CAA - India's Streets Say No

It’s like a dam had burst: as if a reservoir of anger filling up silently had suddenly breached its bounds.

- Bhavna Vij-Aurora And Preetha Nair

The unrest unleashed across India over the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, was on a scale and of an intensity, the Narendra Modi government probably did not anticipate. The prime minister and home minister Amit Shah—forced to come out and defend the act—reiterated that it’s not meant to “take away the citizenship of any Indian”. But the zones of agreement seemed to be shrinking all around. The world media focused unflattering attention, allies dithered or issued caveats, former allies outed caustic taunts, the Opposition did what the Opposition does…but the real sounds came from the streets. They were resounding with something close to a popular veto. It had spilled far beyond the usual enclaves of dissent: city after city saw rallies, and protest calendars filled social media. Young, articulate voices spoke their mind to TV cameras and even IITs, IIMs, and private universities joined others in expressing solidarity as a much-video graphed police crackdown turned some campuses into warzones.

The students of Jamia Millia Islamia became the face of the anti-CAA protest, offering some iconic visuals and sound-bytes amid lathi charges and tear-gas fumes. Also Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). As police action produced stories of severed limbs and lost eyes, it’s the cops who ended up being widely accused of firing on students, arson, vandalism, and bias. With two minority education institutions in focus, whether polarisation was part of the ruling BJP’s plan or not, some debate turned around to whether this was only a ‘Muslim protest’. But one salutary aspect to it was a strong pushback by students, civil society activists, and even politicians all around to that idea. The anti-CAA mood seems to have created solidarity among students and citizenry, cutting across region and religion, providing them with an outlet to express their accumulated grievances against the government.