A Tale of Two Protests
A Tale of Two Protests
Hundreds of thousands have hit the streets to reject India’s anti-Muslim CAA bill—including many who thought protests weren’t for them
By Shreya Shreeraman ・July 17, 2020・16 minutes
The ladies of Bilal Bagh are angry, but they’ve been angry for so long you can barely see it now. One February night, on day 21 of their protest, I watched them pass bowls of watermelon slices to each other, taking care of each other’s children, organising themselves so that everyone could see the speaker on the stage. Volunteers wearing bright green vests on top of their burqas patrolled the front. Outside the long, red tent housing the protestors, students managed visitors and directed them to the empty chairs. The tent was decorated with anti-CAA banners. The narrow street outside was filled with exhaust fumes and meat shops.
Inside the tent, the young woman on the stage was drawing from an inexhaustible source of energy, yelling “Inquilab?” into the mic and encouraging the rows of women and children seated in front of the stage to respond, “Zindabad!”. My friend and I stood in a corner, smiling and refusing watermelons and chairs. We watched the protests, chanted the slogans under our breath, and left after forty minutes. We ate dinner at a nearby restaurant, where I stuffed myself with mounds of rice and ghee, feeling the pleasure of the food in some surreal, detached way.
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The furore that the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 brought was unprecedented, both for Bangalore and myself—and, I daresay, our Prime Minister. Amending a previous Citizenship Act, the 2019 Act sought to provide a pathway for Indian citizenship to illegal migrants who are Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, and who entered India on or before 31 December 2014. Notably, the Act does not mention Muslims or refugee communities from Sri Lanka or Myanmar. Along with the National Register of Citizens—a proposed citizenship database that would weed out illegal immigrants—the CAA seemed poised to dictate completely who got to stay in the country.
In response, protests, violent and nonviolent, broke out across the country. Minority communities and allies decried the law as nakedly Islamophobic, while many Assamese saw themselves threatened, once again, by the arrival of more immigrants. Ministers responded with meme-worthy confusion and obfuscation. Celebrities cowered. Student protestors faced violent police resistance. Nobody could stop talking about the act.
At the heels of the CAA announcement in December 2019, I went to the first political protest of my life. Sitting among a group of people near Bangalore’s Town Hall on a cool evening, and surrounded by a mostly cooperative police force, I felt strangely uninspired. Jai Bheem. I spotted several colleagues in the crowd. Zor se bolo. The speeches and slogans were deeply emotional, filled with rage, like poetry come to life. Azadi! Yet, somehow, I felt far away. I waited for goosebumps.
Only two months later, as the protests continued, Donald Trump made an official visit to India and violence began to break out in pockets across Delhi. This period of violence changed everything for me. It began with the skirmishes in Jafrabad, where a group protesting the CAA had been blocking roadways for days. Agitated mobs, provoked by a minister’s call to clear the streets, took matters into their own hands. The conflict began at the site of the protest and spread like wildfire: balanced between the two sides at first, the violence soon morphed into a full-blown attack on Muslims across the city. Mosques were vandalised. Journalists reporting on the conflict were harassed and bullied. 53 people died. The absurd inaction of the Delhi police dominated several conversations on social media—almost as though the riots themselves were a foregone conclusion, and the only thing left to wonder about was why the system designed to protect the vulnerable was refusing to do so.
It dawned on me that we had truly crossed the line as a country. The downward (and fascist) spiral I had been so afraid of had in fact begun years earlier, and was nearing its completion. As though we were in the plot of some cruel tragicomedy, we watched Donald Trump bumble about the country as, elsewhere, hate and vitriol broke out of the internet and into businesses and homes.
Several thousand kilometers away in Bangalore, I received constant updates of the violence on my phone. I shared articles and posts on social media with an anxious fervor. I was distinctly aware of how little had changed for me, an educated, upper-caste employee receiving a stable income in one of India’s booming metropolitan cities. I had only to switch off my phone for a day to know how easy it was to insulate myself from all of it.
The damage from the violence is familiar and inestimable. Arundhati Roy perhaps said it best: “The morgues are full of the dead. … People on both sides have shown themselves capable of horrifying brutality as well as unbelievable courage and kindness. … None of this alters the fact that the attack was begun by lumpen mobs chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ backed by the apparatus of this now nakedly fascist state.” Roy positions Muslims as the state’s first enemy and warns us of more violence to come. The system has failed us irrevocably, she writes, and there is no help or hope on the horizon. We are living in a fascist state.
