Making (Ab)sense of Women’s Agency and Belonging in Citizenship Debates in India: Analysing the Shaheen Bagh Protests as ‘Act(s) of Citizenship’

Abstract

The developments in citizenship in India that took place in 2019–2020 witnessed intervention from women belonging to minority communities who have emerged as forebears of resistance to the authoritarian-masculine imposition of citizenship as religious exclusion in the form of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), 2019. The article revisits the women protests against the Act through the lens of ‘acts of citizenship’. The Shaheen Bagh protests, as these are called popularly, have been studied mainly as Muslim women exhibiting their defiance against a draconian law adversely affecting them. I argue that these protests can be interpreted as acts of citizenship where women spearheaded demonstrations against the Indian state to withhold their rights of citizenship as ‘activist citizens’, asserting the constitutional value of respecting diversity and democratic citizenship, thereby demonstrating ‘constitutional patriotism’. The article contributes to the ongoing debate on gendered citizenship in India providing an alternative approach, moving away from the popular binaries of ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘cultural nationalism’.

Keywords

Gender India acts of citizenship Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 women’s agency

Introduction

In December 2019, the Indian Parliament passed a new law amending the Citizenship Act of India. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), as it is known, claims to facilitate Indian citizenship for the ‘persecuted minorities’ groups from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who entered India before 31 December 2014, except Muslims from these countries. The categorical omission of Muslims to take advantage of this law has been opposed for being discriminatory and unconstitutional as it made religion the condition for granting citizenship against the secular ethos of the Indian Constitution (British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC], 2019). Scholars and political analysts claimed that the CAA linked with the National Register of Citizens can potentially transform India into a majoritarian polity, marginalising its 200 million Muslims (Regan et al., 2019). The government’s response was marked by sarcasm, as to how a ‘benign’ law facilitating citizenship for persecuted minorities from Muslim majority countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh was being opposed by Muslims in India (Malik et al., 2019). Activists, feminist groups and students who supported the anti-CAA protests criticised the CAA as unconstitutional and against the ‘basic structure principle’ of the Constitution. The law was challenged in the Supreme Court by a group of lawyers, opposition politicians and even the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The strongest resistance against the CAA came from India’s Constitution-loving citizens, especially women, against the dogmatic interpretation of citizenship. They started the anti-CAA protest in Shaheen Bagh which was emulated in various regions of India. The protest was highly publicised in the mainstream media primarily focussing on the ‘religious’ identity of the protesters, imitating the ‘male patriarchal gaze’ (Menon, 2012, p. 197; Mulvey, 1975). A similar narrative was portrayed by the central government which phrased the protest as Muslims versus Hindus (Bhawsar, 2020). Consequently, the protests remained narrowly viewed as an agitation by Muslim women (Datta, 2021; Mustafa, 2020).

Addressing the Shaheen Bagh protests solely through a religious lens was like playing into the hands of the majoritarian state, diluting the cause these women were demonstrating for upholding the constitutional provisions of equal citizenship without discrimination on grounds of religion, caste, language and gender. It is remarkable that even then the Shaheen Bagh peaceful protests provoked the Hindu right wing. Three reasons can be identified for this: first, the gender of the protesters; second, the religion of the protesters; and third, a hurting male ego. How could upper-caste men accept women whom they consider meek and docile, that too Muslims, to come out on the roads, challenging the very core of their ideology with such composure and demeanour without any political and external support? Here it is also necessary to state that access to equal citizenship in India remains a distant dream for most of the population including women, dalits, adivasis, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, the disabled and the poor (Parthasarathy, 2020). Even though the anti-CAA protest was dispersed due to the pandemic and Delhi riots, it was successful in generating a backlash within the ruling coalition, with the law finding no mention in the mandate during Assam elections of 2021 and the central government strategising a regionally differential position vis-à-vis the CAA in the state assembly elections held in 2021 (Pandey, 2021; Press Trust of India, 2021).

