Making it count

Women of Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh lead a silent revolution against the CAA, the NRC, and the NPP, braving cold weather conditions.

- ZIYA US SALAM

TO be a Muslim is to be an orphan or the “other” in new India. Since 2014, there have been systematic attacks on the identity of the country’s largest minority community. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has denied its members the ticket to contest elections, and in States such as Karnataka, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh, the name of every sixth Muslim has been deleted from the electoral rolls. Add to this the Centre’s decision to turn Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority State, into a Union Territory, and the picture of marginalisation of Muslims is complete. Since 2014, the community has been silenced. Muslims have been browbeaten into accepting the Muslim women'sRepresentation of marriage act and even the renaming of cities that had names associated with the community. But now there is resistance, not by some dubious cleric or shrewd politician trying to fish in troubled waters but by veiled Muslim women.

The women—homemakers, school-teachers, college lecturers and professors, the old and the young— have emerged as the strongest rallying point in the protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the National Population Register (NPR). The site of their protest, Shaheen Bagh in south-east Delhi, has attracted international attention. The venue is just a few minutes’ walk from Jamia Millia Islamia, the Central University campus that saw the Delhi Police force their way into the library, hostel and other areas and fire tear gas shells on December 15, 2019. With their peaceful and relentless dharna, the women have given hope and courage to the men to carry on the fight another day.