Politics

“A Nonpartisan Critique”

Curious about the hide-and-seek role played by Mumbai’s political leadership in the December 19, 2019, August Kranti demonstration (on the one hand explicitly involved; on the other hand uncharacteristically avoiding the limelight), I tracked down the person identified by Mumbai’s news media as the chief organizer of the event: Feroze Mithiborewala.7 I rang him up, introduced myself as a research scholar, and asked whether he might have time to tell me the backstory of the gathering. Feroze happily obliged, and we met the next morning at the home he shares with his mother in the western suburbs.

The third-floor flat is bright and breezy, sparsely furnished but with a healthy smattering of family photos adorning the walls. Feroze and I sit near the window, where we avail ourselves of a breeze carrying morning freshness along with the honking and “choke” of rush-hour traffic, which deposits a fine film of dust on my notebook.8 Feroze looks to be in his mid-fifties, with a thick mustache, a mop of jet-black hair, and a ready smile that, by Feroze’s own reckoning, lends him an uncanny resemblance to Bombay film actor Anil Kapoor. Feroze starts midsentence—as, I soon learn, is his way—telling me about the planning meeting yesterday among the members of his newly convened group Hum Bharat ke Log. He rattles off the series of programs Hum Bharat ke Log has planned for the coming weeks: for instance, January 14 is Sankrant—the beloved all-India kite-flying festival announcing the end of winter with the northward movement of the sun in the Hindu calendar—and Hum Bharat ke Log will be holding an anti-CAA kite fight on Juhu beach.

I ask him to please back up and to tell me a bit more about the origins of Hum Bharat ke Log. “It’s a national-level platform,” he tells me, convened during the heady days when the Citizenship Amendment Bill was being discussed in the Indian Parliament—which was only a few weeks ago but feels like longer. It was a Sunday, Feroze recalled, and he had been listening to a rousing speech posted on Facebook by activist-academic Yogendra Yadav. “For the first time in Indian history,” Yadav had pointed out, “citizenship will be linked to religion.” Moved by the scholar’s speech—both its liberal-secularist sentiments and its erudition—Feroze had rung up Yadav. “He took my call,” Feroze tells me with a smile, “and he told me about a protest demonstration they were planning in Delhi on the nineteenth [of December]. So, I said let’s make it a national call.”

Later that same day, a “National Appeal” written in English—India’s lingua franca of the aspirational and educated—was circulated through activist networks all over India under the banner “Hum Sab Nagrik [We All Citizens]: National Campaign for United Citizenship.” While inviting people to “come together under a common banner,” it was asserted that the campaign would maintain “a fluid existence,” without any formal organizational structure. “We shall not invite any community based organisations or major political parties to endorse this call,” the notice read, “though any citizen would be free to join.” The message called for “a coordinated nation-wide protest on 19th December across many cities,”9 and that “in each of these [demonstrations] we should take an oath (to be drafted) and give a memorandum (to be drafted) addressed to the President of India and ask the state legislature to pass a resolution against CAB.” In Mumbai, the circulated call was accompanied by an invitation to attend a “preparatory meeting” to plan the event, which was initially envisioned to be held not on August Kranti (that would come later) but rather on the public beach at Girgaum Chowpatty (see Map 4 in Interlude III). The message concludes with details of the planning meeting as well as contact information for the core conveners of the national platform.

Feroze explained that the demonstration’s objective was to register “a nonpartisan critique” of the bill while it was being debated in the Parliament. He explained that because the Parliament had a large BJP majority, it was of paramount importance that popular apprehensions be represented as the concerns of citizens rather than of partisans—allowing for the possibility (however remote) that some BJP legislators might rethink the wisdom of supporting such a controversial and troubling bill, but without risking allegations of partisan disloyalty. But the lightning speed with which the bill made its way through both houses of Parliament (the day of the planning meeting turned out to be the very day that the bill was passed by the upper house), meant that by the time the December 11 planning meeting came around, the bill had already become law. Feroze explained to me that this development transformed the demonstration’s audience and thus their demands: alongside the injunction to repeal the just-enacted Citizenship Amendment Act (the audience of that demand being the BJP-controlled Parliament), they added an additional request that the opposition-controlled Maharashtra government forswear the plan to create a National Citizen Registry and pass a government resolution to that effect. This reconfiguration and expansion of the demonstration’s addressee is reflected in the minutes from the event’s planning meeting, which—in contravention to the earlier idea of a “nonpartisan critique”—now emphasized the front-and-center role to be played by party politics:

• Organisations and Political Parties can carry their flags as well
• A memorandum will be given to the Governor, the State Govt and the President of India
• . . . the programme will include both social organisations and political parties.