Examining the Anti-CAA Protests as Acts of Citizenship

Digressing from the mainstream analysis of the anti-CAA as a minority protest, this article attempts to examine it as ‘acts of citizenship’ (AC). The AC approach is formalised by Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielson in their important work Acts of Citizenship published in 2008. AC presents an alternative methodology to analyse the anti-CAA protests as ‘acts’ by citizens regardless of the status of the protesters. Herein, subjects/beings constitute themselves as citizens or as those to whom the right to have rights is due (Isin & Nielson, 2008, p. 3). AC as a methodological tool investigates the condition(s) which produces an act, thereby shifting the focus from the ‘actor(s) to acts’ that seeks to rupture the socio-historical patterns towards a greater recognition of (in)justice. AC diverges from the liberal and republican theories of citizenship grounded on legality and obligation to the state, transforming citizenship as ‘everyday’ deeds. AC claims that these acts can be ethical, cultural, social, religious and sexual. An interesting contribution of AC is the distinction it makes between ‘active’ and ‘activist’ citizens: the former being those who follow the script of the state and conduct themselves accordingly, whereas the latter are those who engage themselves in creating and writing a new script. Second, AC defines ‘active citizens’ as those who possess the necessary habit of placing limits on the self, enabling them to learn how to exercise their ‘freedom’ within the boundaries of state diktats. Habits, though significant, cannot be understood as a ‘creative’ endeavour due to calculated outcomes, conditioning citizens to obedience and not questioning injustice by the state. ACs are creative and require a detachment from established habits towards a genuine encounter with the unjust, uncertain and unforeseen (White, 2008, p. 47).

Igor Stiks, asserted that, ‘…activist citizenship as protest can and often does develop a critique of the system questioning the socio-political, economic and cultural foundations of a given regime’ Through this he reaffirmed Michel Foucault’s definition of critique ‘…as not wanting to accept laws because they are unjust and hide illegitimacy’ (Foucault, 2007, p. 46 as cited in Stiks, 2017, p. 30). Protests, Stiks emphasised, can target aberrations, corruption or the malfunctioning of a system without necessarily putting the whole system into question. This brings ‘activist citizenship as protest’ very close to ‘activist citizenship as critique’ (Stiks, 2017, p. 30). Seeking for ‘occupying citizenship, Stiks uses the concept of ‘activist citizens’ as not only those who have the ‘right to have rights’ (an Arendtian understanding), but also those who have ‘the right to claim rights’ (Isin, 2009, as cited in Stiks, 2017, p. 28). This strengthens my hypothesis that the AC methodology I undertake to analyse the anti-CAA protests is capable of enhancing and reformulating women’s agency and their transformative role as citizens and presents an alternative to the binary of citizenship approaches prevalent in Indian societal and academic circles, that is, the school of cultural diversity/pluralism and cultural nationalism.

Engin Isin promulgated that to categorise an act as an AC, it must be investigated using the following three parameters (Isin, 2008, pp. 38-40):

Interpreting acts through their grounds and consequences which includes subjects/citizens becoming activist citizens through scenes created. Applying this principle, we can interpret the anti-CAA protests as ACs where the minority community women acted as activist citizens, refusing to follow the script of the state. In this case, the CAA law which they consider as exclusionary as they fear that it will be used to delegitimise Muslim citizenship. It can be viewed as women appealing to the ‘political’ as well as the ‘social conscious’ of Indian society. Asserting the importance of the ‘social’ in acts, the AC approach takes a cue from Alexis de Tocqueville who understood ‘social’ as integral to political democracy rooted in a claim about ‘the being of being human’ (Singer, 2008, p. 97). Tocqueville associated the ‘social’ with liberty and equality (Singer, 2008, p. 100). Reiterating the relation between the ‘social’ and ‘political’, he remarked that democratic societies are fully capable of moving in contradictory positions, that is, either towards democratic despotism or democratic republicanism. To avoid political democracy from becoming despotic, the social character of democracy plays a significant part (Tocqueville, as referred to by Singer, 2008, pp. 97-98). Applying this understanding of social, we can advance that the Shaheen Bagh women were appealing to the ‘social’ characteristic of democracy to have a dialogue and conversation not just as women or Muslims, but equally as ‘citizens’ of India. They invited politicians, leaders and other citizens to come and share an open communication with them. In this respect, they were quite successful in garnering support from individuals and groups irrespective of their religious, caste and gender status who disassociated themselves from a coercive religious state by voicing their concerns. Hence, the anti-CAA is an act invoking the original character of the Indian Constitution, the result of debate, discussions and deliberation where the framers abstained from making religion the basis of citizenship even in the face of the Partition of India on religious grounds.

