marital name and the maiden name for which we have documentary proof, if any. Very few women formally change their names after marriage through public notification and legal procedure. And marriage certificates are even scarcer than birth certificates in our country. Will old wedding invitations and photographs (if we can dig them up) prove our relationship with the woman who gave us birth and with the person whose surname we now bear? Patriarchy in India sometimes extends even further—even a woman’s first name is changed by the family into which she has married. Several communities adopt this practice to merge the

woman’s identity forever into that of the marital family. The woman’s task to prove her identity will become even more onerous when her first name is itself different today from the one recorded in school and birth records. We are gradually recognising that the largest group of migrants worldwide are women. Marriage reduces women to camp followers forced to relocate to the spouse’s home, to a different neighbourhood, village, city, state or country. Proofs of links to the natal home may have to be shown before the bureaucrat accepts the validity of these several residences. And, as we all know, movement from the natal to the marital home can itself result in loss of valuable documents. Given all the above hurdles, the NPR and NRC might presumably be plain sailing only for the woman who has her own birth certificate and the birth certificates of her parents, provided she has never married and therefore never changed her name (or names) or moved into a marital home. Even this may not be simple. Women who live without male support could also end up outside the record of citizens. Besides, there are deserted women (often living with the children of the marriage), abducted women, women in redlight districts. Government offices are accustomed to treating them as persons without identity, denying them access to certificates and proofs of existence. My experience with a maid some years back in the heart of India’s Silicon Valley, Bengaluru, taught me how this works. R was the sole support of her parents and her child, after being abandoned by the man she had married. No government office would give her an election ID, an Aadhaar card or a ration card and she could not open a bank account, since every bureaucrat demanded that she bring her husband along to their offices. I asked for the constitutional clause which required a woman to produce a husband to claim her vote. Eventually, the babus did their job after making the required local enquiries, but they did it reluctantly and with snide and intrusive comments about R’s situation. We can imagine how they would treat her now, even with an election ID.

Let us understand then why women are gathering in such large numbers at Shaheen Bagh and its offshoots in other cities. Let us understand the havoc that the two citizenship registers will create when our very identities can be changed in accordance with the patriarchal social practices that are applied to us. Unless NPR and NRC are abandoned, we risk losing our homes, our relationships and our country. (This piece is dedicated to Natasha, whose tweets opened my eyes to this problem.)

CHILDREN IN PROTESTS AND CHILDREN WHO PROTEST Enakshi Ganguly On 10 February 2020, the Supreme Court issued a notice to the central and Delhi governments, taking suo motu cognisance based on a letter it received regarding the death of an infant in Shaheen Bagh and the participation of children in protests. The bench, headed by Chief Justice S.A. Bobde, and comprising Justices B.R. Gavai and Surya Kant, asked the women lawyers appearing in the matter, ‘Can a fourmonth-old child be taking part in such protests?’ The judges could well have been asked, ‘Can a four-month-old be left alone in a shanty? And is the state a more intimate and responsible guardian than a parent?’ But the death of the infant, did not appear to be central to the Court’s notice. The Court had extended the matter and decided to examine the right of children, of any age, to participate in protests. The enduring image of Mahatma Gandhi being led by a stick by his grandson, Kanu, has always remained with us, as has the image of Rani Lakshmi Bai on a horse with her little son tied to her back, sword in hand, charging into battle. These are examples from history of children who accompanied adults into protests and battles. I, too, have taken my children to protests from an early age, to begin with because I could not leave them home by themselves and later because I sincerely believed that it was a very good initiation into citizenship and the tenets of democracy. One such instance that I can recall was the protest against the displacement of Adivasis caused by the dams being constructed across the Narmada river. Meeting Medha Patkar and the others on hunger strike is something

my children will always remember. It shaped their social conscience and sense of justice that has remained with them till today. I know that many of my friends have done the same. Yes, our children may have been injured in case there was a stampede or a lathi charge, as we saw in Jamia Millia Islamia University on 13 February—these are risks that can arise in any crowded place. But today, my colleagues and I may have been subjected to charges of child rights violation and enquiry from the government. The women in Shaheen Bagh and other protest sites across Delhi and elsewhere in the country were doing what my friends and I did in the past. Like us, they too may have had nowhere else to leave their small children. Should having children disqualify them from the right to protest and express their citizenship rights? Then there are children themselves who choose to be part of ‘protest and dissent’; to have themselves heard. We bow our heads to the young and brave Bhagat Singh but we forget that he was only twelve years old when he went to Jallianwala Bagh and saw the bodies of people shot down by General Dyer strewn around. We applaud 17-year-old Greta Thunberg for leading the protest on climate change, inspiring thousands of children across the world to take to the streets, marching, shouting slogans and seeking accountability. Malala Yousafzai, an adult today, was until recently celebrated as a child icon. Remember, she was promoted and supported by her father and other adults around her. She inspired children and youth to protest and demand their rights. My own father was active in the freedom movement from the time when he was thirteen years old. He was twenty when India gained independence. Ironically, it is in response to a letter from a 12-year-old, Zen Gunaratan Sadavarte, a 2019 Indian Council for Child Welfare (ICCW) National Bravery Award-winner, that the Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of the matter. Citing an India Today report, Sadavarte said that the infant, Mohammed Jahaan, had been accompanying his mother to the protest every day, and returned home at 1 a.m. on 30 January, when he succumbed to cold and congestion in his sleep. According to Zen, both the parents and the

organisers had failed to protect the child’s rights due to which he died. In her letter to the chief justice, Zen asserted that the infant’s death was a violation of the Right to Life under Article 21 of the Constitution of India and so all children must be barred from participating in any type of protest and agitation. Seeking directives to prevent children from being ‘used in these protests’ as it amounted to cruelty, she sought an investigation into the death of Mohammed Jahaan, who was taken by his mother every day to sit at Shaheen Bagh for the protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. Zen and her mother had asked that she, Zen—herself a child— be allowed to speak in court in this matter. Zen wanted to assert her right to be heard. She was also found speaking to media outside the Supreme Court. So it is perfectly all right for Zen’s mother to want her 12-year-old daughter’s voice to be heard, for which she was willing to let her speak both to the Supreme Court as well as to the media, but no other child should have the right to speak up, speak out. But this contradictory, even hypocritical position is not an unusual one among a vast majority of our middle classes. When the cause is a non-political, middle-class-friendly one, like a campaign against pollution, children will be encouraged to join outdoor demonstrations and breathe in the toxic air. No letters are written against this, no court takes notice. There is no talk of the negligence of parents and teachers, nor of the children’s right to life. In the case of Shaheen Bagh, there were two different matters before the Supreme Court that got conflated. One, children accompanying parents to protest sites, as was the case of four-month-old Mohammed Jahaan. Unfortunately, it was cold and perhaps the infant caught a chill and passed away in his sleep on the night of 30 January. It was a tragedy. But does this qualify as deliberate maltreatment and neglect that warrants legal action? In that case, all those women labourers who take their children to worksites, sometimes working on road dividers in the middle of busy traffic, would have to be charged with deliberate neglect and maltreatment, instead of recognising their desperate

situation and the failure of the state in providing basic housing and child-care facilities or safe working conditions. As has been pointed out by a lawyer in court recently, ‘These women live in slums and have no option but to take their children along to the protest site.’ Yet another lawyer submitted, ‘Political is personal for them [the women protesting in Shaheen Bagh]…Our lives are not sanitised, the protest site is where children are dealing with [and] understanding their lives and realities.’ The court did not appear to be convinced. The second matter is about the children themselves who protest or participate as active ‘protestors’. Here we see two completely different reactions. Children who march to support the CAA receive encouragement and approbation. It is applauded as an informed choice made by ‘nationalist’ children. They are not ‘used’ and ‘influenced’ by adults. At the same time, we see a completely different reaction in the case of children participating in protests against the CAA and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). The state has chosen to treat them harshly. Arrests and detentions were accompanied by allegations of at least forty-one minors who participated in anti-CAA protests being subjected to physical and psychological torture while in police custody in many districts of Uttar Pradesh. This was highlighted in a report by Quill Foundation, Citizens Against Hate and the HAQ Centre for Childs Rights, titled ‘Brutalising Innocence: Detention Torture & Criminalization of Minors by UP Police to Quell Anti-CAA Protests’. According to the report, ‘close to 41 minors are/ were detained and subjected to custodial torture. Of these, 22 minors were detained and tortured in Bijnor and 14 minors in Muzaffarnagar. Of the latter, FIRs were filed against four minors who were released after 12 days of detention. Two minors continue to be held under detention in Firozabad and have not received any legal aid nor have their cases received any media coverage. Two minors sustained bullet injuries in Lucknow, while another eight-year-old was killed during stampede as a result of police use of excessive force against anti-CAA protests in Varanasi. The boy’s parents were forced to conduct a high security burial one hour after the body was returned.’

In another instance, schoolchildren in Bidar, Karnataka, were interrogated several times for participating in an anti-CAA play and were even threatened with sedition charges. Their crime was that they took part in a play staged in Shaheen Primary and Secondary School, Bidar, on 21 January 2020 in which they, allegedly, recited lines against the CAA and the NRC-NPR programmes of the government of India. The mother of an 11-year-old child and the principal of the school were arrested and charged with sedition and spent two weeks in jail before they were granted conditional bail on a personal bond of one lakh with two sureties for the same amount. As is almost the norm today, a video of this play had gone viral on social media, and on the basis of this video, an ABVP activist had filed a complaint in the New Town police station in Bidar. In the complaint, the school and a person who shared the video on Facebook were accused of spreading lies about CAA, NRC and NPR; encouraging seditious thoughts; and making students say that they would ‘beat the PM with chappals’. A usually lethargic police, which under normal circumstances takes hours, even weeks to file an FIR even if it is a complaint of child sexual abuse, took prompt action. While that is in itself reprehensible, there is also the fact that each of the ABVP activist’s statements—which the police accepted with such alacrity—was false, even going by the video of the play. But in an environment of heightened ‘nationalism’ based on exclusion, ‘othering’ and post truth, who cares about that. The FIR was lodged by the police under sections of the Indian Penal Code for ‘Insult intended to provoke breach of the peace’, ‘Statements creating or promoting enmity, hatred or ill-will between classes’, ‘Sedition’ and ‘Promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion’. Karnataka home minister, Basavaraj Bommai, justified the Bidar district police’s decision to file a sedition charge against the school, and arrest the principal and a student’s mother, saying that the play by the children ‘insulted Prime Minister Narendra Modi’. Speaking to media persons, he said, ‘What was said by the child was very, very abusive and in bad taste against the prime minister…So everything has been done as per law.’

But the Supreme Court of India, although concerned about children participating in protests, had not taken suo motu cognisance of these arbitrary and illegal actions of the state for a very long time. It was only on 10 February, after the court’s attention was drawn by media reports about ‘children being detained in police custody and tortured in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh’, that it passed an order making it clear that the police have no right to detain children in conflict with the law in a lockup or a jail. Like the Supreme Court, even the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) did not take suo motu cognisance of the harassment, confinement and torture of children. What is surprising is that the chairperson of the NCPCR, Priyank Kanoongo, said he had ‘no information of illegal detention of children in jails or abuse by policemen either in Uttar Pradesh or anywhere in the country’. Contradicting himself in the same news report, Kanoongo also said that he had written to the superintendents of police of Muzaffarnagar and Bijnor seeking their response to media reports of children being detained for several days, beaten up in police custody, denied water and access to the toilet. According to him he received a response from the police calling the media reports ‘false’ and rejecting the allegations that children were either taken into custody or beaten up during police efforts to ‘quell’ the protests anywhere in UP. Kanoongo then wrote a letter to directors-general of police in UP asking them to take action against persons who were ‘misusing’ children in protests. In an interview with Huffington Post on 24 January 2020, Kanoongo said that he did this acting on a complaint he had received. ‘See, if these children are saying that they will be sent off to detention centres, or they are saying in the videos that “hum maar denge kisiko” (we will kill someone)…they are kids, yeh aise kisiko marne ke baat nahin karte (they don’t talk about hurting people), they say all this when they are traumatised. When the child’s mind will be traumatised and disturbed, only then they will get thoughts of violence like this…In the complaint (that we received), it is said that the children are saying that their elders have told them that our prime minister and the home minister will send them to

detention centres if they cannot show documents of citizenship. So obviously they are under the influence of miscommunication…Yes they need counselling.’ On 26 January 2020, a team of professors consisting of Poonam Batra, Jyoti Dalal, Monica Gupta, psychologist and psychotherapist Shobna Sonpar and research scholar Chetan Anand visited Shaheen Bagh. In a complete contradiction to NCPCR’s claim, they said in a statement that they did not notice any signs of distress associated with trauma in the children there. ‘In fact, the children’s physical proximity with their mothers, whether sitting with them or engaged in activities in a separate space, acts as a buffer to any kind of external or internal stress,’ they said, and added, ‘What we saw could be called a constructive and creative way of organising experiences for children which they may normally not have been exposed to in their individual homes every day. Children are not only engaged in giving language to their experiences, but are also participating in finding new artistic expressions to articulate their experiences. We saw an ambience of empathy and care, alongside critical speeches and slogans that assert the spirit of togetherness and the desire to be heard and respected.’