In a scramble to get all the requisite permissions before the planned gathering on the nineteenth (which was just a week away), Feroze and his HBKL co-conveners organized themselves into “teams” according to their competencies and existing networks of contacts: some were tasked with reaching out to party leaders, others to the police, to the media, and to various activist and social organizations. But three days before the planned event—on December 16—the organizers had yet to secure official permissions to convene at their proposed location on the public beach downtown. This was because getting the necessary permissions to gather on the beach was turning out to be more complicated than they’d expected, since (as it turns out) it isn’t possible for the municipal authorities to give official permission to use a stage or sound system on a public beach. In an effort to sort out the pressing matter of venue, an “all-party meeting” was quickly convened at the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee office in South Mumbai. “We were planning to have a lakh people,” Feroze explained to me, “so we needed to have a sound system.”10 The police commissioner had offered Hum Bharat ke Log permission to hold their event on Azad Maidan—the cordoned-off, hidden-from-public-view location near the municipal corporation headquarters that had been designated by a 1997 Bombay High Court ruling as Mumbai’s “designated space” for protest gatherings.11 Feroze explained that with violence unfolding across the country, the Mumbai police were a bit skittish about people gathering in large numbers on the streets. “But we said no; Azad Maidan is too small.”

Having reached an impasse, they left the police headquarters without having secured official permission for their gathering, scheduled for just two days later. “We didn’t have permission,” Feroze recalled, “but we were thinking, ‘Let’s just do it anyway, on the beach.’” Later that same evening, however, he got a call from a friend—another member of the Hum Bharat ke Log “core team”—informing him that the police had just granted permission to hold their protest gathering, but not on the beach, rather at the fenced-in garden grounds at August Kranti Maidan. Police permission to hold the event at August Kranti had been “brokered,” Feroze explained to me, by someone who wasn’t even a member of the core team: the president of the Bombay Aman Committee (Bombay Peace Committee), the South Bombay organization whose mission and expertise inheres in liaising with city police with the goal of maintaining aman (peace) in Mumbai’s Muslim-majority localities.12

In light of the Bombay Aman Committee’s (BAC) long-standing and hard-earned relations of trust with city police, one of Feroze’s longtime activist friends had (unbeknownst to Feroze) approached the committee’s leadership with a request that the organization reach out (through police contacts) to reassure the skittish authorities that the planned gathering posed no threat to public safety—an overture by means of which the BAC’s leadership effectively took responsibility for any potential “breach of peace”—and to thereby secure the necessary permissions for the planned event. Feroze described his anger upon learning that his trusted friend had gone “behind his back” to approach the committee’s leadership for “help.” Confused, I asked, “What was wrong with asking for help?” Feroze regarded me blankly, then responded, “Because we were organizing it! So we should have been told.” I probed: “Okay, but then why didn’t anyone tell you?” Feroze sighed and explained that, see, his friend who’d reached out to the BAC was well aware that Feroze was loath to collaborate with “those religious people”; the committee, he explains, “is totally dominated by the clergy.” Feroze qualifies his remark: “The leadership is not actually clergy itself, but they’re all part of that same group.”