Acts of citizenship recognise that acts produce actors that become answerable to justice against injustice: The Shaheen Bagh protest was an act against a probable unjust law, and the protesters were distressed that it may be (ab)used to question their citizenship status and integrity to India––the country of their birth and belonging. ACs are not necessarily founded in law or in responsibility. In fact, for ACs to be acts at all they must call the law into question. The activist citizens enact themselves through acts with the aim to affect law that recognises or misrecognises them (Isin, 2008, p. 38). Resisting a state’s action, which has deviated from its commitment to democratic-constitutional values, by means of protests, gatherings of citizens in public spaces or peaceful demonstrations is not against citizenship; rather, it is a dynamic measure in reclaiming public spaces. There is another logic of struggles for rights in cases where once taken-for-granted rights are curtailed or withdrawn from citizens (Mackert & Turner, 2017, p. 2).

The genealogy of peaceful protests is rooted in the Gandhian conceptualisation of ‘ahimsa’ (non-violence) which coupled with satyagraha led to India becoming politically independent from British colonialism. The anti-CAA protesters followed an Indian path of peace and non-violence (ahimsa). Non-violence was the ‘soul force’ of the protest. Echoing the Gandhian belief that non-violence is ‘mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man’, a matchless method to fight against injustice and exploitation (Mathai, 2012, p. 83), the women of Shaheen Bagh displayed the courage and capability in stepping out of their homes against the CAA. Here it is imperative to underline that ‘resisting, not surrendering to injustice remains at the core of Gandhi’s ahimsa’ (Chisti, 2021).

The act of peaceful protest for these women was a reaction to the unconstitutional action by the state. The women argued that making religion the ground to confer citizenship goes against the constitutional spirit of secularism granted by the Indian Constitution. In doing so, they were exhibiting ‘constitutional patriotism’ (Habermas, 1992; Muller, 2009). Questioning the ability of ‘constitutional patriotism’ to challenge the hate generated by majoritarian nationalism in India, Akash Singh Rathore and Ashis Nandy suggest the need towards the vernacularisation of constitutional terms and the use of sadbhavana (goodwill) and ahimsa (Rathore & Nandy, 2020). The Shaheen Bagh protest against an unjust law was a vision of ‘ahimsa in practice’. So contagious was their spirit of peaceful agitation that similar protests sprouted across many places in India. These women are an example of law-abiding citizens: resilient and peaceful. They followed Covid protocols and social distancing during the onset of the pandemic and even organised themselves into smaller groups when the state curbed large gatherings. They further placed their shoes as at the venue of the protest a symbolic representation of their protest when the nationwide lockdown was declared (Viswanath, 2020).

3. Acts of citizenship do not need to be founded in law or executed and enacted in the name of law: AC identifies actors as claimants, asserting their rights and obligations as beings, redefining, reclaiming and correcting falsified definitions which may have been imposed on them. The women protested the allegations levied on them and their community by the central government and its fringe elements. It was also an act of citizenship opposing the stereotypes of Muslim women as conservative and passive. The women turned such stereotypes on their face by confronting the mighty Indian state.