Even just six months back, I would have tried to soften the blow of this statement. But I cannot seem to find a middle ground in thinking about these issues anymore. Perhaps it is because noticing one instance of systemic oppression allows you to see it everywhere, all the time, in every action of the oppressor. I cannot unsee the oppression in the government's callous treatment of migrant workers— who are among the most vulnerable groups in the country—as they tried to travel home in the middle of a pandemic-induced nationwide lockdown. I cannot unsee it in the little things that once seemed benign, amusing even: the removal of the Mughals from history textbooks or the erasure of Allahabad and its rechristening as Prayagraj. Over and over, the government’s official representatives sink their teeth deeper into their Hindu-first agenda. To be neutral toward this government’s actions is only to be unaffected by them. It is to support, knowingly or unknowingly, violence against those deemed unimportant by the powerful.
Earlier in February, as legislative assembly elections came around in Delhi, the peaceful, woman-led protest in Shaheen Bagh had become a symbol of non-violent dissent. Addressing members of his party during that time, the Minister of Home Affairs said, “When you press the button on February 8 [polling day], do so with such anger that its current is felt at Shaheen Bagh.” Maybe he forgot that it was anger that brought hordes of women to Shaheen Bagh in the first place; that the current of their anger has spread so far and wide that it has birthed nearly a hundred other Shaheen Baghs across the country. Maybe it was anger for his naked hatred, and his brand of condescension, that pushed my friend and me to drive to Bilal Bagh as the violence in Delhi thickened; to physically attend a protest inspired by Shaheen Bagh, to stand in solidarity with a Muslim community in Bangalore.
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There is a lot of shame in my anger towards those in power. There is also guilt. I often recall Alok Rai’s Hindi Nationalism, in which he explores the phenomenon of India’s English-speaking, elitist, liberal guilt—a guilt so sharp that it allows for Hindi to rise as the primary language of the nation, even at the cost of paving a path towards a damaging Hindu nationalist movement. I can’t help but notice that I am part of that circle, a circle so out of touch with over seventy percent of the country that it seems plausible to excuse this dash toward Hindu nationalism as a progressive step in reclaiming our pre-colonial heritage.
But knowing my own complicity in the system does not make it easier to protest. In protests, I feel alien and uncomfortable. I can recognize the power of the protests as a symbol, but I wonder often if they may have come too late to make a tangible impact. It was clear that the motivations to protest differed radically based on which region the protestors were from. There was a lack of organisation, a lack of a common goal. Maybe there is no point to the protests—maybe the re-election of a Modi government is inevitable, and he timed this turbulent announcement of the CAA in his (second term) first year as Prime Minister so as to give him the time to systemically wipe out the minority from the voter base and our memories. Through all of this, silence is alluring—but most of all, it is familiar.
I spent my childhood in Oman, an Islamic monarchy, where my family was part of the Indian community that made up the majority of the country’s blue- and white-collar workforce. Oman welcomed my family’s Hindu lifestyle: we went to the temple every week, I learned my Carnatic music, I attended a school that taught me about the Dandi March more times than I care to count. And yet, when Omani teens living around our area bullied us in the evenings, I knew it was wise not to say anything back. In the absence of permanent residence and democratic rights, my family encouraged silence believing that it granted us safety. Even if we knew that there existed in Oman an underbelly of the South Asian community—and many of us did, we knew of the mistreated labourers, the car cleaners, the passport-less, the abjectly poor—we could not talk about it. Even if we wanted to help, there was no way to offer them support; there was no space to begin a conversation, let alone demand better conditions. It wasn’t enough to be in the majority: silence defined my relationship to the country.
In India, things are supposed to be different. I have a voter’s ID, a PAN card, and an Aadhar profile. I have a constitutional right to freedom of speech. I am of this country in a way that I will never be of any other place. I am secure in an identity that the CAA will rob from so many others—and yet, I am so often tempted to remain silent. When I hear that a High Court judge can be transferred out of his court on the same day that he questions police inaction in Delhi, or that activists are being arrested for sedition without a charge sheet, I want to lay low and stay quiet.
But I cannot let silence define my relationship with India. Again and again, I am reminded of those for whom silence is not an option, for whom speaking out has bigger consequences than a fall out with friends or family. I think of the video, one among thousands circulating online, of the bloodied man being dragged across the streets by a rioting mob in Delhi. I think of the lynchings that passed by unpunished before these riots, and those that will continue to pass by after. I think of the old man in that narrow alley, with his granddaughter on his lap, who cheerily pointed us to where Bilal Bagh was. Then I think that perhaps I will go to just one more protest if only to stand on the sidelines and listen to the cries around me. ❖
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