LIBERATION SQUARE

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REFLECTING ON THE PRESENT ASCENDANCE of Hindu nationalism in Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point, the historian Gyan Prakash wrote:

There is nothing in India like the organic resistance in the United States to Trump’s racist agenda. The reasons are not far to seek. No history of civil rights battles stands behind the granting of equal rights to minorities in postcolonial India.

Instead, it was the nationalist struggle against British rule that produced a secular and democratic constitution. But with nationalism now hijacked by Hindu majoritarianism, the defense of minority rights can summon no history of popular struggle on its behalf.

One evening in December 2019, roughly a year after the publication of Prakash’s book, I accompanied a friend to Shaheen Bagh, a Delhi neighbourhood neither of us had visited before. A tent of yellow tarpaulin had been erected on a busy thoroughfare; under it, women sat on battered dhurries in the midst of one of the coldest Delhi winters on record. A wire string separated the women from the men present, who looked beyond them towards a rickety stage where speakers, from both the neighbourhood and far beyond, kept up the protesters’ morale. No more than two hundred people were present. Over the next three months, as I became a regular visitor to Shaheen Bagh, I saw first-hand its exponential and barely believable growth, as a modest protest on a south-Delhi street grew into a national movement and a symbol of the struggle for constitutional rights.

Two recent books, both by veteran journalists, attempt to look back at how Shaheen Bagh came to embody the spirit of the cataclysmic events of the winter of 2019 and the year beyond, when the country was roiled by the largest protests seen in decades after the passage of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. Shaheen Bagh and the Idea of India, a collection of reportage and essays edited by Seema Mustafa, combines contributions from both participants and observers of Shaheen Bagh, taking in the perspectives of activists and scholars, journalists and ordinary citizens. Shaheen Bagh: From a Protest to a Movement, co-authored by Ziya Us Salam and Uzma Ausaf, is a panoramic account of Shaheen Bagh and its myriad aspects: the role of women in the vanguard, the simultaneous assertion of Muslim and Indian identity, and the blossoming of the Shaheen Bagh model across the country. Though sometimes taking an unabashedly romanticised view of Shaheen Bagh, the book by Ausaf and Salam, who are married, still serves as a useful compendium for a historic protest that will almost certainly inspire more literature in the future.

THE DECISION that led the women of Shaheen Bagh to squat on the busy thoroughfare adjoining their neighbourhood can be traced directly to a series of accelerating moves aimed at Muslims in Narendra Modi’s second term as prime minister. Though Modi’s first term had been marked by lynchings and a climate of aggravating hostility towards Muslims, for many in the community, his thumping re-election in 2019 was followed by a clear and pronounced escalation.

In July 2019, the government criminalised triple talaq without consulting Muslim women or taking the wider Muslim community into confidence. In August came the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir. This did not directly affect Indian Muslims as a whole, but the brutal clampdown in the valley was a useful tool for the Hindu Right, allowing it to conflate the recalcitrant Kashmiri populace with the country’s Muslims and maliciously paint them all in the same hue, as unreconstructed secessionists. Finally, a month prior to the women’s occupation of Shaheen Bagh, the Supreme Court, in one of the most shameful and bizarre judgments in the history of Indian jurisprudence, awarded the site of the Babri Masjid to Hindu organisations for the construction of a Ram temple; in effect rewarding the mob that had destroyed the mosque in 1992 for what the court itself admitted was an illegal act of demolition.

A menacing addition to the mix was the rising prominence of Amit Shah, whose rhetoric during Modi’s re-election campaign and subsequent belligerence as the home minister had filled Muslims with a mixture of foreboding and alarm. During the 2019 election, Shah, as the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, had boasted of eliminating “termites” and “infiltrators” from the country. In the campaign, he had repeatedly spoken of extending the National Register of Citizens across the country. At a rally in April 2019, in a video that would be recalled by protesters repeatedly, Shah said, “Chronology samajh lijiye. Pehle CAB aane jaa raha hai, CAB aane ke baad, NRC aayega”— Please understand the chronology. The CAB will come first, followed by the NRC. Shah went on at some length about how the two acronyms were connected. It was his lucid explanation of the malign motives behind these twin pincers of legislation that, in large measure, brought home to India’s Muslims the prospect of arbitrary detention and even statelessness.

In The Death of Democracy, an account of the fall of the Weimar Republic and Hitler’s rise to power, the historian Benjamin Carter Hett described the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933. “Soon enough,” he wrote, “it began to become clear what it meant to have Hitler as chancellor and Hermann Göring in charge of the Prussian police … there came a steady drumbeat of legal and police measures aimed at anyone who might be a Nazi opponent: Communists, Social Democrats, liberals, pacifists, intellectuals and journalists, artists, human rights activists—and their press.”

For the Nazis, Hett continued, “the political left and other determined opponents had to be driven from any vestige of power and