“Those Religious People”

Feroze’s characterization of the Bombay Aman Committee as dominated by “religious people” caught my attention, because it was quite different from how others have described the committee and its activities. Independent journalist Jyoti Punwani—longtime chronicler of Muslim Mumbai who has written extensively on the BAC—notes that historically the organization has not had an especially religious composition or orientation. Rather, it was an initiative of South Bombay business elites who—in the aftermath of the 1984 Hindi–Muslim violence in Mumbai’s industrial suburbs—sought to curb the impact that creeping religiously inflected tensions might have on the economic fabric of South Bombay’s famously cosmopolitan commercial districts—convening interfaith outreach and mediating conflicts among communities of traders. BAC founder Wahid Ali Khan (the current president’s late brother) was the owner of a travel agency as well as two of the city’s largest imported goods markets and was for many years was the primary agent for the neighborhood’s many Hindu importers. When violence eventually did break out in South Bombay in 1992–93, Punwani reported indefatigably on the relief work carried out by Khan and other BAC volunteers. And in the aftermath of the violence she followed BAC volunteers as they worked tirelessly to bring witnesses to testify before the Srikrishna lnquiry Commission, to secure through court action the release of the commission’s report (which indicted Mumbai policemen for their role in the riots), and to advocate for the implementation of the commission report’s recommendations (which are still pending). Punwani, who knew Khan so well that she’d walked in his funeral procession after he was killed by an unidentified gunman in 1999—emphasizes that while the BAC founder himself, “with his trademark beard, could be recognized as a Muslim anywhere,” the committee’s work was not religious per se. Rather, its purpose was to “negotiate with the establishment in times of crisis.”13

Given the extraordinary heterogeneity of Muslim Mumbai, which is differentiated not only in sectarian terms but in a myriad of ways along lines of class, caste, gender, occupation, family structure, language grouping, place of origin, political orientation, and so on (discussed in Interlude II), the BAC’s aspiration was not religious but rather pragmatic: to “negotiate with the establishment.” And yet as memories of the riots faded and the city got back to the business of surviving and (sometimes) thriving through millennial Mumbai’s liberalization-era trials and transformations, Feroze recalled how Mumbai’s myriad Muslim-led organizations and leaders turned inward and “stopped calling people like us”—meaning “liberals” and “reformists”—with whom they tended to disagree on religious matters. More recently however, with Hindutva on the rise (and for which a monolithic “Muslim community” is conjured as its other), the impetus to imagine the diverse and richly textured social fabric of Muslim Mumbai as if it were in fact a monolithic “community” in order to “negotiate with the establishment” has returned: “They’re starting to call us again,” Feroze tells me.

Feroze narrated for me two recent issues on which he and his “liberal reformist” friends had locked horns with Muslim Mumbai’s “community leaders”—both of which notably involved the fraught terrain of women’s rights and Islamic feminism. First, in 2016, Feroze—a nonpracticing Bohra (Shia) Muslim—clashed with Muslim Mumbai’s religious and political establishment when, together with liberal human rights activists affiliated with Bombay-based Indian Muslims for Secular Democracy (IMSD), he joined hands with the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (Indian Muslim Women’s Movement) to challenge a recent ban on women’s access to the inner sanctum of the Haji Ali Dargah, the fifteenth-century shrine and dargah (mosque) of Sufi saint Pir Haji Ali Shah Bukhari, which is situated on a small islet off of Mumbai’s western coast. Women had enjoyed unrestricted access to the inner sanctum for over five hundred years, until sometime in 2011 when the charitable trust governing the dargah declared that permitting women into the inner sanctum was un-Islamic and decided unilaterally to prohibit women from entering. After efforts to dialogue with the trustees failed, the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan approached first the state’s minister for minority affairs and then the chairman of the Maharashtra Minorities’ Commission—neither effort yielding fruit.

I met one of the conveners of the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, a woman in her late forties named Neema, who recalled that when she approached the minister for minority affairs he told her there was nothing he could do to intervene because it was “a religious matter.” Neema laughed dryly: “How can this be religious matter when it’s not codified anywhere? And this was from an elected representative.” The minister directed Neema and her colleagues to instead approach the Maharashtra Minorities’ Commission. When the chairman of the commission sent them right back to the minority affairs minister, Neema recalled, “We realized we were alone.” Neema told me that in Mumbai, it was only Feroze and his activist friends with Indian Muslims for Secular Democracy who supported them in their (ultimately successful) petition to the Bombay High Court, where they contested the legality of the ban on women’s entry to Haji Ali Dargah on the constitutional grounds that it violated gender-based rights to equal access to public spaces. Feroze recalled how after the petition was filed, he got a phone call from the Bombay Aman Committee: “They were saying, ‘Come, on bhai [brother], don’t do this.’ But of course, I didn’t listen.”