The essence of AC is that they express the need to be heard (Reinach, 1983). The anti-CAA protest reflected on the tolerance quotient that has reached a point of saturation, a point of rupture, ‘stirring the soul’ towards openness, dispelling the old habits of compliance and obedience to embrace new insights and ideas by resisting exclusionary politics (Bergson, 1977, pp. 43–46 as referred to by White, 2008, p. 53). The discriminatory CAA triggered the creativeness in Muslim women to unify and demonstrate their opposition against a majoritarian state trying to demolish the very structure on which a democratic India’s societal culture was built (Kymlicka, 1995). It is these ‘activist-creative citizens’ who through their protest mirrored the mutation of Indian democracy into ‘democratic-despotism’ (Mansfield, 2010, p. 57).

The Anti-CAA Protests: Democratic Redemption of Citizenship Through Resistance, Participation and Performance

Resistance

The Shaheen Bagh protests have brought the spirit of citizenship as resistance to the fore, as an element of liberal engagement––a more powerful means of ‘staging-exclusion’ (Mayhall, 2003, p. 46). Exclusion in this case is extremely intense, involving losing one’s being, belonging––a sense of dispossession, putting the security and safety of the present and future generations at risk. It is this sense of vulnerability that gives individuals and communities the courage to ‘gather and resist state-power while taking [a] risk with their bodies and exposing themselves to possible harm, as they have been living in precarious condition of vulnerabilities preceding the one that they encounter on the street’ (Butler et al., 2016, p. 12). The women of Shaheen Bagh need to be seen as resisting the state’s high-handedness while conducting themselves as ‘citizens’. A parallel can be drawn with the ‘suffragette assertion of resistance, a right drawn upon the historically based right of the people to resist a corrupt and tyrannical government … wherein women were deemed fit for citizenship because they acted as citizens who would not be denied their place in the political nation’, defining citizenship as an active practice (Mayhall, 2003, p. 40).

Historically, citizenship has been about people’s struggles for rights and their resistance to illegitimate and repressive authorities, unbearable economic living conditions or discrimination regarding religion, ethnic belonging and sexual orientation (Mackert & Turner, 2017, p. 2). Becoming effective citizens at times demands going beyond ‘formal citizen status’, raising the following question: what can poor and deprived citizens do when exposed to violence and mob-lynching? They have little or no power to make claims against the state authorities meant to protect them (Mackert & Turner, 2017, p. 2). Muslims, the largest minority community in India, have been marginalised, maligned and even murdered in rising incidents of communal riots and mob-lynching. The CAA—a law which can be used to strip them of their citizenship rendering them stateless and homeless—had a TINA² (There is No Alternative) effect on Muslim women. Hence, the extreme vulnerability of the Muslim community took the form of non-violent assembly as resistance. Increased vulnerabilities often are the trigger for effective mobilisation, to create and open the platform for political expression (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013, pp. 13–14). The resistance of these women stems from their total inability to intervene in the decisions made by the misuse of governmental power, leaving resistance the only possible response by ordinary citizens (Walzer, 1960).

Participation

The participation by citizens creates a ‘public realm’––the polis (Arendt, 1998). Participation is an important condition of citizenship. As Gunsteren stated that political participation, judgement by one’s peers, socio-economic security, freedom of organisation and knowledge are integral to citizenship (Van Gunsteren, 1998, pp. 732–733). The issue and outcomes of citizen action (participation) must be checked and controlled by a continuous process of debate between citizens and not just by the state machinery like the police or army. The public sphere is also the social sphere, a free space of interaction between citizens. Participatory conversations among citizens are fundamental to democracy’s health and helps build solidarities.