Photo by Ananya Singh, courtesy The Citizen. The detention and arrests of children breach the Constitution of India under Article 19 (1) (a), which guarantees freedom of speech and expression to all citizens of India. In addition, the Supreme Court in a constitutional bench decision in the Kedar Nath Singh vs State Of Bihar, 1962 case had clearly delimited the use of the sedition law only to speech which had the tendency to actually incite violence against the state. The police action against minors in UP, Karnataka and elsewhere was also in contravention of domestic laws (such as the Juvenile Justice [Care and Protection of Children] Act) and international conventions that India has ratified which provide for a system that seeks to engage even with an offending child in a nonpunitive manner. The guiding principles of these laws stress on nondiscrimination, the best interests of the child, and dignity—all of which were violated by the police when taking action against minors protesting the CAA.

Poster by Orijit Sen, courtesy The Citizen. The rights of children to express themselves and be heard in all matters concerning them are enshrined in the Constitution of India as a fundamental right, which is complemented by the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC), as well as the National Policy for Children. But one of the most important concepts that we tend to miss when we discuss children’s rights to participate in protests and be heard, is that of the ‘evolving capacity of children’

mentioned under Article 5 of the CRC. While the definition of ‘child’ is ‘persons up to 18 years’, the Article recognises that the capacity of children keeps changing and evolving based on age and (dis)ability. Therefore, children have to be heard out before any restrictions are placed on their right to protest. We need the government and institutions such as the courts and statutory institutions such as the NCPCR and the state commissions to act to safeguard the rights of children. It is the duty of institutions like the NCPCR and the police and the judiciary to protect children, even from the state if it is violating their rights. Instead, we see different strokes for different children; actions based not on the principles of justice and on child-specific needs but guided by ‘public perception’ and ‘popular mandate’. The remedy to this lies in creating just conditions, where children are treated with love and respect; in creating an atmosphere of safety and security, making children feel secure and empowered to participate and be heard in matters that concern them—even in sites of protests. Today as we watch a dark period in India’s history unfold, my mother, a protestor herself, who taught me to protest as a child, watched me write this article and started reciting a song by Rabindranath Tagore, which urges people to rise up: Hey mor chittopunyotirthejaago re dhire Eibhaarotermahamanobersaagorotire. Hethaydnaaraye du bahu baarayenominarodebotare— Udaarchhandeparomanandebandankoritnaare. Dhyanogombhirei je bhudhar, nodijapomaala dhritopraantar, Hethaynityo hero pobitrodhoritrire— Eibhaarotermahamanobersaagorotire O my spirit, in sacred pilgrimage Awake, slowly and calmly, Around this shore of India’s great people Where I stand, my two hands outstretched, Bowing before this great human god in joy, in unbounded rhythm.

I invoke this human god— O land of meditating mountains, Plains bound by a rosary of rivers, Awake, where I stand Around this shore of India’s great people. My mother is eighty-nine. She is a #DadiOfShaheenBagh.

MUSLIMS AMIDST THE STORM OF HINDUTVA* HOW MUSLIMS ARE CREATING A NEW VOCABULARY OF SECULARISM FOR INDIAN DEMOCRACY Sharik Laliwala The countrywide demonstrations against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) and National Population Register (NPR) have reinserted secularism into India’s mainstream political vocabulary in a way few people would have imagined. This shift in political discourse has come at the behest of the Muslim community, before it was picked up by students, civil society groups and political parties. The arguments made by the Muslim community—including Islamic activists—against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led NDA government’s citizenship initiatives are mostly articulated in the language of constitutional rights guaranteed to all Indians. This focus on fundamental rights and the language of democracy belies the conventional wisdom that the hegemony of majoritarian politics would cultivate radical tendencies among Indian Muslims. The onslaught of political Hindutva, implemented by the BJP, has been increasing state hostility against Muslims day by day as seen in the treatment meted out to the students of Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University, or during the Delhi riots of February 2020 in which over fifty people, mostly Muslims, were killed. (The Hindutva forces—with police support—have unsurprisingly accused Muslims of instigating the violence.) The state’s antipathy towards Muslims has exacerbated their socioeconomic marginalisation, especially of the pasmanda Muslims (Dalit and OBC Muslims). Bias against Muslims is not just evident in

deliberate misconduct by police forces but is even written into the law. For instance, the Disturbed Areas Act in Gujarat severely restricts property transactions between Hindus and Muslims in urban Gujarat to ‘maintain demographic equilibrium’. On top of that, the Muslim community’s political representation is at one of its worst levels since Independence: in the current Lok Sabha, only twenty-five of the total 543 Members of Parliament (MPs) are Muslim. This translates into a little over 4.5 per cent, even though Muslims form 14.2 per cent of India’s population. Just seven out of these twenty-five Muslim MPs belong to lower-caste and Dalit Muslim jatis which possibly constitute at least 75 per cent of Indian Muslims. The BJP, the party with an overwhelming majority in the Lok Sabha, does not have a single elected MP. In January 2018, out of the BJP’s 1,418 MLAs in the state legislatures, just four were Muslim. Despite this, the growing invisibilisation of Indian Muslims—the ‘fifth column’ of Indian society for the Hindu nationalists—has not led to radicalisation, barring exceptional instances in Jammu and Kashmir and a few anecdotal instances in Kerala. To the contrary, as the recent pro-democracy protests show, India’s Muslims are introducing a new vernacular idiom of secularism through civic symbols while innovatively merging them with religious motifs. This signifies a fundamental transformation in the political strategy of the Muslim community over the years: Indian Muslims are not only privileging a language of rights over the religious-moral duties emphasised by Islamic reformists, but also using Islam as a tool to make their moral-political arguments. Muslim feminist groups have almost always employed an understanding of human rights, often justifying them by citing Quranic verses. A case in point is the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, which has been vocal about women being denied entry to dargahs and demanding autonomy over personal life decisions. However, the ‘nonreligious’ groups among Muslims—such as the pasmanda organisations working primarily in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra—have devoted their energies to addressing the

question of caste-based socio-economic backwardness among Muslims through representative politics. In the recently seen anti-CAA, pro-democracy protests, especially by leaderless Muslim women in many parts of India, the acts of holding portraits of B.R. Ambedkar, M.K. Gandhi, Savitribai Phule; reading the Preamble of the Indian Constitution; and upholding the national flag have been prioritised, at least in the public sphere. Indeed, the storm of Hindutva is making Muslims unreservedly secular— quite unlike Mohammad Iqbal’s poetic revelation that the ‘storm of the West made the Muslim a real Muslim’. This is not to claim that Indian Muslims were not aligned with secular aims earlier, but to indicate that the active assertion of constitutional and secular symbols without abandoning religiosity is their new and unique contribution to the country. For example, this form of secularism does not draw from an atheistic fascination with secularism—of the kind enabled by Laicite in France. It emphasises a multi-cultural ethos where a Muslim woman can wear a burqa or hijab while holding India’s national flag and swearing by the Preamble of its Constitution. The Islamic nature of one’s Muslim identity is considered perfectly in sync with one’s Indian-ness and with modern democracy. The anti-CAA movement also points to a development that has been taking place for some years in India but is rarely reported or discussed. To speak a rights-based language more confidently, Muslims are increasingly adopting socio-political and educational means for progress. Despite the stereotype, most Muslim children in India attend not Islamic-religious but secular schools. In 2006, just 7 per cent of Muslim children of school-going age (7-19 years) attended a madrassa, and half of those who went to a madrassa undertook only part-time religious education as they also attended a mainstream school. However, the state’s anti-Muslim bias has limited the generational transfer of socio-educational mobility within Muslims and put them even behind Hindu Dalits, one of the most vulnerable groups in India. Even Islamists—a much-maligned group in the country— have begun to articulate themselves through a rights-centred vocabulary,

including while making an argument for autonomy over the issue of personal law and religious practices. My research on two Islamic reformist organisations operating in Gujarat, a state that is the laboratory for Hindu nationalist politics, confirms this discernible shift. For example, Muslim charity schools run by these groups, with gender-segregated classrooms and a parttime religious syllabus, use the state-prescribed curriculum—thus, in some sense, merging the site of a secular school with that of a parttime madrassa. Their aim is clear: to develop skills and learning capacities among Muslim children in light of continuous state neglect. By doing so, these Islamic activists negotiate secular modernity on their own terms, via justifications from Islam. They find a new moral ground to adopt secular positions by somewhat renouncing rigidities regarding the infallibility of religious truth. My findings are congruent with those described by Irfan Ahmed in his 2009 book Islamism and Democracy in India, which traces the remarkable metamorphosis in the value system of the Jamaat-eIslami Hind, an Islamist group founded in 1941. From a rejection of secular democracy and nationalism around the time of the Indian subcontinent’s Partition, the Jamaat began to trust religious pluralism, tolerance and a democratic system, particularly from the 1990s. These ideological transformations are most crucial, given the Jamaat’s support to the Pakistan movement, including its role in Pakistan’s Islamisation project and alleged participation in terrorist activities through its student wing, the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). The Jamaat in India has not only abandoned its aim of establishing an Islamic state but also prompts its members to pursue careers in the social sciences, journalism and the civil services, while frequently collaborating with civil society organisations. This trend can also be witnessed in the functioning of political parties specially devoted to the Muslim question, such as Asaduddin Owaisi’s All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen and the Welfare Party of India. This discursive shift is slowly allowing Muslim groups to nurture solidarities with other marginalised groups facing similar threats and insecurities. The overwhelming Muslim support for Bhim Army chief

Chandrashekhar Azad among Muslims in the past few years—which was so visible during the anti-CAA protests in Delhi and elsewhere— exemplifies this tendency. However, the alliance between Muslims and Hindu Dalits is still somewhat incoherent, given the overrepresentation of elite ashraf castes in Muslim groups whose socioeconomic interests do not match with Dalit-led associations. And yet, the signs of change, of unprecedented solidarities, are now apparent. All this makes it clear that Indian Muslims have entered a postIslamist phase, marrying a constitutional phraseology of freedom, justice and equality with religious notions. Their renewed faith in this vernacularised secular politics is the result of their frustrations with the dominant liberal brand of secularism, which either preferred a limited adoption of mostly majoritarian religious symbols or abhorred the display of religion in public altogether. At best, the liberal custodians of secularism overlooked the socio-economic concerns of the Muslim community— especially of the low-caste and Dalit Muslims—and rallied behind an empty discourse without mass appeal. At worst, Muslims were castigated as a community with antediluvian beliefs. By exposing these faultlines, though it is premature to say, the pro-democracy agitations led by Indian Muslims have provided a new life and meaning to not just secular democracy but even participatory democracy—a concept almost alien to the ruling dispensation today. ________________________ *A version of this essay was first published in Scroll.in on 16

February 2020.

WHO IS AFRAID OF THE INDIAN CITIZEN? Nandita Haksar Remember I have not forgotten You sent people to demolish the Masjid But now You have demolished the Constitution The soul of this land I am angry How dare you? How dare you?

