At Shaheen Bagh on counting day, the banners did the talking. (Express photo: Yashee)
Shaheen Bagh, located in Delhi’s Okhla constituency, has over the past few weeks morphed into several things. The seat voted the AAP candidate by the highest margin in the polls. But till just a week ago, things here were hanging on a precipice: ‘Shaheen Bagh’ had become a hotly contested verb in the poll campaign. It pioneered the sit-in protests of determined women camping round the clock, protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens – both together seen as a threat to India’s basis of citizenship without religious discrimination.
The utterances — and silences — of the BJP and the AAP on Shaheen Bagh were sought to be made into a partisan electoral issue, but Shaheen Bagh spoke volumes with its continued silent protests after the results were announced. It snubbed the BJP’s loud bellicosity and perhaps added to the discomfort of AAP’s tactical silence on an issue which cannot be wished away.
But Shaheen Bagh, as an idea, had already grown beyond its postcode, spreading to multiple sites in the country – Lucknow, Patna, Gaya, Kota, Chennai, Kolkata and beyond. Beyond BJP’s aggressive rhetoric, It has drawn the attention of scholars globally.
How significant are public protests in a democracy like India, which has always seen smooth transfers of power when electorates vote them out? AAP, the winner of the elections in Delhi, after all, grew out of a public protest movement. Christian Volk a Germany-based Professor for Political Science and author of Arendtian Constitutionalism: Law, Politics and the Order of Freedom says,“Political protests articulate the core ideals of democracy: that people assemble, publicly express their opinions, usually their dissent, and thus make a social conflict visible. Protests are the expression of a lively and vibrant democracy; they are a piece of untamed democracy.”
But do they have any kind of impact on secure majority governments, like the one BJP has at the Centre? “Measuring the impact of protest is an empirically very difficult challenge. The protests in Spain – Indignados – brought forth Podemos, a new party, a movement party, which is now part of the government. In this case the impact is clear,” Volk adds, “But even beyond direct influence on the political decision-making process, political protest can impact modern democracies. Political protest can undermine the credibility of governments and their legitimacy, set new issues, change the way we think about the world and thus describe problems in a new and different way, initiate debates, give a voice to marginalized groups or simply bring people out of their isolation and let them experience solidarity within the movement – to name just a few points.”
The protests against CAA have been led by women. On the significance of women being so visibly upfront, Jason Stanley, Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and most recently the author of How Fascism Works says,“My Grandmother, Ilse Stanley, was a German Jewish woman living in Berlin when Hitler rose to power. An accomplished actor and daughter of a prominent Jewish religious leader, she deeply loved her homeland of Germany. It was this, her profound belief in her homeland, that led her on a path to save 412 fellow Germans from Sachsenhausen, in its early years. When she received word from a relative that their husband had been sent there, she went straight to the Gestapo headquarters on Alexanderplatz in Berlin, committed to the view that even in that hell, there were good fellow Germans. She ran into an old employee of hers, her provided her with a uniform of a Nazi social worker and forged free passes to rescue her relative. Time and time again they repeated this work – the Gestapo officer, providing her papers, and cover, and a non-Jewish German communist driving her to the camp and back. As a woman in a social worker’s uniform, with a non-Jewish appearance, she managed to do work that a man probably could not have done.”
Adds Stanley, “My Grandmother fundamentally never accepted that her beloved liberal homeland could transform in the way it did – and ultimately, she turned out to be right, as Germany has been for decades a world center for liberal democracy. Now, a crown jewel of the liberal democratic system is facing its own 1935, when the Nuremberg Laws stripped German citizenship from many German Jews, like my grandmother and father. Because of India’s now long history as a shining jewel of secular liberal democracy, large protests have broken out, with young people committed to preserving the India of their ideals against a slide back into nationalist authoritarianism – indeed, a slide back into fascism, the toxic Western ideology that RSS brought into a land in which it had previously been unknown.”