Borrowing from Tocqueville’s work Democracy in America (1961) and Journey to America (1962), Peter Singer differentiated between two kinds of democracies based on citizen action: township and undomesticated. In a township democracy, citizens are ‘tempered’ to enact in a specific condition of diversity, inculcating a sense of place and a public spirit tied to the place. Here, citizens are domesticated in the institutional and legal procedures and continuously negotiate with neighbours. On the other extreme, undomesticated democracy, which Singer calls ‘democratic sauvage’, is characterised by impatience and indifference to the public spirit without any particularistic location (Singer, 2008, p. 99). Here mobility is the defining character. We can safely place the anti-CAA protesters as practising democracy in accordance with the first category, reiterating the need for an effective equal interaction and communication between members keeping with the contextuality and understanding of democracy in relation to the socio-cultural location where it is practised, that is, India which has always showcased itself as a believer in unity in diversity. Participation by citizens in the polity is accepted as intrinsic to democracy by most scholars where a polis is defined as: ‘The organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, the space of appearance where I appear to others as others appear to me’ (Arendt, 1998 as referred to by Bonner, 2008, p. 139).

Making a distinction between citizenship as status (legal) and quality (social-political), Stiks confirmed that ‘quality of citizenship’ can be experienced only through the political participation of citizens in (re)defining and managing their political community public space. Participation is crucial to the development of a sense of membership in a community––a shared political identity (Stiks, 2017, p. 28). Participation then is essential to reclaim the ‘spaces of citizenship’ in multi-nation states when citizens confront themselves with difference, exclusion and diversity––both from the outside and from within (Tamayo, 2019, p. 127). It is through participation they create a space of struggle which furthers a way to define ‘spaces of citizenship’. Here, ‘spaces’ is understood as an immediate place for the exercise of citizen rights––a ‘citizens’ space’. A citizens’ space is a political realm created by citizens through the re-appropriation of public space––the polis (to use Arendt’s terminology taken from Aristotle) where citizens interact and communicate freely. It is as much political as symbolic––a ‘relational space’ which acquires new meanings for the population where different social groups express themselves differently––a space of communicational flow (Tamayo, 2019, pp. 129–130). Such an understanding of citizenship rescues it from being fixated by the state converting it into an ever-evolving process.

Participation as citizens is then not narrowly understood as voting, paying taxes and obeying laws of the state, but highlights on duties of a citizen to endure a state from becoming authoritarian and tyrannical, overwhelmed with the sense of absolute power. AC is a step forward in examining the role of citizens in the day-to-day mechanisms of the state and keeping a check on state power, reminding its leaders their duty towards the citizens.

Performance

The Shaheen Bagh protests can be analysed as the performance of the ‘political’ by citizens wherein they act in accordance with the identity imposed on them or that they create for themselves. As Balibar rightly pointed out:

Identities shape the sense of belonging by presenting the “condition of conditions’ the other scene, which often determines how politics is engineered, presenting the ground for protests. Such political acts are not only to be viewed as transformative and emancipatory, but as acts demanding ‘civility’. (Balibar, 2002, p. 2)

His argument rests on equal liberty as unconditional, where the ‘autonomy of politics’ depends on the ‘autonomy of ‘citizenship’, as the two are unconceivable without the other. He stated that:

… politics is an unfolding of the self-determination of the people [demos] (the body of citizens ‘free and equal in rights’), which constitutes itself in and by the establishment of its rights. Whatever the conditions in which individuals. communities or collectives capable of recognizing each other as political subjects find themselves, and whatever rule causes of the restrictions imposed on liberty and equality, those restrictions are in themselves illegitimate: their abolition may be demanded immediately. (Balibar, 2002, p. 3)