—Ajmal Khan, poet, university teacher, Indian citizen The Shaheen Bagh protest has become a symbol of resistance for all those who are fighting for the secular soul of the Indian Constitution, which promises equal rights not only to every citizen but also to every resident of India, regardless of class, caste or creed. It became an inspiration for similar protests across the country. It also attracted vitriolic reactions from the supporters of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). As the protests spread to other parts of Delhi, and after the BJP was comprehensively defeated in the Delhi elections of February 2020, mere vitriol was not enough. A BJP leader, Kapil Mishra, gave the police three days to clear the roads occupied in northeast Delhi by unarmed and peaceful people, most of them local Muslim women inspired by their sisters from Shaheen Bagh. ‘After that,’ Mishra said, ‘we will not listen even to you…we will have to come out onto the roads ourselves.’ A senior police officer who should have arrested Mishra for what was clearly a hate speech, instead stood quietly next to the politician like a bodyguard. Barely a day later, men armed with

sticks, stones, knives, metal rods and guns took over the streets of northeast Delhi. In four days of rioting, over fifty people (over 100 by some unofficial estimates), both Muslim and Hindu, were killed. Many more were seriously injured. Ambulances were not allowed to reach the wounded. Shops, schools and mosques were burnt down. The Delhi police was either absent or inactive, or complicit in the violence. The Shaheen Bagh protest was a resistance that no one in the right-wing had expected. It was as non-violent and nationalistic as it was bold. At first, it was a small group of ten to fifteen local women who decided to blockade the Kalindi Kunj Road, a six-lane highway bordering the Muslim-dominated neighbourhood of Shaheen Bagh in southeast Delhi. As the protest gathered momentum, with elderly women and children also sitting out in the bitter cold, hundreds of people cutting across religious, class and political identities joined the protestors. They sat under pictures of Gandhi, Ambedkar, Maulana Azad and the Indian Constitution, with a 40-foot metal map of India in the background, holding the Indian flag and singing the national anthem together with revolutionary poetry. The BJP-led government felt threatened and intimidated by the peaceful protest and began attacking the protestors with words which hurt more than bullets. Later, the bullets came too. The words deeply hurt the sentiments of all Indian citizens who owe allegiance to the secular and democratic foundation of India. The words— allegations, false accusations and defamation—reflected the hatred, prejudice and, above all, ignorance about the history of Muslims in India among right-wing ideologues and their followers. Most of the remarks showed how the BJP conflates Muslims with terrorists, terrorists with Kashmir and Kashmir with Pakistan. Thus, anyone protesting against the BJP or its Hindutva ideology is dubbed pro-Pakistan, pro-terrorist and anti-national. Parvesh Verma, a BJP Member of Parliament, drew a parallel between Kashmiri militants and anti-CAA protestors. He made Shaheen Bagh the centre of his poll campaign before the Delhi legislative elections, warning people: ‘The fire that started some years ago in Kashmir [where] the sisters and daughters of Kashmiri

Pandits were raped, and the fire which then spread to UP and Hyderabad and Kerala—it has now reached a corner of Delhi. Lakhs of people gather there [in Shaheen Bagh] and this fire can reach the households of Delhi any time. People of Delhi need to think about it and decide. These people will enter your homes, abduct your sisters and daughters and rape them, kill them.’ This MP also said that all mosques that had come up on government land in his constituency would be ‘demolished’ after the BJP came to power in Delhi, and that the protestors in Shaheen Bagh would be cleared in a day. Before Verma, Kapil Mishra, the same man who gave the police that three-day ultimatum to clear northeast Delhi’s roads of anti-CAA protestors, had described the sites of protest as ‘mini Pakistans’. In a tweet posted in Hindi, he said, ‘Pakistan has entered Shaheen Bagh. Mini Pakistans are being created in Delhi. Indian law is not followed in areas like Shaheen Bagh, Chand Bagh and Inderlok. Pakistani hooligans have captured the streets of Delhi.’ Anurag Thakur, union minister of state for finance in the BJP government, while addressing an election rally branded the protestors ‘traitors of the nation’, and incited the crowd to shoot them down. ‘Desh ke gaddaron ko…’ he shouted repeatedly, each time provoking the crowd to complete the slogan favoured by many of his party-men and supporters: ‘…Goli maro saalon ko.’ The Election Commission acted half-heartedly, surprising no one, and banned Thakur and Mishra from campaigning during the elections for seventy-two hours and ninety-six hours respectively. Brinda Karat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), CPI (M), tried to file complaints against the BJP members for making speeches which were clearly in violation of several sections of the Indian Penal Code, including 153-A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc.), 153-B (imputations, assertions prejudicial to national integration) and 295-A (deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs). But the police refused to file any case, forcing Karat to approach the courts.

Even the filing of court cases would not check the Islamophobia of the BJP. The union home minister asked Delhi’s voters to press the button of the electronic voting machines so hard that the ‘current’ would reach Shaheen Bagh. The prime minister, in his first public meeting on the eve of the Delhi elections, said that the Shaheen Bagh protest was not just a protest against a law. Had it been just against a law, he said, the protestors would have returned home after his repeated assurances. He then said that the protest was part of a political conspiracy to break the unity of India and that the protestors were hiding behind the Tricolour and the Constitution but in fact they had other designs. The response of Shaheen Bagh’s protestors was to invite the prime minister to meet them and have a cup of tea with them. They sent him postcards, and unveiled a huge red teddy bear with ‘Modi tum kab aaoge?’(‘Modi, when will you visit us?’) written on it. The prime minister did not respond to the invitation. The BJP and its supporters have used every trick in their bag to malign and defame the protestors. When a four-month-old infant whose parents had been protesting at Shaheen Bagh died, allegedly due to exposure to the cold, BJP supporters tried to use this tragedy to file a complaint before the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), alleging that children were being misinformed by their parents about the CAA. The child’s mother, 24-year-old Nazia, who lives in a little shack put together with plastic sheets, said she would continue protesting. The Indian Express reported: ‘Sitting with her two surviving children—a one-year-old boy and a five-yearold girl—near the stage [at the protest site], she claimed the new citizenship law was the reason for her child’s death. “I would bring him to the protest to fight for the future. He was only a witness in the fight; he played with his siblings. Protesters gave him a Tricolour bandana, they loved him.”’ Some days later, a union minister, Giriraj Singh of the BJP, speaking to the news agency ANI, claimed that Nazia had referred to her dead infant as a ‘martyr’. ‘If this [is] not a suicide bomb, what else is it?’ Singh said. ‘If you want to save India, this suicide bomb and Khilafat movement has to be dealt with.’

A ‘conspiracy’, a ‘suicide bomb’, a gathering of ‘traitors’ and ‘rapists’, who deserved to be shot, electrocuted, wiped out. What is it about the Shaheen Bagh protest, and the hundreds of similar protests it inspired, that troubles and angers the BJP and its supporters so much? The answer lies in the concept of democracy and democratic citizenship that this peaceful movement has articulated and defended. What does citizenship really mean? The textbook definition of citizenship describes it as membership of a political community or entity which bestows rights and duties and ensures legitimate and equal membership of society. The key defining characteristic of citizenship, and what differentiates it from mere subject-hood, is the ethic of participation. The protest in Shaheen Bagh was started by a group of Muslim women, but it welcomed and celebrated the inclusion of people from all walks of life, of all ideologies, professions, religions and ethnicities. They were all united in their demand that a law conferring Indian citizenship to a person on the basis of religion is against the secular, democratic foundation of the Indian Constitution. The protestors at Shaheen Bagh were only performing their duty as citizens. The duties under the Indian Constitution include: abide by the Constitution and respect the national flag and the national anthem; follow the ideals of the freedom struggle; protect the sovereignty and integrity of India; preserve the spirit of common brotherhood; preserve India’s composite culture. These are exactly the things that the protestors of Shaheen Bagh were doing. In fact, the Shaheen Bagh protest was the quintessential assertion of participatory democratic citizenship; the protestors were protecting constitutional values and claiming their own and everyone else’s right to perform their duties as Indian citizens. They were not asserting their rights as a persecuted minority (even though they would have been entirely within their rights to do so) but as citizens who have a right to equality and dignity, which has been promised by the Constitution of India. This is why their movement was, and remains, a threat to a political party which has never accepted the

principles of equality, secularism and solidarity that are fundamental to our Constitution. When members of the government, Members of Parliament, attack citizens, malign them, refuse to listen to their grievances; when the Parliament passes a law against its own citizens—when this happens, it is the citizens’ responsibility to protest, to protect the values and ideals of socialism, secularism, liberty and equality enshrined in our Constitution, and to remind governments that they can be challenged and power can be taken back from them. This is the reason why Shaheen Bagh is so important, and the reason why the protestors continue to be vilified, and why mobs were allowed to loot and kill in the streets of Delhi.

THE LIGHT OF SHAHEEN BAGH Apoorvanand The name Shaheen Bagh is a combination of two Persian words absorbed into Urdu. It means Garden of the Eagle, the majestic bird and a favourite of the poet-philosopher Allama Iqbal. The literal meaning was never a true reflection of the physical space—an overcrowded Delhi locality of narrow, dusty lanes and haphazard construction. But now the name seems entirely appropriate. It signifies not merely a site, but an act. A majestic act of protest carried out with determination and perseverance. When you utter the words Shaheen Bagh today, they bring to mind an image of hundreds of women sitting on the ground, with children around them, and the Indian flag and brightly coloured posters of Gandhi, Ambedkar and Azad above them. It is not a grim picture. There is a lot of self-confidence and excitement, even joy, in it. But then I pause, and ponder over the fact that this is not the image that the two words evoke in every Indian mind. To a certain kind of Indian, they represent Muslims conspiring, behind the cover of their women, not merely against the Indian state but also Indian nationhood. To this variety of Indian, the protests are not a defence of the Indian Constitution but a threat to the country, an affront to Hindus, an audacious treachery, a nuisance. The words evoke hope in one mind, hatred and disgust in another. We know that words are signs that are deciphered by people to make meaning for themselves. Every person does this from her or his own unique position, which is determined by her or his individual and community histories and memories, but in our times also—and largely—by political alignment. Shaheen Bagh helps us understand

how the same words are decoded in diametrically opposite ways by two different kinds of people. Let us call them Hindus and Muslims. I am saying this well aware of the charge that I will have to face. So, let me accept fully that I am taking recourse to simplification here, and with good reason. Hindus who are liberal, democratic and also secular need not be offended by this simplification. As things stand today, Hindus with these ‘foreign’ traits are denied Hinduness. They try very hard to claim it but they are derided as libtards, sickulars, Khan Market gang or urban Naxals. Their attempts to be heard as Hindus have failed. Therefore, the meaning they attach to the words ‘Shaheen Bagh’ is not the ‘true’ Hindu meaning of the words. Shaheen Bagh throws a brutal light on the chasm that exists between the Hindu sensibility and the Muslim sensibility in India. At this moment in our history, these are the only two sensibilities that our degraded democracy seems to recognize, and that is the reason why almost the entire Indian political class has been ambivalent about Shaheen Bagh and failed it. With few exceptions, even the prominent Dalit and Other Backward Classes leaders did not talk to their communities about the anxieties of the protestors. Bridges could have been built across the chasm, but those who had the means, and who were politically and socially empowered to do so, did not have the courage or even the will. This was clear even in the initial days of the women’s protest, when I wrote these lines in an article for The Wire: Who would deny that the Muslims have genuine anxieties after the enactment of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA)? It isolates them by omitting their religion from the text of the Act. It is only for the Muslims to feel this loneliness. When they come out on the streets, they lay their claim over their nation, India. They act as citizens. They are not making any sectarian demand. They are only emphasizing that they have equal rights in India. Not only that, but also that Muslimness is as naturally Indian as Hinduness. If non-Muslims have a right to enter and enjoy the hospitality of India, Muslims also have the same rights. The CAA

makes a contrary argument. The Muslims of India are making this point by criticizing the Act through their protests. Muslims are often advised to be secular and work under secular leadership. This is a strange argument. No secular party thought it necessary (if you leave the Trinamool Congress, which is treated as more Muslim than the Muslims themselves, aside) to mobilize people or public opinion against the Act[.] Muslims waited for the secular parties to take a stand on the injustice inbuilt in the Ayodhya judgement. They were disappointed. The secular parties vied with each other to look more Hindu. The outcome of the case was not seen as communal or sectarian but an ‘acknowledgment of the sentiments of the people of India’. The Ayodhya judgement was a precursor to the CAA. Treating the Hindu claim, even if without any evidence, as weightier than the Muslim claim created a hierarchy in which Muslims were inferior. The CAA does the same. Are Muslims wrong in feeling that this is an attempt to further marginalize them in the project of nation-making? If the secular political class is reluctant to give voice to this anxiety of Muslims, what are they supposed to do? They did not come out when individual Muslims were being killed. They did not come out when the top leadership of the country was demonizing them. No secular party spoke out firmly against the vilification of Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University in these past six years. No secular party spoke out when Muslims were pushed out of mixed localities by the use of the Disturbed Areas Act in Baroda. It did not disturb the political class when the Muslimness of India was being erased bit by bit. The process started long back. As early as 1949, Indira Gandhi had noticed it when she wrote to Nehru: ‘I hope Farrukhabad was not too dusty and tiring. I hear Tandon ji wants to change its name and that of every town which ends in “bad” into “nagar”. If this sort of thing goes on much longer, I shall be provoked into calling myself “Zohra Begum” or some such thing!’ That sort of clarity and resolve have gone, even in her own party. The Hinduization of India is seen as natural. The Muslims have long borne the burden of Partition. Seventy years have passed and new generations of Muslims are still asked to account for it. They are reminded of the wounds that the Hindus and Sikhs carry, displaced from their homes, but we never talk about the massacre of Muslims in what is now India! Do Muslims who decided

to live in India despite witnessing this atrocity still need to give repeated tests of loyalty to India? Muslims tied their fate with the secular polity of India. But they were never accepted as worthy of representing the collective will of India. Muslim leaders are destined to remain only Muslim leaders, like Dalit leaders who are never recognized as universal voices. It is not for the Muslims to ensure that they do not get ghettoized. As it is not for the Dalits to not be special. Remember, the April 2 protest called by [Dalits] in 2018 did not see the participation of Caste Hindus. The Dalit anxiety was not imaginary. But it was not shared by the non-Dalits. Dalits are in a far better situation than Muslims because they are never called sectarian when they protest as Dalits. Political parties compete with each other to be on their side. Muslims have no such luck. This time, Muslims have decided to say that they reject their marginalization. That their language should be considered as representative and as democratic and as Indian as any other. Muslims have nothing to prove to India. This time it is for the rest of us non-Muslims to stand by India’s Muslims and prove to them that we qualify as co-citizens. After all, what is a citizen if not the Vaishnav Jan of the old man? And how can one be a Vaishnav Jan without sharing and knowing the pain of others? The Muslims’ pain must be allowed the dignity of speaking for itself; others should prove their humanity by walking alongside them.

