Places of Protest

In the winter of 2019–20, on the eve of the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Indian streets erupted in mass protest against an amendment to national citizenship law that, for the first time in Indian history, made religion a criterion in the granting of citizenship. The 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) created a fast track toward Indian citizenship, but on a religiously differentiated basis that excluded Muslims from eligibility. While, formally speaking, the CAA professed to be a mechanism for the extension of citizenship rights—providing a path to national belonging for religious minorities fleeing persecution in neighboring countries1—it set off a firestorm not only because the introduction of the religious criterion for citizenship was unprecedented (and possibly unconstitutional) but also because of fears that the new law would be used as part of a constellation of arcane policy tools which together would provide a means to strip Muslim Indians of citizenship. The CAA was passed in conjunction with a move to carry out an exercise to update India’s National Population Registry (NPR)—a comprehensive database of every “usual resident”2 of India (both citizens and noncitizens) compiled by means of a nationwide door-to-door survey.3 While on the surface the updating of the NPR appeared no cause for concern (survey respondents would be interviewed regarding details of their identity—their place and date of birth, the place and date of birth of their parents, etc.—but would not be required to produce documents), concerns arose about the potential use of the NPR in conjunction with the government’s recently announced plans to create, for the very first time, a National Registry of Citizens (NRC). So while the NPR survey itself would not verify the citizenship status of “usual residents,” the information compiled in the NPR would subsequently be used as the basis by which local-level citizenship registry officials would compile the NRC. Using their discretionary power and subjective interpretation of the NPR survey data, local officials would be tasked with compiling lists of “doubtful citizens”—people whose answers to the NPR survey raised “doubts” about their citizenship, and who would then be required to produce documentary proof of their formal citizenship status—paper documents, needless to say, that the Indian state has never made a point of providing to its citizenry. The whole exercise would effectively call into question the citizenship status of every India resident, shifting the burden of proving citizenship to individuals. Those whose verbal testimonials raise unspecified “doubts” would have their suffrage rights immediately revoked and would be required to provide some unspecified paper proof of citizenship; those failing to provide such documentary evidence could face internment and eventual expulsion from India.

Now, given the Indian state’s famously patchy, contradictory, and exclusionary regime of documentary practices,4 the NPR-NRC combination had the potential to raise “doubts” about the citizenship of untold numbers of people—with women, gender minorities, Dalits, Adivasis, and Muslims anticipated to be overrepresented among those facing this prospective stripping of rights: people who were born at home rather than in a hospital, and who thus don’t have documentary certification that they exist at all (a common situation in rural communities of Dalits and Adivasis); landless laborers who often have not completed enough education to earn a “school-leaving” certificate; linguistic minorities whose names are regularly misspelled by state officers when transliterated into Marathi, Hindi, or English for documentary purposes;5 people whose names and places of residence change after marriage (common among women and gender minorities); those who don’t own property or hold documentary proof of property ownership; seasonal migrants living on construction sites or other places of employment in cities like Mumbai—and so on. It was in this context that, with untold numbers having their citizenship rights called into question, the new CAA introduced a fast track toward officiality. But it did so on religiously discriminatory basis that excluded Muslims, who (as of 2023) comprised around 14.2 percent (an estimated 197 million people) of India’s population.6 In the weeks and months following the ratifying of the bill into law, people poured into city streets (not only in India but worldwide) to demand the repeal of what came to be known as the kaala kanoon (black law). Protesters took to reading aloud the preamble to the Indian Constitution (of whose protections of Indians’ Fundamental Right to equality the CAA was argued to be in violation),7 pledging noncooperation with the NPR exercise and condemning the police violence being unleashed against university students protesting the new law on campuses in BJP-governed states across North India.

Apart from the staggering scale and energy of the anti-CAA protests, what immediately caught my attention was their apparent disavowal of the forms of political subjectivity to which I had become accustomed, and to which previous chapters of this book have attended: the carefully crafted, relational chains of sociomaterial efficacy and the discerning audience-publics who at once enact and assess them. The protests instead presided over the articulation of a collective political subject—“We the People of India”—whose infrastructures of articulation were both more central and more diffuse. Bursting out of intimate intersections and known neighborhoods, the anti-CAA protests assembled crowds of strangers into the city’s vast open spaces, from where image-representations were produced and circulated far beyond the familiar friends’ groups and accustomed circuits.