CAA protest: The Year After

Women gather during an anti-CAA demonstration at Shaheen Bagh, Delhi, in January this year. File pic AFP

The flagging spirit of Shaheen Bagh, recognised as the epicentre of the nationwide protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act until March, has been rejuvenated with the outbreak of the farmers' protest. Muslim activists who cut their teeth at Shaheen Bagh have made it their habit to wend their way to the outskirts of Delhi, to express their solidarity with the Sikhs, whose presence dominates the army of farmers amassed there. They say their journey is an expression of gratitude to the community that was so outspoken in its support for the anti-CAA protest. They also perceive a link between the anti-CAA and farmers' movements, both sparked because of laws perceived unjust.

It is sheer serendipity that the farmers should have besieged Delhi at the completion of one year of the protest against the CAA, which Parliament passed on December 11. Muslims are heartened that they are not alone in resisting the Indian state's lurch towards authoritarianism. Yet their trips to the outskirts of Delhi convey to them the stark difference between the state's treatment of the farmers' protest and their own against the CAA. The farmers are indulged and negotiated with, in sharp contrast to Muslims, who were ignored, demonised and violently targetted. This comparison saddens them, as it establishes their inferior status, but it also bolsters their resolve to fight for equality.

This resolve is a direct outcome of the anti-CAA protest, which imbibed in Muslims a sense of their own worthiness and had them discover their political self. Their nonviolent movement for equal citizenship gave a meaning to the lives of students, the unemployed, those holding part-time jobs and home-makers, injecting into them the exuberance and audacity of hope typical of those who have an abiding faith in human will, which setbacks fail to crush.

Crippled their will was temporarily, once the riots were scripted in Northeast Delhi in February and the COVID-induced lockdown froze all public activities. Then the police embarked on a witch-hunt against the anti-CAA protesters, in Delhi and the states under the control of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Young men and women were persistently called for interrogation, and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act invoked to dump them into prison. Fear gripped the Muslim youth. Yet this fear ebbs and rises. It ebbed as the camaraderie discovered during the protest was harnessed to provide relief to people during the lockdown. It has receded even farther with the farmers' protest.

"…Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated," wrote Ernest Hemingway in The Old Man and the Sea. A fisherman must fight sharks to wheel in a big catch. Citizens must fight for their rights shrunk by an authoritarian state, as the farmers are spectacularly doing, as Muslims too did months ago. Awakened to the possibility and beauty of the collective human will, activists I spoke with said they will rise, sweeping aside their fear of the state, to reclaim their rights.

Yet the community does not have a homogeneous view on the strategy for the future. One school of thought says the anti-CAA protest was and is part of the larger battle for the "idea of India", which liberal, Left, even orthodox Hindus too, are waging. Muslims must forge linkages with them. Another school says that since the state is attacking them for their religious identity, the response of Muslims must be steeped in Islam. They must show it is possible to be Indian as well as religious. They must organise Muslims, develop their own leadership, and chart their own course, rather than follow the lead of non-BJP parties, which are reluctant to fight for them.

As a pointer, the second school says civil society groups did not organise anti-CAA protests in Hindu areas or failed when they tried to do so. Hindu liberals should cleanse their community's glasses through which the image of Muslims is distorted as anti-national. It is the Hindus who need lessons in secularism and liberalism, it claims. This prescription, argues the first school, is politically suicidal, but admits, with alarm, its growing attraction for many.

Both schools are critical of Muslim film-stars, academicians, and former government and army officials shying away from the anti-CAA protest. Arguing against the explanation that they are far more vulnerable than any other group to the state's targeting, they ask: How come Prof Apoorvanand, Kavita Krishnan and Harsh Mander were willing to stand up and be counted?

The anti-CAA protest shattered the myth that Muslim women who don the hijab are uninformed and politically apathetic. Indeed, the protest's most enduring legacy is that it has redefined gender relations in the community. I was told about the enhanced participation of women in drawing-room discussions on politics, their new-found confidence that they can straddle public and private spaces. As evidence, one woman pointed out that even though she is the only female member of a Muslim forum constituted for social interventions, it is she who spearheads it. Battered and buffeted by fear, Muslims, like Hemingway's old man, seem willing to row through choppy waters, with the hope of reaching the shore promised to them in the Constitution.

The writer is a senior journalist. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper

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