Over four months have passed since this piece was written. The idea of Shaheen Bagh has survived, though the streets of Delhi have been stained with blood. Delhi is still trying to recover from the antiMuslim violence that engulfed the northeast part of the city, the most densely populated geographical area of India, and also distinctly Muslim, where protests inspired by Shaheen Bagh had gained particular strength. The violence was carried out to teach Muslims a lesson for having dared to protest. Over fifty people were killed and over thrice the number injured. Hundreds of houses and establishments owned by Muslims were burnt and demolished. Mosques and dargahs were desecrated and set ablaze. Now we have pictures of thousands of grieving Muslim women, children and men in relief camps. These pictures have

almost replaced the other images of Shaheen Bagh in the popular mind. We see violated and brutalised Muslims and not the determined faces of the women of Shaheen Bagh. For almost three months, there had been a psychological preparation for violence against those protesting the new Citizenship Act. The fact that the protestors were mainly Muslims made this task easy—over the years, Hindutva organisations have pushed the idea among Hindus that while individual Muslims may be ‘good’, a collective of Muslims is necessarily dangerous. As the anti-CAA protests grew, so did a whisper campaign branding the protestors as anti-Indian and anti-Hindu. The whisper campaign was made a fullblown narrative during the campaign for the Delhi Assembly elections. A conspiracy theory was floated—that the protesting women were a cover for ‘jihadis’, ‘anarchists’ and ‘urban Naxals’ intent on breaking India. The prime minister himself sent a sinister signal to his electorate when he cautioned them against the ‘experiment’ that Shaheen Bagh was—it was not a sanyog (coincidence), he said, but a prayog (experiment) designed to ‘break the harmony of the country’. The PM’s ministers called for open violence against Shaheen Bagh, which they called a den of terrorists, criminals and rapists. Ordinary Hindus agreed to believe what the BJP leaders told them. Their minds, historically prejudiced against Muslims, were eager to receive what these leaders gave them. The sight of Muslims collectively claiming an equal share in the idea of India angered them. While Muslims were trying to talk to the state through Shaheen Bagh, Hindus dissolved themselves in the state. The process of Hindus becoming one with the state was ignored. It was the duty of the secular political parties to talk to their constituents about the real anxieties and expectations of the Muslims. It was for the media to represent these anxieties faithfully and honestly. It was not done. Non-Muslim India decided to treat the matter as a ‘Muslim only’ concern. Travelling in Pune, I asked a taxi driver, Rohit Shinde (name changed), what he thought of the Shaheen Bagh happening in his town. ‘It is their problem, sir,’ he replied. I could see that he was not an active Muslim hater. But he

was indifferent to their concerns; he did not see that by asking for their constitutional rights they were also strengthening his own democratic inheritance and future. He was never encouraged to understand the message of Shaheen Bagh. Our mainstream political parties were not interested in doing it. Their conscious decision to keep away from Shaheen Bagh isolated it and left it vulnerable to attacks from the majoritarian BJP and its cohorts. The killings and targeted looting and arson in northeast Delhi were a direct result of this. It was then that some of us—Syeda Hameed, Shabnam Hashmi, Harsh Mander and I—thought that it would be prudent for the Shaheen Bagh protests to be withdrawn and for the protestors to move to the next phase of mass awareness around the issues that they had so courageously raised. It was not an easy decision, and we struggled with ourselves. In the end, we issued an appeal to the protestors: Open vilification of the peaceful, courageous and dignified protest led by the Muslim women has been used most cynically to stoke violence in Delhi. This has resulted in largescale arson, destruction of property, and more sadly, loss of precious lives, both of ordinary citizens and a police official on duty. It would take years for hundreds of families to recover from it. Our social fabric has been assaulted but we are confident that it can and will mend and endure. The idea behind the movement of countrywide peaceful protests was to assert the claim for equal citizenship and life with dignity. The protests have been peaceful. But they are being used by the BJPRSS combine to instil poison and hatred against Muslims. That campaign has exhibited its first heinous outcome in the form of violence in Delhi. The equal citizenship right protests at Shaheen Bagh and other places were a lesson in peaceful assertion of citizenship. But their ultimate objective was to live within a peaceful society. When we see violence unleashed under the excuse of opposing these protests, we want to say that first and foremost we stand for peace. In light of the violence and death, and as a mark of respect towards the dead and injured, we are humbly of the opinion that all protests be withdrawn for the time being. This is for the courageous women protesters to ultimately decide. But we are convinced that the task of

the moment should be to provide solace to the afflicted, calm the nerves of the society and establish peace. We cannot afford the loss of a single more innocent life. The movement is not by any means over and this withdrawal won’t be defeat in any way. It is a retreat in the best Gandhian tradition which valued human lives most. The movement in future weeks and months must focus on the one hand on preventing the NPR, and on the other on further strengthening unity, love and solidarity between Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and indeed people of every faith, and non-believers. We appeal to all the protesters to get involved in relief, healing and peace-making work…

The statement met with strong disapproval from many of our secular friends. They thought that we had insulted the agency of the Muslim women, that we were outsiders and we had no right to talk about the direction of the Shaheen Bagh movement. We were not the ones who started it, then what authority did we have to speak about it? When I shared all this with a Muslim friend, he said that it is the duty of all movements, especially those that are identity-based, to create empathy for their cause. This is a difficult thing to do in a country like India which has largely been a divided society and where the idea of sharing of spaces—so important for the project of nation-making—is still met with resistance. And yet, it is essential if a movement such as Shaheen Bagh is to make any significant headway here. My friend thought that the inability and unwillingness of the non-BJP forces to undertake this exercise of expanding the idea of the nation as a shared space has left the field open for the divisive politics of the BJP. It would be impossible for Shaheen Bagh alone to fight the battle for reclaiming our democracy and building solidarities. So, has Shaheen Bagh been futile? Has it achieved anything? It has certainly given the Muslims of India the confidence that they can speak as citizens with their Muslimness. But it has also revealed to them the real face of the other India that is built on exclusion and perpetual hierarchies; an India that has reduced democracy merely to the brute will of the majority and does not hesitate to meet non-

violence with terrible violence. The democratic battle that is Shaheen Bagh is necessary, but democratisation of the Hindu mind is the greater challenge. It cannot be done without curing Hindus of the disease of anti-Muslim and anti-Christian hatred. That is a task Shaheen Bagh has thrown before us. And it is a task for which the movement, too, must find a different approach. To take a step back to be able to move forward is a good compromise. It requires courage to withdraw and reimagine a popular movement. The suspension of the sit-in protest due to the national lockdown imposed in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic is an opportunity to re-imagine the movement. For many weeks before this forced suspension, the protesting women had seemed almost alone in their battle for the soul of the Indian Constitution. While the political parties never supported them, many of those who did had been content only with registering their presence at Shaheen Bagh and other protest sites, or lending support on social media. The necessary hard work of sustained, collective and visible political mobilisation was never attempted. India’s multiple Shaheen Baghs became islands, the lights of protest seen from a distance, the glow steady but unchanging. The Shaheen Bagh movement has reminded us how great our democracy can be, but also how easily it can be corrupted and its very foundations destroyed unless we are vigilant and fearless about asserting our rights as equal citizens. It has also reminded us that we can be united in this struggle. Shaheen Bagh was a beginning. The movement must now recognise the limitations of the times we are in and find different instruments, a new language to continue the battle and guide into light and freedom a nation that has lost its way.

Part Three

A RIOT, A WITCH-HUNT

TERROR AND ITS AFTERMATH* Seemi Pasha TERROR

The signs were all there; we knew that a riot was in the making. In Shaheen Bagh you could almost taste the anxiety in the air. The BJP government, beginning with the prime minister and his home minister, had started communalising the anti-CAA protests viciously in the run-up to the February 2020 Delhi Assembly elections (see ‘Women, Violence and Democracy’). It was clear that the protest was not to be seen as a legitimate expression of dissent within a democracy but as a treasonous revolt by a belligerent and politically dispensable community. It needed to be crushed. In the end, Delhi rejected the BJP’s hate politics. Or at least it appeared to have given greater importance to issues of local governance than to communal agendas. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) won the elections with a thumping majority, bagging sixty-two of the total seventy seats in the assembly. The people of Delhi seemed to want peace and development, something they assumed Arvind Kejriwal would deliver. The Muslims among them, literally fighting for survival, had demonstrated that at least in the national capital their vote was far from irrelevant; in a two-way contest between the BJP and AAP, they had voted across the city to halt the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah juggernaut. During the election campaign the AAP supremo and Delhi chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, had stayed away from Shaheen Bagh and evaded all questions about the protest. It was widely believed that this was a strategic decision—to deny the BJP a chance to further polarise the elections and paint the AAP as ‘pro-Muslim’.

Surprisingly, however, even after its win the AAP, Kejriwal downwards, maintained a safe distance from Shaheen Bagh and all other anti-CAA protest sites. Many still gave Kejriwal the benefit of the doubt, and celebrated his party’s victory as a shot in the arm for Indian democracy. In the season of darkness, they thought, there was some light. But the euphoria over the AAP victory was short-lived. It lasted exactly twelve days. On the thirteenth day, communal riots broke out in the city. The immediate provocation for the riots, it seemed, was a speech delivered by a local BJP leader, Kapil Mishra—once a prominent member of the AAP. He gave the Delhi police an ultimatum to clear the stretch of road near the Jaffrabad Metro Station, where people had been staging a protest against the CAA and NRC for more than forty days. One cannot now be sure if Mishra’s speech was the trigger or scene one, act one of a carefully planned drama of terror. Within hours of his speech, savage violence broke out in northeast Delhi. This was the beginning of a four-day-long carnage where homes and businesses owned by Muslims were meticulously targeted. The only difference between the Gujarat riots of 2002 and the Delhi riots of 2020 is that Muslims in Delhi retaliated. There were Hindu casualties as well, but nothing compared to what the Muslims suffered. The Delhi police made no effort to control the violence and was in many cases seen assisting rioters, even firing tear gas shells into Muslim localities. The newly elected chief minister, whom many had seen as a beacon of hope, shut himself up in his bungalow. Three days after the riots had started, three days after the first killings were reported, three days after organised mobs began to set homes and shops ablaze, three days after the first mosques were desecrated, he broke his silence with a feeble call for peace on social media. It took a High Court order to push Kejriwal to visit riotaffected areas. Shaheen Bagh itself was untouched, but most protest sites in Muslim-dominated areas of northeast Delhi, which were emulating the Shaheen Bagh model, were destroyed. It may not have been

impossible, but it had certainly become extremely difficult to target Shaheen Bagh directly because of the global attention it was attracting. Jaffrabad and its surrounding areas, however, were not in the spotlight; the world wasn’t watching, and terror could be unleashed there. With the riots—rather, the massacre—Hindutva goons were able to send out a twin message. One, even the national capital was not immune to communal terror. And two, anti-CAA protest sites were easy targets. *** A GROUND REPORT FROM THE SITES OF MASSACRE, MARCH 2020

It is over a week since the riots that claimed over fifty lives in northeast Delhi. The neighbourhoods where terror reigned for almost five days remain tense. Men in khaki who once inspired some confidence are now viewed with fear and suspicion as they patrol the streets littered with ash, broken glass and rubble. The victims all claim that the cops were present and did nothing when armed mobs attacked their homes and shops and set them on fire. In fact, they say, policemen had stood with their hands folded, watching and allowing safe passage to armed men who had arrived from Uttar Pradesh in three buses on the night of 24 February. When the union home minister, Amit Shah, praised the police for ending the violence ‘within thirty-six hours’, people who lived through the horrific violence could only shake their heads in disbelief. Sixty-year-old Kishmathoon, a resident of Kardampuri extension, is inconsolable. Her 26-year-old son Faizan was killed in the violence. What makes her story even more heartbreaking is the fact that her son was not killed by rioters but goons in khaki. Faizan was one of the men seen in a video that shook many Indians who still retained humanity in those dark days—the young men were lying on a public road, battered and bleeding, singing the national anthem for cops who kicked and hit them with their lathis for not singing loud enough and for wanting ‘azadi’. ‘We had seen the video but we had

no idea that Faizan was also there. He was lying on the ground on his side. It was only afterwards, when we paused and zoomed in, that we recognised him.’ He was later detained at the Jyoti Colony police station. Kishmathoon says, ‘I ran to the police station with a passport-size photograph of my son. It was close to one on the twenty-fifth night. The policeman on duty looked at Faizan’s photo and confirmed that he was in custody but refused to let me see him. He said it is too late and women are not allowed inside the cell.’ She reportedly went to the police station again the next morning but was turned away. The distraught mother then approached the local AAP leader who called the police station but was unable to get her son released. That same night, at 11 p.m., she got a call from the AAP leader asking her to reach his house. Two other mothers were also there. They were asked to go to the Jyoti Colony police station and pick up their sons. Kishmathoon and the other mothers rushed to the police station where they were handed over their bashed and bruised sons. ‘After Faizan had been handed over to me, I asked the policeman how they had allowed me inside after 11 p.m. because the night before I had been told that it was against the rules.’ Kishmathoon claims she was not given any document by the police to show that Faizan had been in custody for close to thirty-six hours. ‘They told me to be thankful that I had been given my son back and told me to get lost. By the time we came back home it was almost one o’clock. He was in great pain and was restless all night. We took him to a local clinic in the morning. The doctor referred us to a bigger hospital but the doctors there said that it was a police case and they needed to see some police documents. We had no paperwork. We finally managed to get him admitted with some help but by 11 p.m. he was dead.’