Feroze sparred with Muslim Mumbai’s would-be “community leadership” again a few years later when he and his Indian Muslims for Secular Democracy activist friends came out in support of a highly controversial proposed national law that sought to criminalize “triple talaq”—a practice with contested standing in Islamic law (there is no mention of the practice in the Quran), whereby a marriage is unilaterally and instantaneously dissolved when the word talaq (divorce) is pronounced three times in succession.14 The proposed law came on the heels of a 2017 Indian Supreme Court ruling that triple talaq was unconstitutional and therefore invalid. The new bill went a step further, proposing to criminalize the pronouncement of triple talaq, with those found guilty punishable with up to three years’ imprisonment. The political debates around the proposed law criminalizing triple talaq were fierce and complex—bringing human rights activists and some Islamic feminist groups into an unlikely coalition with the Hindu nationalist outfits who had proposed the bill. Meanwhile, national-level mobilization against the bill was spearheaded by the conservative Islamic All India Muslim Personal Law Board, for whom the proposed criminalization of triple talaq was said to chip away Muslim Indians’ long-established rights to govern Muslim family affairs (which in India are governed by the 1937 Muslim Personal Law [Shariat] Application Act—commonly known as Muslim Personal Law).15 Opposition parties, with the Congress Party at the helm, challenged the proposed bill in the Parliament, criticizing it as a cynical use of Muslim women as pawns in an effort to chip away at Muslim Personal Law and community autonomy. And yet widespread opposition to the bill criminalizing triple talaq should not be interpreted to indicate support for the practice; as Hyderabad-based feminist activist A. Suneetha has pointed out, “The current opposition to the state regulation of arbitrary talaq is perhaps not indicative of either the communities’ understanding of this practice or concern about women victimized by such a practice.”16 Since triple talaq’s lack of legal standing had already been established in 2017, criminalizing the practice, it was argued, was unnecessary and would merely introduce a ready way to harass Muslim men with the new law.

In Mumbai, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board worked together with religious, political, and neighborhood leaders in an unprecedented mobilization in advance of the Supreme Court ruling on triple talaq—assembling an estimated fifty thousand Muslim women at Azad Maidan to register their opposition to the bill. Thus, in using his secular activist platforms and networks to register support for the bill, Feroze broke ranks not only with Mumbai’s Muslim leadership but also with human rights activists concerned about the likely misuse of the law. Against this backdrop of recent and bitter fallouts over his support for the BJP’s bill criminalizing triple talaq (the bill became law in 2018), Feroze was surprised when South Bombay’s Muslim leaders “started to call again.” The previous month, in advance of the November 2019 Supreme Court’s anticipated judgment regarding the future of the contested site of the demolished Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, Feroze had been pleasantly surprised to be invited for a meeting at the Islam Gymkhana, where religious people, community leaders, and party politicians put their differences aside to discuss the more immediately pressing matter of how to respond to the impending ruling, which was not expected to go in their favor: “We all wanted to keep the peace,” Feroze recalled.17

By 2019, with the CAA-NPR-NRC combine threatening to call into question the citizenship of Muslim Indians, the “Muslim community” was once again conjured into being. In this context, the point of contention concerned how “Muslim Mumbai” as a collective subject ought (and ought not) to be represented, how relations with political parties ought (and ought not) to be construed, and who had the capacity to mediate representations by controlling and curating the image of the protesting crowd. For their part, as already mentioned, the Mumbai conveners of Hum Bharat Ke Log were intent on keeping all signs of religion—Islamic or otherwise—far away from the protest.

