How Dissent Dies

Updated at 9:05 a.m. ET on June 17, 2021.

For most of her life, Gulfisha Fatima showed little interest in anything beyond academics. By late 2019, the 27-year-old Delhi resident had finished her M.B.A. and was getting ready to apply for a Ph.D. Even as a student, she stayed away from activism. “Her world,” her brother Aqil told me, “revolved around books.”

That began to change in December of that year. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government had proposed a bill that would alter the country’s citizenship law, effectively barring Muslim refugees in neighboring countries from seeking asylum in India. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) sparked outrage among critics, civil libertarians, and minority-rights activists, who worried that Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would use the potential law to erode the status of India’s 200 million Muslims as well. Before long, women in Muslim-majority northeast Delhi began staging street protests and sit-ins, demonstrations that over the following weeks would balloon to include tens of thousands nationwide.

Fatima did not immediately join the protests in Seelampur, the Delhi neighborhood where her family lived. But as the month progressed, Aqil said, she began to drop in. “Gulfisha would sit at the site for a bit, see what was going on,” he told me. She watched as protesters drew graffiti, raised placards,