Faizan lying injured on the road.

Kishmathoon A mother to five sons and four daughters, Kishmathoon had raised her children all alone after her husband was killed in a road accident twenty years ago. She had been looking forward to seeing

them all settled now, especially her youngest son, Faizan, who lived with her, but tragedy had struck again. About 3 kilometres from Kardampuri on National Highway Number 9 is Chand Bagh, in New Mustafabad. The small lowermiddle-class settlement gets its name from the mazaar and dargah (grave and shrine) of Chand Baba Syed. The dargah, located on the main road and barely 15 feet from a police post, was also targeted by rioters. Its green minarets have been broken, the green and white tiles on the outside have been damaged and soot marks suggest an attempt to burn it down. Why the police could not stop the dargah from being vandalised is anyone’s guess.

The dargah of Chand Baba Syed that was vandalised. Across the road from the dargah is another building that was attacked. The ground floor is—was—a row of fruit and juice shops, now gutted and empty. Burnt oranges are strewn on the road outside. On the soot-blackened shelves that still remain on a wall sit ash-covered bottles that were once filled with coloured essence and artificial flavours for fruit juices and milkshakes. All around are piles

of fluffy ash, pieces of half-burnt wood and blackened, deformed metal and plastic. The shops belonged to Bhure Khan Phalwale (fruit-seller) and his brothers. The family ran one fruit shop, one juice centre and one chicken shop on the ground floor and the first floor was occupied by Bhure Khan, his wife and children. The other two brothers had moved out of the building and taken a flat across the road a few years ago because the apartment on the first floor was becoming too crowded for the joint family. In hindsight it was a good decision, because all that remains of Bhure Khan’s house is a shell of burnt and broken walls. ‘We saw rioters pelting stones and shouting slogans of “Jai Shri Ram” running towards us,’ recounts Bhure Khan as he stands on the ash-covered floor inside his house. ‘They set my car and motorcycle on fire. When we ran out to douse the flame, they threw tear gas shells inside my house. We realised that policemen were accompanying the rioters. It did not make any sense to stay back and hope for any sort of protection. I told my family that we would have to flee. We ran to our terrace and jumped over the boundary wall to the adjacent house. We covered at least four or five houses like this. We finally climbed down the stairs of a house towards the back lane but the exit door was locked. We called up the owners and took permission to break the lock and then ran for our lives. We called the police helpline number and the fire brigade but no one came to help us. About eight hours later, when we called the fire brigade again, they sent a fire engine and doused the fire. Everything had been destroyed by then.’

Bhure Khan’s fruit shops on the ground floor and house on the first floor were looted and set ablaze.

Burnt oranges outside Bhure Khan’s shop.

Charred bottles of essence and flavours. Down the road from Bhure Khan’s shops there are several others that have been looted and burnt down, but adjoining shops with Hindu-sounding names on the hoardings have been spared. It is clear the violence was not all mindless or even spontaneous. It was carefully planned and executed to target the Muslim community. Small groups of men standing outside the burnt shops claim that there are several localities that witnessed largescale violence but the police has still not reached these areas. Two of these men offer to take me to their homes in Shaheed Bhagat Singh colony.

Bhure Khan holds up burnt wads of cash. ‘Come with me, I will show you how they have singled out homes of Muslim families and even set a mosque on fire. There has been no documentation of the violence there,’ says Mohammad Imran. He sports a long white beard and is dressed in white kurtapyjama and a skull cap. He flags down an auto-rickshaw and we climb in. Imran shouts and calls a few other men. By the time we are ready to leave, there are two men sitting with the auto driver in the front and two others at the back. The auto driver seems reluctant and says that he doesn’t want to go into the interiors. Imran reassures him that it is safe and we start off. After a kilometre or so, he asks the auto driver to stop. Another man with a flowing beard joins us, his name is Irfan. The men all get off the auto and after a short discussion decide that only two clean-shaven men will accompany us. ‘I have a beard and it is easy for people to tell that I’m a Muslim. It’s not safe for me. Only those who are clean-shaven should go. You can’t make out their religion by looking at them. The police has still not reached that area, it isn’t safe,’ says Irfan.

The two men, Mohammad Idris and Bhure (which seems to be a common name), who are given the task of accompanying me and my video journalist, look extremely uncomfortable. One of them turns towards me and says, ‘If something happens, you will have to save us.’ I look at this ageing man with dishevelled grey hair, a white stubble, paan-stained mouth, rheumy eyes and old, worn clothes and wonder why he’s willing to take this risk for a journalist he has just met. And I wonder how scared a man like him must be to ask a woman to protect him in case of physical violence. ‘I’ll do whatever I can to keep you safe,’ I tell him. ‘And if I get into trouble you will help me, I suppose.’ He’s quiet for a minute, as if judging whether the risk is worth taking after all, and then agrees. We get back into the auto. The road soon degenerates into a dirt track with giant potholes. Water from overflowing drains fills the streets that are lined with piles of garbage. Sanitation workers have stopped collecting garbage from these areas. But hygiene is not a priority for anyone here at this time. Staying alive is.

A lane in Shaheed Bhagat Singh Colony where only homes of Muslim residents were targeted. An hour and almost 10 kilometres later, we reach Shaheed Bhagat Singh colony. Named after one of India’s great freedom fighters, a revolutionary who wanted freedom and equality for every last Indian, the colony has let him down. In one of the by-lanes that has close to a hundred Hindu families, there are five or six Muslim homes and it does not take much to identify them even from a distance. From television sets, refrigerators, gas stoves and cylinders to clothes, books, pots and pans, plates and spoons— everything has been pulled out of these houses and torn and smashed. None of these houses had any visible exterior motif or signage to suggest that the occupants were Muslims. Outside several homes, Idris, Bhure and I pick up torn pieces of the Quran strewn in the lane and the narrow open drain that runs on both sides. When I ask how the rioters could have known which

houses belonged to Muslims, Idris whispers that the Hindu neighbours had pointed them out. ‘They are all the same.’ Then he adds, ‘Even if some of them are well-meaning, all it takes is one man from the street to identity the houses. It is easy to get some men drunk and make them talk.’ A mosque in the by-lane has also been ruined. The four-storey Allah-wali Masjid is covered with soot on the outside and a statue of Hanuman has been installed in a niche in the wall. The gate of the mosque is secured with a loosely tied plastic hose. Idris opens the gate and takes us inside. It takes a few seconds for our eyes to adjust. Everything inside has been reduced to ash. Even the plaster on the walls is black and has peeled off. The fans that remain on the ceiling have melted and look like giant, wilted flowers. Piles of ash and metal objects, some identifiable, some melted or charred out of shape, cover the ground. A half-burnt Quran lies on a shelf on the wall. There is another one on the floor that looks like a bundle of black wafers, but the shape is still recognisable. The fire in the mosque that raged for several hours was not put out by anyone. It died on its own after there was nothing left to burn. On our way out, I notice graffiti in Hindi written in white chalk on a soot-covered wall. It says, ‘Yahan peshaab karein.’ ‘Urinate here.’ Some of the locals, probably Hindu, who have accompanied us, make disapproving noises as I click pictures. ‘We don’t know who wrote this. It is completely unnecessary.’ Outside, Ram Kirpal, a senior resident of the by-lane, tells us that he helped many Muslim neighbours escape. ‘When we found out that rioters were targeting Muslims, we asked our neighbours to run away.’ Idris and Bhure, who managed to flee with just the clothes on their bodies, stand by and listen quietly as Kirpal recounts how outsiders wreaked havoc in their neighbourhood. ‘We are in a majority here but we are living in fear today,’ he says with moist eyes. ‘Hindus came here and indulged in a riot but what if tomorrow some Muslims show up to retaliate, what are we going to do? There is such a big mosque here, who will come to pray here? There are only five Muslims in this lane. This mosque can only be filled if outsiders come here to pray. And if they decide to do something

similar then all our houses here will be reduced to ash.’ They may have lived peacefully together as neighbours for years but today they view each other with suspicion. Houses and mosques will be rebuilt, it is the rebuilding of trust that seems to be a bigger challenge. We leave the neighbourhood and make our way through a labyrinth to finally reach a small shop outside a large open plot of land. Idris gives money to the people inside the shop through the half-open shutter and walks inside the gate. He emerges a few minutes later driving an auto-rickshaw. ‘I had left my auto here in the parking lot and did not have the courage to come back to pick it up. It is my only source of livelihood. My family will not have food to eat if I don’t drive this auto.’ We get inside and are driven to safety.

Prayer hall on the ground floor of Allah-wali Masjid in Shaheed Bhagat Singh colony.

Graffiti on a wall inside the Allah-wali Masjid: ‘Yahan peshaab karein.’

Burnt copies of the Quran inside Allah-wali Masjid.

Statue of Hanuman installed outside the burnt Allah-wali Masjid. The Al-Hind Hospital in Old Mustafabad has been flooded since the riots broke out. Even as most private clinics shut shop, this hospital run by Dr M.A. Anwar not only provided urgent medical treatment to riot victims but also opened its doors for displaced persons. ‘Seventy-five per cent of the victims who were brought here had received firearm injuries. Some had pellets imbedded in their skin, some had bullet injuries and a few came in with their legs split up till their stomachs. We provided as much first-aid as we could. There were a few who were bleeding profusely and had to be given stitches so they didn’t go into shock and their vitals were maintained.’ The fifteen-bed hospital has till now treated hundreds of riot victims free of cost. The first floor of the hospital building, which was lying vacant till recently, has been converted into a temporary shelter. Residents who have nothing left to go back to have taken

refuge here. ‘There are about 150 people here who were rescued by locals. Their houses have been burnt down and all their belongings destroyed,’ says Mohammad Rayees, an electrician who is volunteering at the hospital. ‘I cannot describe the scenes that I have witnessed,’ he says. ‘I have seen people with their heads smashed, I have seen people who were butchered with knives, I have seen people with severed thumbs. I took a few photographs as well but I cannot begin to describe what I saw here.’ Carpets and plastic sheets have been spread out on the floor and families sit huddled in small groups. Irshad, a tailor by profession, has sought shelter here with his wife and two children. ‘There were about thirty-five to forty Muslim houses in our locality that were set ablaze by rioters. I don’t have a house of my own, I was living on rent. They burnt down everything, I have nothing left,’ he says without making eye contact. A little further away from Irshad, his wife sits talking to Shanno, a single mother with two sons. A resident of Bhagirathi Vihar, Shanno claims an armed mob of close to twenty people broke into her house on the afternoon of 24 February. ‘They were not outsiders, they were local residents who started attacking us with iron rods and sticks. They were forcing us to chant “Jai Shri Ram”. They were hitting Muslims who started chanting with them and hitting those who did not. I somehow managed to save my life and run away from there. My sons were at school. I picked them up and we fled the area.’

An injured man who was brought to the Al-Hind Hospital for treatment on 25 February.