The theory of performativity draws our attention to the context of claim-making and to the ‘specific codes or institutionalised practices that make possible a performative utterance’ (Butler, 1997). Citizenship claims are not discovered nor given by human nature; rather, they are created through the process of civic engagement, debate and deliberation. They require the citizens to ‘act in concert’ to constitute their meaning and ensure their preservation and power (Zivi, 2005). A performative perspective on citizenship shifts the discussion over who is entitled to rights (Hildebrandt, 2019, p. 30), not from a narrow statist perspective, but from advancing citizenship as a negotiated and dynamic relationship (Tully, 2014, p. 5). Building on his own work on ‘acts of citizenship’, Isin defined performativity as an attempt to understand the ways in which people inhabit and transform specific subjectivities and how these subjectivities follow from acts, made possible under certain material and symbolic conditions (Isin, 2019, p. 47). First, this requires recognition that citizenship that exists on paper is an expression of inert or passive rights; yet citizenship rights (and responsibilities) are brought into being only when performed. It is not only that rights that have been won through long and hard social struggles (such as the freedom of speech or social insurance) would disappear if not performed, but also that such struggles require performing rights that may not exist (for example, sexual rights, animal rights and ecological rights). Second, since citizenship is brought into being by performing it, non-citizens can also perform citizenship. These two performative aspects of citizenship have the capability of examining tensions or gaps between different articulations of citizenship in the public discourse (Isin, 2019, p. 51).

The AC methodology theorises ‘acts’ as comprising three entities: acts, actors and actions. An act is neither a practice nor a conduct nor an action, and yet it implies all three or perhaps makes all these possible (Isin, 2008, p. 37). Seen from such a lens, the anti- CAA protest was a spontaneous act by women who did not strategise or plan the protest, rather acted as the need to be heard overcame all other logic. To be heard then, they performed a peaceful dissent as an act of citizenship. Supporting the anti-CAA protests as the performance of ‘constitutional patriotism’ and questioning the Indian government’s narrative on ‘anti-nationals’, which Raghu Kesavan puts aptly as, ‘When bullets are aimed at the Constitution, who’s the patriot and who’s the traitor?’ (Kesavan, 2020).

Mary McThomas probes that instead of understanding obligation as what citizens owe to the state, we should flip it and ask ‘what the state owes to citizens’? Championing the cause of a performance-based conception of citizenship, she has further asserted that such a conception ‘focuses on the carrying out of civic duties instead of nation-state authorization, reflecting our current situation and recognizes obligations we have to those living among us’ (McThomas, 2016, p. 2). This understanding of performative citizenship comes very close to the Shaheen Bagh protest. The movement has been termed as the ‘totem of resistance’, taking forward the unfinished task of the Indian Republic towards the equality and dignity that has been promised to all citizens under the Constitution (Padmanabhan, 2020).

Women as Agents of Change in the Citizenship Debates in India

Nationalism and state-making in India were influenced by European modernity, essentially British colonialism. To fight against colonialism, Indian leaders felt the need to imagine India as a nation. Towards this task, indigenous historians started writing history from the perspective of Indians against British scholarship. In their zeal to write an indigenous history, most of them depicted the Vedic age as the golden period, with Vedic women as the ideal prototype (Chakravarti, 1992, p. 51). This rendition penetrated in the sphere of ‘reforms for women’, which essentially transgressed into ‘reform of women’, in terms of their behaviour, mannerisms and interests. It may seem contradictory to put imperial and nationalistic together, but this is because the nationalist construction of ‘how [a] woman in India should be’ was entrenched with patriarchy similar to the White man’s dual burden: of educating the unenlightened ‘coloured’ natives and of emancipating native women (Sengupta, 2018, pp. 93–94). Post-colonial India continued with the gendered biases as Independence was the replacement ‘of a certain “species” of men by another “species” of men—an absolute substitution’ (Fanon, 1963, p. 35). Consequently, in discussions related to citizenship in Independent India, women were mostly overshadowed behind a male figure, be it father, husband or son. It is interesting to note that during the first general elections held in 1952, the names of nearly 2.8 million women were deleted from the electoral rolls failing to disclose their individual names and using ‘wife of’ so and so. In many cases, husbands did not allow their wives to be enrolled as voters (Report of the First General Election in India as referred in Shani, 2017, pp. 47–48).

