Thursday 26 December 2019

The Women of Shaheen Bagh: Changing the Narrative




Every repressive, authoritarian regime targets some vulnerable minority as the primary means for its violent control of the entire population. The communal regime of Modi-Shah is no exception. There is no doubt that the primary goal of this regime is to divide the Indian population by attacking the vulnerable muslim community so that the resistance to its authoritarian control does not take a unified form. The attack on the people of Kashmir and the plans to implement the CAA-NRC-NRP schemes are the most recent culmination of the diabolical plan to essentially relegate the entire muslim population as pariahs of the Indian state.

Just as we expect the students, farmers, working people, and women to take to the streets when they are attacked as a community, it is natural to expect the muslim population of nearly 220 million people to fill the streets in India as a mark of protest to the global attack on them. Setting aside the protests against CAA-NRC in Assam, it is no wonder that the first brave public protests emanated from the muslim-dominated campuses of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and Jamia Milia University (Jamia) in Delhi.

Somewhat unexpectedly for the regime, the protests by AMU and Jamia students spread rapidly to other non-muslim campuses and communities across the country in Kolkata, Bangaluru, Hyderabad and others. The spread of protests showed that the people of the country finally understood that, although the muslims are the primary target of the regime, the regime basically plans to disenfranchise vast sections of the people, especially the poor and the subaltern, to stall any resistance to its abysmal economic failure and to prepare the way for a fundamentalist Hindu Rashtra.

The striking feature of the current protests is that the muslim population has finally gathered the courage to emerge from its justified sense of diffidence and isolation to fearlessly launch community-wide public protests. Sensing great setback to its plans, the regime quickly adopted the tested technique of portraying any protest by muslims as laced with terrorist violence. To implement it, they used the other tested technique of first provoking peaceful mass protests with aggressive policeaction. Then they used planted agent provocateurs to attack the police with stones etc. so that the police can now open fire, carry out brutal lathi-charge, and engage in large-scale arrests to (a) break the protests with violence and (b) portray the protests as Islamic terrorism.

This is essentially what happened in the attack on students of Jamia and AMU and the massive attack on vast assembly of protesters from Jama Masjid to Daryagunj. The strategy was used widely in UP where the murderous police of the Bisht govt. attacked demonstrators in the ‘sensitive’ muslim-dominated areas of Lucknow, Kanpur, Meerut etc. to provoke large-scale violence and murder. The mixing of violence with muslim-dominated protests changed the earlier narrative of peaceful protests by citizens such that the media was compelled to shift the attention to ‘violence’ and the form of protests associated by it. Amit Shah thought that the situation was falling under control.

Away from this familiar muslim-terrorism-police action scenario carefully nurtured by the Sangh for the large few decades, a large group of women and children from the backward, non-elite areas of Delhi simply occupied a public area, constructed tents, arranged for food and shelter in the biting cold, and sat down on 15 December to an indefinite day-night vigil against the draconian acts. Finally, a wonderful group of women, mostly housewives and low-level workers from the subaltern muslim community, defied the image of the Islamic terrorist and reasserted their citizenship with the rest of the subaltern masses that later gathered on the steps and the streets of the Jama Masjid. Finally, a decisive section of the fearless muslim community sat down to stand up to the pluralist heritage of India.

The ground-breaking resistance at Shaheen Bagh now forms the core of the resistance against the draconian acts. The Modi-Shah regime dare not come near to this wonderful gathering of ‘ordinary’ citizens. The rest of the India, especially elite non-muslim women’s organizations and the secular political parties must now form rings of solidarity around this core group in ever-expanding circles until it surrounds the citadel of power. Hopefully, the ‘housewives’ of the country are listening, watching and preparing to organise hundreds of Shaheen Baghs across the country for the rest of India to join in. The thugs of the state dare not approach these gatherings of subaltern power. Let us take it from there.

Shaheen Bagh is not just an endearing example. It is a change in the narrative for constructing a just India. Perhaps the world.