The story repeats itself in every by-lane and at every street corner. Some victims claim they were targeted by outsiders, some claim their Hindu neighbours turned against them. There have been casualties on both sides, but the loss of life and business suffered by Muslims has been far greater. DRP School in Shiv Vihar, owned by a Hindu, had become unrecognisable by the time violence subsided. The official list puts the number of Hindu casualties at fifteen out of the fifty-one dead bodies that have been identified. Apart from police constable Ratan Lal and Intelligence Bureau field officer Ankit Sharma who lost their lives in the riot, the Hindu victims who have been identified are Rahul Solanki and Vir Bhan Singh, both residents of Delhi. A fifth Hindu riot victim belongs to Uttarakhand. Locals claim that many of the victims were migrant workers and it could take months for their families to realise that they were among the dead. Even as the official death toll has now reached fifty-three, residents claim the actual number is much higher. People claim close to twenty-eight bodies were pulled out from the large open drain that runs through the entire belt like a river of muck and sewage, but the numbers just don’t add up. Some people say they have seen unclaimed bodies stacked up like goods at the government-run Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital. No one knows the exact number of houses that have been burnt and vandalised and businesses destroyed. It will take months to ascertain the extent of damage and years to rebuild the broken and burnt part of the city. *** WITCH-HUNT

On the morning of 24 March 2020, several hours before Prime Minister Modi informed India that a nationwide lockdown would be imposed to control the Covid-19 pandemic, the Shaheen Bagh protest site was cleared by a massive contingent of the Delhi police. All markers of the protest, including slogans and graffiti painted on the walls, were erased. There was something else that needed to be erased, painted over, denied: Within days of the lockdown, when

many rights had been suspended, and even as one of the biggest health and humanitarian crises the country has faced was unfolding, students and alumni of Jamia Millia Islamia and others who had organised or participated in protests against the CAA and NRC were being served notices by the Delhi Police. Some of them were arrested for allegedly ‘hatching a conspiracy’ that led to the northeast Delhi riots, and were booked under an anti-terror law, the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). The world was fighting a pandemic and India was fighting its own people. Busy giving the coronavirus a communal colour, the government and its agencies were also using the lockdown to target those who had stood up in defence of Indian democracy. The Delhi Police, which reports to the union home ministry, felt it owed no one any answers, and indeed, even the courts have rarely asked them for any. Never mind that people opposing the CAA, including those who had gathered at the protest sites in northeast Delhi, had always practiced and advocated non-violent resistance, and that they were the ones targeted by armed mobs during the communal violence. Never mind that the violence broke out within hours of BJP politician Kapil Mishra’s brazenly inflammatory speech where he threatened to remove the anti-CAA protestors who were staging a demonstration outside the Jaffrabad metro station if the police did not do so within three days. The stand of the government and the police on a High Court petition seeking registration of a case against Mishra was, ‘…time is not ripe [for it]’. No such hesitation came in the way of a First Information Report (FIR), numbered 59/2020, being registered on 6 March 2020, naming JNU student Umar Khalid and a person by the name of Danish as the prime accused in the ‘conspiracy’. The FIR was registered by the Delhi police acting on a complaint filed by one of its own sub-inspectors, and based on what he had learnt from unnamed ‘sources’. Subsequently, Jamia students Meeran Haider and Safoora Zargar, who was pregnant at the time, were arrested in connection with the allegations stated in this curious FIR based, it appears, not on evidence but on hearsay at best.

Haider (who is also president of the youth wing of the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Delhi) and Zargar (who was a member of the Jamia Coordination Committee) were arrested in early April, and after their arrest the police added UAPA charges to the FIR, equating peaceful dissenters and demonstrators with terrorists. More arrests followed. Among others, Shifa-Ur-Rehman, the president of the Alumni Association of Jamia Millia Islamia (AAJMI), was arrested on 26 April. Close to fifty members of the Jamia Coordination Committee, which includes students and alumni, were also reportedly served notices by the Special Cell of the Delhi Police. * It is important to take a closer look at the FIR because of which Meeran, Safoora and Rehman are currently behind bars. FIR number 59/2020 was registered by the Crime Branch police station in Delhi on 6 March 2020, on the complaint of Sub-Inspector Arvind Kumar. According to the FIR,‘the SI has learnt through his sources that the communal riot incidents in Delhi that took place on February 23, 24 and 25, were part of a pre-planned conspiracy. The conspiracy to spread the riots was hatched by JNU student Umar Khalid and his associates who are linked to a number of organisations’. As per the FIR, Umar Khalid gave provocative speeches at various places and appealed to Muslims to block roads and public places during US President Donald Trump’s visit to India. The FIR alleges this was done as part of propaganda to show that atrocities are being committed against minorities in India. To this end, the FIR says, ‘firearms, petrol bombs, acid bottles, stones, sling shots and other dangerous items were collected in homes in Maujpur, Kardampuri, Jaffrabad, Chand Bagh, Gokulpuri, and Shiv Vihar and nearby areas’. The FIR says that Danish, a resident of Bhajanpura (in northeast Delhi), was given the responsibility of collecting women and children to block the Jaffrabad Metro Station to create tension in the area. This, according to the FIR, led to riots in northeast Delhi.

The FIR also states that on the day the violence started (23 February), people belonging to a ‘minority community’ picked up their children early from some schools. This, according to the police, was part of a premeditated plan. The case is currently being investigated by the New Delhi Range of the Special Cell. The FIR was initially registered under IPC sections 147, 148, 149 and 120(B), which relate to rioting, being armed with a deadly weapon and unlawful assembly. All of these sections are bailable. After the case was transferred to the Special Cell, charges of conspiracy to commit murder (302), attempt to murder (307), sedition (124 A), promoting enmity between different communities on grounds of religion (153 A) and sections under the Arms Act were added. Of the two prime suspects named in the FIR, Danish was arrested and later granted bail. At the time of writing this essay, Umar Khalid had still not been questioned. Yet, making assumptions from the completely unsubstantiated ‘conspiracy’ theory in this FIR, students and alumni of Jamia had been arrested! On 21 April, the police also added sections 13, 16, 17 and 18 of the stringent UAPA to the FIR. These sections pertain to offences of unlawful activity, ‘commission of a terrorist act’, ‘collecting funds for a terrorist act’ and ‘conspiracy for committing a terrorist act’. According to many lawyers and legal experts, FIR 59/2020 is a blatant attempt to politicise the communal violence in northeast Delhi by blaming anti-CAA protestors for it. Advocate Sarim Naved, who represents Meeran Haider, says, ‘One of the basic things in criminal law is that you have a proceeding based on a crime. The FIR has to say that a crime has been committed. This investigation is about a vague conspiracy that may or may not have inspired a hate crime or communal violence. This FIR seems to be a new innovation in criminal law. There is no way that any terrorism charges are prima facie made out here. It is a very tenuous charge. The smoking gun is completely missing. You are working backwards from where people have been killed. You are saying it is a result of the anti-CAA protests and then you are picking up students who were on the

ground, not necessarily organising the protest but supporting the cause.’ It is important to note that after the addition of UAPA charges to the FIR, the possibility of the accused being granted bail diminished significantly, because Section 43D, sub section 5 of the UAPA states that no person accused of an offence under this act can be released on bail on his/ her own bond unless the public prosecutor makes a case for release. Ordinarily, if a person is arrested, he or she has to be produced before a magistrate within twenty-four hours of the arrest, but under UAPA the person can be detained for thirty days without being produced before a magistrate. If circumstances require, those arrested can be kept in judicial custody for ninety days and even more. Further, under ordinary criminal law, a charge sheet has to be filed within ninety days of the date of arrest, failing which the accused is granted bail. But under the UAPA, the police have 180 days to file the charge sheet. Also, for offences under UAPA, the police can conduct search and seizure operations without a warrant from a magistrate. This means that FIR 59/2020 has become a potent weapon in the hands of the Delhi Police’s Special Cell. A group of eminent citizens, including academicians, historians, film-makers and activists who have come together under the banner of ‘Campaign against witch-hunt of anti-CAA activists’, released a statement condemning the conduct of the Delhi Police and the authorities it takes orders from. ‘FIR means First Information Report, i.e., the receipt of information that a cognizable offence has been committed,’ the statement said. ‘However, FIR no 59/2020 shows a glorious absence of any information. It has conjectures, yes, even a theory of what the complainant, a sub-inspector of the Delhi Police, thinks has transpired, but certainly no information. By hypothesizing that Muslims did not send their children to schools on the day violence broke out, it attempts to elevate prejudice and conspiracy theories typical of WhatsApp bilge to “legal fact”.’ The statement further said that the FIR was an attempt to criminalise democratic protests and target young Muslim voices. ‘The present regime has unleashed a war on young Muslims. A

generation of scholar-activists have come to political baptism in the heat of systemic and systematic erosion of their rights as minorities, as citizens. Refusing to fall into despair, they have instead vitalised the spaces of democratic protest by participating in a most remarkable protest against the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act. The anti-CAA protests mark a poignant moment of Constitutional recovery, and reclamation of the Republic from a turgid and toxic hyper-nationalism. Instead of engaging with the protestors, the state has chosen, if predictably, to unleash its naked power on them: detaining, and arresting them under harsh penal provisions.’ * To understand the agenda of the police and the government it reports to, and the prejudice of some of the judges who are hearing petitions relating to the matter, let us consider the case of two people arrested by the Delhi Police in the aftermath of the communal violence of February 2020. One, Safoora Zargar, is a pregnant Muslim woman, a student of Jamia Millia Islamia, an activist protesting a law that she and many millions of others feel is unconstitutional. She has no prior involvement in any criminal activity. A case was registered against her over a week after the violence in northeast Delhi had ended, and she was taken into custody another five weeks later. No arms or ammunition were recovered from her. The other person is Manish Sirohi, a Hindu man who the police themselves claim had been supplying arms to various people in and around Delhi for the past two years, buying guns and cartridges from Madhya Pradesh and then bringing them to Delhi. He was arrested even as violence raged in northeast Delhi and the police recovered five pistols and twenty cartridges from him. Many of the victims killed in the violence died of gunshot wounds. Both Zargar and Sirohi were arrested by the Delhi Police Special Cell, and both were (eventually) booked under FIR No. 59. But it soon emerged that the Special Cell was investigating two FIRs of the

same number, i.e., FIR 59, and this is where the contrast in their treatment becomes glaring. Safoora Zargar has been charged under India’s antiterrorism law, the stringent UAPA, and was in jail for almost three months, without the prospect of bail. This despite the fact that her pregnancy and Delhi’s overcrowded prison system heightened her risk of being infected with the coronavirus. Manish Sirohi, booked under the same—yet not the same—FIR, has been charged only under the Arms Act, even though he was arrested during the riots and found in possession of illegal arms. And on 6 May a Delhi court granted him bail, citing the risk to him of contracting Covid-19: ‘Therefore, keeping in view the above facts and circumstances and also the fact that spread of COVID-19 pandemic is on high rise and there is always a risk of the applicant being infected with the said virus in case he is left to be confined in jail, the applicant is admitted to bail on furnishing a personal bond of Rs 25,000/- with one surety of the like amount…’ Sirohi’s bail application was not contested by the police. Zargar’s was, repeatedly. And on 4 June her bail application was rejected in court once again, this time by Delhi’s Patiala House, with the Additional Sessions Judge Dharmender Rana stating in his order: ‘When you choose to play with embers, you cannot blame the wind to have carried the spark a bit too far and spread the fire…The acts and inflammatory speeches of the co-conspirators are admissible under the Indian Evidence Act even against the accused.’ [Emphasis mine.] Safoora Zargar had made no inflammatory speeches (as the judge himself implied); Kapil Mishra and his bosses and partycolleagues had (and there is ample proof of this). Safoora Zargar had spread no fires; Manish Sirohi, on the other hand, had smuggled illegal firearms into Delhi days before parts of it went up in flames. And while Sirohi may or may not have been at any real risk of being ‘infected with the [Covid-19] virus’ in jail, Zargar, as a pregnant woman, certainly was, even according to the Indian government’s own advisories.

The contrasting fate of Zargar and Sirohi, lawyers say, strengthens the perception that the Delhi Police has adopted a ‘political’ and ‘communal’ approach towards the Delhi violence. Legal experts say there is a clear anomaly here. Sirohi was arrested during a horrific riot and found to be in possession of several guns and cartridges, but was only booked under the Arms Act. But the students booked two months after the riots, and who had only ever participated in peaceful protests, were booked under an anti-terror law, the UAPA. How can the bail application of a person who was found in possession of illegal arms during a riot go uncontested while others from whom nothing was recovered are still lodged behind bars? As Jignesh Mevani, the prominent youth leader and independent MLA from Gujarat, has said, ‘This is not an investigation of a conspiracy, this investigation itself is a conspiracy.’ Having scripted a drama at the behest of the government, wrote the teacher and rights activist Apoorvanand in The Wire, the police was now going around arresting dissenters and student activists in order to assemble the cast. ‘The plot of the story was given to the police by its political masters. In parliament, a statement was made by ruling party MPs that there were organisations like “United Against Hate” and persons like Umar Khalid who were responsible for provoking violence…The investigative agencies have developed this plot into a story, found characters to the scripted roles and are trying to persuade the courts and public at large about its truthfulness.’ In her powerful column in Outlook, Manisha Sethi, author and teacher at the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR), writes, ‘The Delhi Police seems to be mocking us all, rebuking us, in fact, reminding us that words and phrases like rule of law, justice, victims, fairness shall be defined only in the manner that the government pleases.’ She goes on to explain: Read, for example, what the notorious FIR in the Delhi violence case says: it speaks of a ‘premeditated conspiracy’ of rather apocalyptic proportions. It involves—as alleged links in the chain leading up to rioting—young student leaders who gave speeches against the CAA-

NRC, protesting women and children who blocked roads under the Jaffrabad metro station, and all ordinary Muslims who did not send their children to school knowing that violence would break out! Imagine that sweep…In one stroke, the conspiracy is shown to be one in which the entire Muslim community was complicit, women and children included. ‘Instigator’, ‘conspirator’, ‘rioter’: every Muslim is guilty. This is no ordinary FIR. Its narrative burden is more than simply to criminalise a democratic movement—a movement that was as peaceful and inspiring in its form as radical in its content, a movement that simply sought adherence to the Constitution. It is to pathologise an entire community. And by extension, to wipe out the fact that the victims of the February [2020] violence—now designated as a terror act through the application of UAPA—were overwhelmingly Muslims. Would terror charges have been invoked if a different set of accused had been booked for the Northeast Delhi violence—say, those whose speeches openly threatened violence against anti-CAA protesters? That such a prejudiced document is the basis of the present investigation and prosecution should give us all, and the judiciary, ample cause for alarm.