The two major schools of citizenship in India, that is, the one celebrating cultural pluralism and the other based on cultural nationalism, treat women as supplementary to their male counterparts where the duties assigned to women as citizens are decided by men, not chosen by women. For instance, India’s Partition and the state actions thereof diminished women’s agency where adult women were treated as having no agency to make an ‘independent rational choice’, whereas a male of 16 years of age was considered capable of choosing whether to stay in India or Pakistan (The Abducted Persons [Recovery and Restoration] Act 1949). Thereafter, the Hindu Code Bill, the personal laws, labour laws, all discriminated against women (Butalia, 1993; Menon & Bhasin, 1993; Das, 1997; Jayal, 2013; Kidwai, 1974; Menon, 1998; Rajan, 2003; Roy, 2010). Such legal measures led to intense patriarchal patronisation behind the veil of plurality. According to this approach, citizenship rests on either an abstract-universal notion which falls short of recognising the political relevance of gender and excludes women in the name of gender neutrality (Prokhovnik, 1998, p. 84), and even if it acknowledges women as citizens, their roles are restricted, subordinated and decided by men (Yuval-Davis, 1989; Yuval-Davis & Anthias, 2008; Vogel, 1996). On the other hand, cultural nationalism in India is premised on the dualism between the Hindu (self) and the Muslim (other) which in turn forms the basis of its conceptualisation of citizenship. It utilises the protection of Hindu women’s honour as justification for hatred towards Muslim men, considered as a threat and outsiders. Claims have been made by the Hindu right wing asserting love jihad, that is, Muslim men targetting Hindu women in the name of love and thereby converting them into Muslims (Gupta, 2009). Recently some states in India have passed laws to this effect which activists and scholars claim control women’s agency by attacking their individuality and autonomy (Apoorvanand, 2021; Datta, 2020; Setalvad, 2020; Shamsad, 2020).

The AC as discussed above presents a refreshingly new approach to women’s agency in shaping citizenship in India by breaking the imagery of women either as victims or goddesses, never fully recognised as individuals capable of making a free choice. The anti-CAA protest of Shaheen Bagh can also be seen as women, especially Muslim women, exercising their agency equally against the state as well as religious patriarchy. This raises further research avenues: has the participation in the anti-CAA protests changed their perception within their community? Have Muslim men recognised Muslim women’s agency as activist citizens capable of leading such a protest completely peacefully on the face of atrocities? Can it also be seen as Muslim men’s acceptance and endorsement of Muslim women’s assertion of their freedom and equality? Answering such introspection calls for further investigation. Though Shaheen Bagh has been described as ‘miraculous’ where Muslim women demonstrated the constitutional spirit of secularism against both the Hindu fundamentalist and the obscurantist ulemas. Freeing ‘the concept of secularism out of the rarefied elite portals of parliament and the Supreme Court, from legalistic and political fetters to the streets, where it now mingles joyously with the ordinary citizens’ (Shukla, 2020).

Bringing citizenship as a daily practice puts the onus of checking the government’s unjust coercion and abuse of political power on its activist citizens. The anti-CAA protests celebrated citizenship as regular conversation among citizens, strengthening social bonding, focussing on civility and solidarity as equal members of a civil-political society. These ACs led by women demonstrated their loyalty towards the Indian Constitution, making them ‘constitutional patriots’ and conscientious citizens of India (Habermas, 1992; Muller, 2009) who came out to rescue India from a further democratic downslide (Bermeo, 2016; Huntington, 1991; Waseem, 2002).

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the anonymous reviewers of the journal for their astute comments. The author would like to acknowledge Professor Niraja G. Jayal and Professor Dwaipayan Bhattacharya for reading and commenting on an earlier draft and Ms Aparna Sengupta for making available important literature. The present article has enormously gained from all the insights. The usual disclaimer applies.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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