Gyan Prakash, a political scientist based in Princeton, studied the protests against the 1975 Emergency for his award-winning book, The Emergency Chronicles.“First, unlike the student-youth protests of 1973-74, the upsurge of youth and students is far more organic. Unlike then, when the ABVP and the RSS provided the organizing cadre, there is no political party behind the current protests. In that sense, it is genuinely more ground up. Also, although JP spoke about Total Revolution, his program for decentralizing power never targeted the local caste and class structures of power. Even his limited call for social revolution faltered, and he took on a more overtly political program of ousting Indira. This is how the ABVP and the RSS became integral to his movement. Today, Ambedkar is part of the iconography of protests. The demand for equal citizenship has a more clear social goal than was ever the case with the JP movement. A different idea of the nation, invoking the constitutional idea of equality, has emerged to challenge the Hindutva’s hijacking of nationalism,” Prakash says.
Prakash finds the lead taken by Muslims, especially women, “extraordinary”. He says that the “Indian Constitution gave us equal citizenship but that was due to the struggle against colonial inequality. There was no civil rights movement that agitated for that provision. Today, we are witnessing an attempt to realize that promise with popular action. In that sense, I would draw a comparison with the US Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.” He believes this now “a movement crossing religious, linguistic, and regional boundaries”.
Among the common symbols seen in almost all the protests raging across India are the use of Gandhi as an icon. Oxford-based Historian and the author of The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence, Prof Faisal Devji posits that “A number of commentators have already compared the protests to civil disobedience, which was inaugurated in India with Gandhi’s Salt March in 1930. But I think non-cooperation might make a better comparison, and not only because this year marks its centenary. The great mobilisation of 1920 brought together Hindus and Muslims in a political partnership for the first time since the Mutiny of 1857. Rather than losing their identities within some generic vision of Indian citizenship, the different groups involved in all these events supported each others’ causes and in this way created a nation out of their joint struggles. In non-cooperation, the causes involved were both domestic and international, with Indians protesting both the ‘Punjab wrongs’ of the Rowlatt Act and Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and, in the Khilafat Movement, European imperialism’s appropriation of the Middle East.”
“Today’s protests, too, appear to be remaking national identity by a common struggle that encompasses the international issue of refugee status and the domestic one of equal citizenship, for both of which religious and caste differences are crucial,” he adds.
Devji, who witnessed the protests in Mumbai last month, says, “On the one hand are the students, teachers and universities under attack; and on the other the caste and minority groups made vulnerable by the law. It is as if the constitution brandished by the protestors is in some halting and fitful way giving rise to the citizen it had envisaged in principle but not reality. And in this way the contradiction that Dr. Ambedkar had noted between constitutional principles and social realities has at last received its public recognition.”
Volk does not see the street protests seen in India and before that in several countries in the world as having a parallel in either 1848, 1968 or even 19789. “What distinguishes today’s protest from the protests of 1848, 1968 or 1989 is that it focuses primarily on prevention and rejection and generally refrains from providing an alternative vision of a common world (no “I have a dream”). In academia we speak of “negative politics” in this context (negative not in the sense of bad, but in the sense of denying). Negative politics certainly also has a strategic component, i.e. it is easier to mobilize people when you are against something than when you have to agree on something positive. But negative politics is also an expression of a feeling of powerlessness on the part of the activists, who know that their own demands are not or very difficult to reconcile with the existing order and who consider their room for manoeuvre and scope of action to be very limited.”
But he adds; “India has had a long and impressive history of political protest. However, it is always important to renew the political-democratic culture, to fill it with life and energy and to make it clear to the political elite that they must – and should better – anticipate an active civil society, politically vigilant and committed citizens.”
Shaheen Bagh has set a striking example of an active civil society, full of politically vigilant and committed citizens. Kejriwal’s political pitch sought to redefine patriotism in terms of providing education and health to all Delhizens, allowing him to steer clear of the BJP’s framing of Shaheen Bagh as ‘Pakistan’. But as his stature has grown, beating back the BJP juggernaut months after being third in the state, and with Shaheen Bagh not going away anywhere, he will have to articulate his position unambiguously. That will be the true test of his political mettle.