Speaking during an online press conference organised to condemn the police action, Kanhaiya Kumar, the former Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union president, highlighted the targeting of student activists in particular: ‘When people accused of heinous crimes are being given bail, what is the urgency of accusing students and throwing them behind bars? These students who have been arrested were not ordinary students. Along with studying, they were also raising extremely important questions regarding education, employment and livelihood; but this government [has been] constantly demonising and attacking students since it came to power to hide its own failures. The government is killing two birds with one stone. On the one hand, it is trying to do the politics of vendetta by targeting activists who were in the forefront of the anti-CAA struggle. On the other hand, it is sending out a larger message of intimidation to everyone else with the threat of incarceration.’ Eventually, on 23 June 2020, the Delhi High Court granted Safoora Zargar bail, but under strict conditions. The solicitor general, Tushar Mehta, appearing on behalf of the Delhi Police, said the state

would not object to Zargar’s bail application ‘on humanitarian grounds’. Just a day earlier, Mehta had opposed Zargar’s bail plea, arguing that thirty-nine deliveries had taken place in Tihar Jail in the last ten years, so Zargar’s plea had no merit. She was getting the required medical attention in Tihar. Putting this curious about turn in perspective, Supreme Court lawyer, Chitranshul Sinha, told Livemint: ‘I am glad that the state conceded on humanitarian grounds and agreed to Safoora’s bail but the question remains, what was stopping them from doing so before the sessions court or the magistrate?’ ‘If you see the lower court order, bail was denied because the court said there was an embargo on it from granting bail due to section 43D(5) of UAPA. So the HC would have actually gone into the correctness of it. The state conceded humanitarian grounds because, in my opinion, they didn’t want an order on merits as it would have weakened their cases against other riot accused. So this was a strategic move in my view.’ Lawyer Guneet Kaur agreed and added, ‘I assume lawyers from the government’s side anticipated a bail order which would have gone into the nature of the investigation based on the status report submitted yesterday, and made observations on how the investigation has obfuscated the facts around the Delhi violence.’

But the eleven others arrested for anti-CAA protests remain in jail despite demands for their release. It is hard not to conclude that the witch-hunt by the police is meant to terrorise students and young activists who have protested against the CAA, NRC and NPR, and warn those who may oppose similar government laws and actions in the future. It is the regime’s war against its young citizens who may, tomorrow, shape the country in a manner that defies bigotry, chauvinism and majoritarian rule. ________________________ *All photos in the essay courtesy the author.

DISSENT IS CONTAGIOUS Anirban Bhattacharya In the fog of a pandemic, it already seems distant. But only a few months ago, there were women on the streets beating the winter chill with slogans and placards. There were songs, poetry, paintings, graffiti, dance, passionate speeches, late-night libraries, makeshift installations, perseverance, patience, tenacity and warmth as tens of thousands of people across India staged protests against the discriminatory Citizenship (Amendment) Act and planned National Register of Citizens in venues that came to be known as Shaheen Baghs—after the ghetto on the banks of the Yamuna in Delhi where the movement started in December 2019. The largest non-violent civil disobedience movement that India has witnessed since 1947, ‘Shaheen Bagh’ has come to describe a repertoire of resistance adopted largely by Muslims but not exclusively by them. It was both unapologetic about their identity as well as avowedly secular in their demands as equal citizens of this country. It did not just redefine the contours of politics in India; it also set in motion a process that unsettled well-settled paradigms of ‘managing’ minority politics that had been used over the decades, even by the so-called secular forces. Most significantly, Shaheen Bagh undermined the concerted campaign of Hindutva groups to create a dehumanising stereotype about Muslims—their purported outlook, their ghettos and their beliefs. This strategy is waged from the highest level. Even as TV anchors conjure up imaginary plots by Muslims that they label ‘love jihad’ and ‘corona jihad’, the home minister denounces ‘infiltrators’ and ‘termites’. This rhetoric has laid the ground for India’s Muslims to be persecuted—and even ‘cleansed’.

Disruptive Images

Shaheen Bagh upended that strategy. The iconic photo of the three women students shouting slogans at the gates of New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia university; the viral footage of fearless women warning the police to stay away from their male comrade; the dadis of Shaheen Bagh, some even older than the republic, demanding their rightful place in the country—these images tore apart the straightjacketed narrative that goes into building the stereotype. The images of India’s hundreds of Shaheen Baghs showed a community, in all its vitality, responding to an existential challenge for the republic, with rage and yet with civility, with courage and with humility, as Muslims and yet as Indian citizens. They even refused to be provoked by repeated attempts at incitement by gunmen. This was not a model that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) could permit to stand unchallenged. The party’s binary politics, pitting Hindu against Muslim, is a vital strategy for distracting public attention from its immense governance failures. But for a binary to function, both variables have to behave in a predictable way. Even if one of them—in this case, the media-created image of the minority— is disturbed, it makes the equation unstable. The Shaheen Baghs and protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC) may not have been as much of an electoral threat for the BJP. But a politics that allows Muslims to articulate themselves in a vocabulary that is not just unapologetic about their identity but is also based on a rights discourse is definitely a threat. From the Sangh’s point of view, there was a real possibility that this politics would lay the ground for Muslims to forge effective alliances with Dalits, with farmers, with workers, with other minorities and other marginalised groups. The arrival of peasants from Punjab in the streets of Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh was a hint of this possibility. During the protests, the ruling establishment was particularly perturbed by the overwhelming participation of women from minority communities, especially an emerging leadership of vibrant and articulate women from among them. So it does not come as a

surprise that in the weeks that have followed, the police have arrested activists Ishrat Jahan, Gulshifa Fatima, Safoora Zargar, Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal. They have also come after activist Kawalpreet Kaur. Other activists have also been arrested, including Sharjeel Imam, Khalid Saifi, Meeran Haider, Shifa Ur Rehman and Asif Iqbal Tanha, ostensibly for playing a role in the communal violence that convulsed northeast Delhi for three days at the end of February. Human right defenders such as Harsh Mander have been targeted for being vocal about the divisive intentions of the BJP’s citizenship initiatives, while activist Umar Khalid has been branded a ‘conspirator’. On the other hand, BJP leader Kapil Mishra, who openly threatened to remove protestors by force remains at large and so are the gunmen who shot at the protestors. The Curious Case of FIR 59

The urgency of the ruling establishment in prosecuting Muslim activists seems to be a desperate attempt to defend its stereotypes. The cynicism of this exercise is evident in the curious case of the FIR No. 59/2020 in connection with the violence in northeast Delhi. Early in March, the police acted on this FIR to arrest three activists—Mohammad Danish, Pervez Alam and Mohammad Illyas— under bailable offences. They received bail in two days. In fact, Judge Prabh Deep Kaur reprimanded the police for not granting them Station House bail on the day they were arrested. While Ishrat Jahan had been granted bail on 21 March in an earlier case around the protests, she and Khalid Saifi were rearrested under this FIR but this time with some non-bailable sections added. Similarly Safoora Zargar was initially arrested on 13 March for February’s violence in the Jaffrabad area. When she was granted bail in that case on 13 April, the police re-arrested her under this FIR. Again, Gulfisha Fatima was arrested in connection to violence in Jaffrabad and after getting bail on 13 May in that case, she was rearrested under this FIR.

Meeran Haider and Safoora Zargar were also charged under the anti-terror Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act under this same FIR. It is ironic that so many Muslim activists involved in the protests against the BJP’s citizenship initiatives are being linked to an episode of violence in which two-third of those killed were in fact Muslim, and which saw the destruction of fifteen Muslim places of worship. So much so that in the hearing on the custody of Asif Iqbal Tanha on 27 May, even the Additional Sessions Judge Dharmender Rana was moved to note, ‘Perusal of the case diary reveals a disturbing fact. The investigation seems to be targeted only towards one end. Upon enquiry from Inspector Lokesh and Anil, they have failed to point out what investigation has been carried out so far regarding the involvement of the rival faction.’ Not surprisingly, one of the first tasks of the government at the very outset of the Covid-19 pandemic was to whitewash the protest art on the walls of Jamia Millia Islamia, the university whose campus was one of the major sites of mobilisation. They were in a great hurry to erase evidence of the many shades of opposition—the poetry, the odes to the Constitution, the slogans of the women. But when an entire people is pregnant with ideas, mere white paint cannot efface them, nor can a spate of arrests. Dissent is contagious.

AFTERWORD Seema Mustafa We have come a long distance in our fight against injustice. Our efforts have birthed practical, tangible sources of dissent in the system itself. When we began, only four states had passed a resolution against CAA-NRC-NPR. Today, the number stands at eleven. Although the sit-in by the women of Shaheen Bagh was the fundamental form of the protest, its essence, however, far transcends its physical form. Shaheen Bagh is no longer just a physical space, but an idea, a warm sentiment, a symbol of indefatigable spirit and democratic force. The movement will go on and only its physical manifestations will evolve. When we may return on the other side of this pandemic, we hope to emerge stronger, braver, wiser and even more resilient.

This was the statement issued by the Shaheen Bagh ‘official collective’ to the media, after the police moved in the early hours of 24 March 2020 and forcibly removed the handful of women who remained at the protest site after the Delhi government issued orders banning congregations of more than five persons in a public space. Who won? In a long struggle of 100 days that took the country— including the government—by storm, did the women who became the face of the protest against CAANRC-NPR win? Or did the government that was determined to defame and put the struggle down win? Was the goal achieved? Perhaps not yet. Not the avowed goal of getting the government to take back the CAA-NPR-NRC. But, as often happens in a fight as fundamental as this, something else was achieved along the way which could also change society in fundamental ways. For the hundred days that the women of Shaheen Bagh sat on the road,

they showed that a united, inclusive India is possible, that indeed it existed at least in the small space they occupied. For those hundred days, they gave Delhi, even the country, a heart and a conscience. Equally important, they proved that a protest can be peaceful no matter what the provocation; that hate speeches and gun-toting do not have to be answered by hate and violence. Shaheen Bagh inspired protests across the country. It also triggered terrible violence in Delhi, where mobs moved into the densely populated localities of northeast Delhi to loot, plunder and kill with impunity. As the fires of hate raged while the country watched aghast, the women of Shaheen Bagh came under renewed pressure from within their own supporters to end the protest. In fact, this had been a constant, with several efforts being made by wellwishers who were part of the struggle to create a face-saving exit. Mahatma Gandhi’s death anniversary, 30 January, was one such day when serious effort was made to end the protest before the Delhi election campaign of 2020 gained momentum. Shaheen Bagh had become a protest site for everyone. No one owned it, and several groups and individuals opposing CAA-NPR-NRC attached themselves to it as the movement grew. A seemingly unseen hand seemed to run the movement that acquired a volition of its own. Well-meaning individuals acted as arbitrators as and when required, with any number of discussions about when the protest should end. This generated deep differences at times, with groups leaving the protest when their views were not heard, during the last days in particular, and the support base in terms of civil society dwindled somewhat. The protest was dogged by threats from the government, but also from moves within to pack up and go home. The lack of consensus within made the ‘dadis’ and the other women stay on— braving the trolling, the abuse, the fake news, the lies, the media attack, the slurs, the threats made real by important functionaries in government, the gun attacks, the petro-bomb that was hurled during the coronavirus lockdown. It was not an easy 100 days, and the women earned respect and admiration during the course of this journey for standing as a bulwark against intimidation.

The Covid-19 pandemic, a disaster for nations across the world, came in handy for the administration to remove the protest. Many supporters had wanted the women to move as soon as the lockdown was announced. Others clearly were able to influence them not to, and Shaheen Bagh then announced that it would continue the protest, observing all lockdown instructions from the government. The site was cleared of all except five women, who sat at the stipulated distance from each other, with shoes and slippers placed across the protest site as symbolic of the supporting masses. Until the police came on the night of 23-24 March and cleared the site. This was expected. The declared national health emergency made it imperative, and while it could have been done with a lighter hand, that it would be done was a given. So the supporters are now divided between those who feel the protest could have been lifted earlier, and others who wanted it to continue until the government finally gave in. In one sense the government did given in. On 25 March, it announced the postponement of the first phase of the census 2021 and the NPR because of the pandemic—a fact acknowledged by the Shaheen Bagh statement. The notification by the office of the Registrar General, India, made it clear it had made the necessary preparations to start the collection of data for the NPR from April as earlier announced but that it now stood postponed. So in that sense, coronavirus has stopped the protest on the one hand, and, on the other, postponed the census and NPR. But that this is temporary is made clear both by the protestors and the authorities. And it is also clear that given the manner in which the pandemic is playing out, everyone will have to shift goalposts and priorities. It will impact governments, civil society, and individual human beings. Meanwhile, through the entire lockdown period the police in Delhi has been filing cases against and arresting scores of students and activists who participated in the Shaheen Bagh protests, many of the cases registered under an infamous law designed to deal with ‘terrorist activities’. An assessment of their own protest issued by the Shaheen Bagh ‘official collective’ makes some valid points in what is clearly a

time of introspection. A lot has been said and written about our struggle over the last few months. It has been called unprecedented, strong, creative and inspiring. We did not set out to break precedents. We did not know we had any great strength. We did not know we have creativity and that we would inspire expression of such support and solidarity from artists, intellectuals and other struggling citizens. To us, none of what we did was extraordinary. It may only seem extraordinary when one contrasts it with how everyone has become used to seeing and valuing women’s lives and labour. Is going out to public spaces extraordinary? Is raising one’s voice extraordinary? Is embracing a new experience extraordinary? None of it is extraordinary as individual acts. Yet, all of it is extraordinary when done collectively by Muslim women, who have been marginalised in the mainstream social and political thinking. We simply came out on the roads to support and protect our children who were being attacked in colleges and universities all over, when nobody else did. The attacks on the youth were extraordinary. Our response was not extraordinary. If we had stayed silent—that would have been extraordinary.

An emphasis that protest and the right to dissent is ordinary, and what is not is the attack on the Constitution, police persecution and brutality, mob attacks, violent assault and murder, targeted attacks on citizens, and the cover of impunity: ‘To speak for sanity, peace, dignity, justice and equality should be normalised, not violence and targeting.’ This assessment, endorsed by those who were part of the Shaheen Bagh protest and others across the country, thus continues to claim the space to dissent, to speak out, and legitimises it. Currently there is a realisation of the changed dynamics amongst the Shaheen Bagh protestors. And the official statement is indicative of this as it briefly brings in the changed perspective. ‘As we continue our struggle to be heard by our government, we wish to reiterate that we have merely suspended gatherings; our movement is on. We will use other means to continue to resist CAA-NPR-NRC. For our detractors, it would be a sobering exercise to compare our protest with any in recent history.’

And again: ‘We continue to be alert if the basic principles on which our republic is based are being undermined. Our founding fathers and mothers made sure we have rights using which we speak our mind to our governments—to assemble, to associate, to express. We will not give up these precious rights. We shall fight till the end, to safeguard our Constitution. Until the government revokes the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019, and permanently calls off NPR and NRC.’ The importance of Shaheen Bagh has been partially understood in real time. But it will acquire a special dimension as time rolls by, provided it remains a platform of unity and strength of purpose— even as the government and its police will, without doubt, continue the witch-hunt to punish citizens for peacefully but resolutely defending their most basic democratic rights. As the organisers have stated, the protest will take another form now and a great deal will depend on how innovative and meaningful that form is to conclusively establish the power of dissent and protest; the empowerment of ordinary citizens, especially women; the resilience of the human spirit, and, through it all, the Idea of India as enshrined in the Constitution. In the words of Rabindranath Tagore: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Poster by amoebak, courtesy The Citizen.

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS Apoorvanand (born Apoorvanand Jha) is professor at the Hindi Department, Faculty of Arts, University of Delhi. An avowed secularist, he also writes in English and is known for his frequent interventions in day-to-day politics, and for being a tireless champion of minority rights. He is one of the most vocal critics of the Sangh Parivar in the Hindi belt. His critical essays have appeared in all major Hindi journals. Apart from his academic and literary writings, he also contributes columns in newspapers and magazines on the issues of education, culture, communalism, violence and human rights. He is the author of two books, Sundar ka Swapna and Sahitya ka Ekant. Nazes Afroz has worked as a journalist for nearly forty years, eighteen of which were with the BBC, covering current affairs spanning South, Central and West Asia in the capacity of a producer and later as a senior editor. Apart from co-authoring a cultural guidebook on Afghanistan, Nazes has translated Syed Mujtaba Ali’s classic memoir of his time in Kabul, Deshe Bideshe into English under the title In a Land Far from Home: A Bengali in Afghanistan. Published in 2015, the translation has attracted critical acclaim. As a passionate documentary photographer Nazes has held several exhibitions in countries across three continents from 2015. Subhashini Ali is currently a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). She was inducted to the polit bureau of the CPI (M) in 2015, becoming the second woman member in the PB after Brinda Karat. As a trade unionist and leader of the All India Democratic Women’s Association, she was earlier very influential in the politics of Kanpur, winning the general elections

to Parliament in 1989 with a margin of 56,587 votes over her nearest BJP rival. The daughter of Colonel Prem Sehgal and Captain Lakshmi Sehgal, who were part of the Indian National Army, Subhashini Ali was formerly married to film-maker Muzaffar Ali, and designed period costumes for his 1981 classic, Umrao Jaan. Muzaffar Ali’s film Anjuman (1986) was based on her struggles in Kanpur with the AIDWA. Subhashini Ali also dabbles in amateur acting, and her first starring role was in Asoka (2001), followed the by the English feature film, The Guru (2002). She was seen again with her fellow party member, Brinda Karat, in the film Amu (2005). Anirban Bhattacharya currently heads the research team at the Centre for Equity Studies, New Delhi. He was a student of history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. His PhD is on the history of plantation labour in the Duars. As a researcher, activist and writer, he concerns himself with issues of political justice, democratic rights and equality. Nilanjana Bhowmick is an award-winning journalist based in New Delhi, India. She is the founder of Shetizen Journalist, a website dedicated to women’s empowerment. Enakshi Ganguly has been engaged in research, advocacy and training on wide-ranging socio-legal issues and human rights, particularly of children, women and other marginalised groups, for three and a half decades. She co-founded HAQ: Centre for Child Rights in 1998 and was its co-director till August 2018. Having stepped out to make way for a new leadership, she is currently Advisor of HAQ. She has been a member of drafting committees for laws and policies for the government, including the Steering Committee of the Planning Commission for the Eleventh and Twelfth Five Year Plans. She has also been invited as a technical expert in UN Agencies. In 2003 she was awarded the Ashoka Fellowship and has been profiled in a book entitled Womankind: Faces of Change Around the World by Donna Nebenzahl (text) and Nance Ackerman (photographs) (Raincoast Books, Vancouver). In 2019 she was

awarded the REX Karmaveer Chakra award instituted by iCONGO in Partnership with the United Nations. Nandita Haksar is a human rights lawyer, teacher, activist and writer. She has been instrumental in setting up the country’s first human rights courses at several universities. In 1983, she became the first person to challenge the infamous Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) in the Supreme Court. She successfully led the campaign for the acquittal of one of the people framed in the Indian Parliament attack case, and has been taking up the cause of migrant workers in the Northeast. Nandita’s published works include Framing Geelani, Hanging Afzal: Patriotism in the Time of Terror (2009); Across the Chicken Neck: Travels in North East India (2013); and Kuknalim: Naga Armed Resistance (with Sebastian Hongray, 2019). Zoya Hasan is professor emerita, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University and former dean of the School of Social Sciences and chairperson of the Centre for Political Studies, JNU. She is the author/editor of eighteen books, including most recently Congress After Indira: Policy, Power and Political Change (19842009); Agitation to Legislation: Negotiating Equity and Justice in Contemporary India; and Empire of Disgust: Prejudice, Discrimination and Policy in India and the US (co-edited). Hasan has held visiting appointments at National University of Singapore, University of Zurich, University of Edinburgh and fellowships at, among others, University of Sussex, Rockefeller Centre, Bellagio, Maison Des Sciences Del’ Homme, Paris, and the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin. She is currently a member of the editorial board of Secular Studies (Brille), Journal of Human Development in India and Antyajaa: Indian Journal of Women and Social Change. A journalist by profession, Zeyad Masroor Khan writes on minority affairs, drugs, crime, politics and pop culture. In the last

seven years, he has worked with Reuters, Vice, Brut India and Deccan Herald. He grew up in the old town in Uttar Pradesh’s Aligarh. In an area populated by mostly lock workers and frequently overrun by communal violence, he closely saw how religion, class, caste and gender identities shape the life of huge populace in India’s largest state. An alumni of AJK MCRC, he aims to represent the aspirations of the young men and women of the Indian heartland, while trying to encompass the gritty but fascinating stories of the nation’s complicated diversities. In his career, he has written about satanist cults in Aligarh, Bulandshahr boys running to be armymen, ‘witches’ in Assam, gun smugglers in Bihar, dating lives of Delhi’s urban poor, Istanbul’s Taksim Square protests and India’s presidential elections. Sharik Laliwala is an independent researcher focusing on Gujarat’s contemporary politics and Muslim politics in north India. Harsh Mander is a writer, human rights worker, columnist, researcher and teacher, who works with survivors of mass violence and hunger as well as with homeless persons and street children. His books include Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India; Unheard Voices: Stories of Forgotten Lives; The Ripped Chest: Public Policy and the Poor in India; Fear and Forgiveness: The Aftermath of Massacre; Fractured Freedom: Chronicles from India’s Margins; Untouchability in Rural India (coauthored); Living with Hunger; and Ash in the Belly: India’s Unfinished Battle Against Hunger. He regularly writes columns for The Hindu, Hindustan Times and Mint, and contributes frequently to scholarly journals. His stories have been adapted for films, such as Shyam Benegal’s Samar, and Mallika Sarabhai’s dance drama Unsuni. Samprati Pani is a social anthropologist working on weekly bazaars in Delhi through intersections of urban informality, design

and spatial practices. She is also a freelance editor and book designer, and is the editor of the blog Chiragh Dilli. Nizam Pasha is a lawyer in the Supreme Court of India. Seemi Pasha is an independent journalist based in Delhi. She has worked as a television reporter and news anchor with CNN-IBN and India Today Television. In her last assignment with a TV station, she worked as the senior executive editor with Tiranga TV. Seemi has widely reported on politics, society and gender and has also dabbled with investigative journalism. She bagged the NT award for ‘Best Investigative Report in English’ in 2011 for a series on the ‘Medical Council of India Scam’ and was awarded the prestigious Red Ink award for ‘Political Reporting’ in 2016 for a documentary on Bihar elections. An alumnus of Delhi’s Lady Shri Ram College and AJK Mass Communication Research Centre in Jamia Millia Islamia, Seemi likes to describe herself as a ‘ghetto girl’. Mustafa Quraishi is a documentary photographer based in New Delhi. He has worked with the Associated Press (2004-13) and The Indian Express (1999-2004) as a staff photographer. Mustafa’s major news assignments for the Associated Press have included photographing Afghanistan post Osama bin Laden (2011), Afghanistan Parliamentary elections (2010), removal of the monarchy in Nepal (2008), the tsunami in Andhra Pradesh (2004) amongst others. In 2007, Mustafa received the National Foundation of India Media Fellowship to document the Maoist rebels in central and south India. His photographs have been published in newspapers and magazines worldwide, including Newsweek, Time Magazine, Der Spiegel, The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Geo and The Guardian. Mustafa has also worked with several NGOs like UNAIDS, International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Greenpeace.

Mustafa’s work at the Associated Press can be seen here: http://tinyurl.com/n9o6dfm Nayantara Sahgal is the author of several works of fiction and non-fiction, the first of which, Prison and Chocolate Cake, an autobiography, was published in 1954. Her works include classic novels such as Rich Like Us, Plans for Departure and Lesser Breeds. She has received the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Sinclair Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her novel, When the Moon Shines by Day, was longlisted for the 2018 JCB Prize. She returned her Akademi Award in 2015 in protest against the murder by vigilantes of three writers, and the Akademi’s silence at the time. She has been a vice president of the PUCL (People’s Union for Civil Liberties) and is engaged in an ongoing protest against the assaults on the freedom of expression and democratic rights. Renuka Vishwanathan is a public finance specialist. She is former secretary to the Government of India, Cabinet Secretariat and has worked with the Planning Commission and Finance Ministry in India. She has written prolifically on issues of governance, covering public finance, economic policy, public administration and gender. Sarover Zaidi has studied philosophy, sociology and social anthropology. She has worked extensively on art, architecture and iconography, and currently teaches at the Jindal School of Art and Architecture, Sonipat.

SPEAKING TIGER BOOKS LLP 4381/4 Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002, India First published by Speaking Tiger Books in paperback 2020 Anthology copyright © Speaking Tiger Books 2020 Introduction copyright © Seema Mustafa 2020 The copyright for each contribution vests with the individual authors or their estates. ISBN: 978-93-89958-15-7 eISBN: 978-93-89958-16-4 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

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