And yet predictably, Hum Bharat Ke Log was not the only activist network and platform that emerged to register protest against the CAA that winter; another national-level group formed around the same time under the banner National Alliance Against CAA, NRC, and NPR—the Alliance for short—whose leadership held very different ideas about how “community” identity ought to be represented. While the Maharashtra branch of the Alliance took shape under the leadership of retired Bombay High Court judge Khosle Patil—a non-Muslim social activist known for his postretirement advocacy in rural Maharashtra on behalf of landless and lower-caste (Bahujan) agricultural workers18—the Alliance’s primary convener in the city of Mumbai was the acting president of the Mumbai branch of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, Abdul Haseeb Bhatkar.

Keen to understand these struggles over how religious identity should or could be construed in curating crowd images during the anti-CAA protests, I met Bhatkar a few weeks after the August Kranti gathering in his small office in Mumbai’s eastern suburb of Kurla, where he recalled for me how the Alliance had “made a resolution to let students and leftists take the lead.” He explained: “Everyone was in agreement” that opposition to the CAA could not be allowed to be seen as “a Muslim issue,” because to allow that to happen would be to “fall into the BJP trap” of further isolating Muslim Indians in a what ought to be treated as a constitutional matter. But from Bhatkar’s perspective (and unlike for Feroze and his activist friends), letting “students and leftists” take the lead didn’t necessarily mean that religious people had no role to play whatsoever. “We wanted a Muslim scholar to speak at August Kranti,” Bhatkar recalled; “there were so many leaders who were speaking, so we said: why not an Islamic one?”

It was in the midst of this heated standoff between the Alliance and Hum Bharat Ke Log over whether or not a religious leader ought to be included among the lineup of speakers invited to address the gathering at August Kranti Maidan on December 19 that a social activist who was on good terms with both groups had approached the Bombay Aman Committee president with a request to put the organization’s good relations with the authorities to work in the service of securing permissions for the fast-approaching protest gathering. What had initially struck me as a petty (even ungrateful) response to the eleventh-hour intervention by the Bombay Aman Committee became clear: Feroze was concerned that the overt involvement of religious leaders in the protest movement risked casting the CAA as a “Muslim issue”—and thereby politically isolating Muslims.

Initially furious that “those religious people” had hijacked their event and “corralled” the demonstration “into a garden,” Feroze soon warmed to the August Kranti venue as “blessing in disguise,” since after all, it is the site from which Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India movement in 1942: “August Kranti is where freedom marches.” The next morning—the day before the protest—Feroze went for an “all-party meeting” at the Congress office to “tell them the new plan,” to prepare a press release, and to “run around” securing all of the other necessary permissions: from the state government’s Archeology Directorate (“usually this kind of thing would take weeks”), the BMC’s Garden Department, the central government’s Heritage Office and Archaeological Survey, and finally the local Gamdevy police station, whose final approval was contingent on all the others’. A letter was quickly typed out and dispatched from the Congress Party office, but was just as quickly returned unsigned because a Congress staffer had titled the rally for which permission was sought “BJP Hatao!”—“Stop the BJP!” Eyes rolled and a new letter was drafted, this time describing the event as a “Peaceful Protest against the CAA-NRC.” Then, Feroze tells me, there was a phone volley: they sent “a boy” to bring the letter around for all the necessary signatures—from the Heritage Office and the Archaeological Survey, and to the local police at Gamdevy—while the additional commissioner of police (happy to help after the Bombay Aman Committee stepped in to broker) made path-clearing phone calls from his office at the police headquarters at Crawford Market (see Map 4 in Interlude III). When “the boy” tasked with running around to gather signatures called up Feroze to report that a junior officer at the local Gamdevy police station was refusing to give permission without the approval of his superior—who happened to be in Nagpur that day—Feroze simply rang up the additional commissioner. “The additional commissioner called over to Nagpur and the Nagpur officer called back to Gamdevy to give his permission, and just like that it all got done.” Feroze animatedly recalled the breathlessness of this last-minute frenzy: “This all happened between 12 and 5 p.m. on the eighteenth.”

On the morning of nineteenth—the day of the protest—only one thing was still pending: Where would they find the money to pay the fee for use of the public garden? Feroze rang up a senior Congress Party leader—someone who had been helpful in getting them this far—“but he said he’d been paying for so many things recently and suggested that we should call someone else.” The person he suggested, however—also a party politician—was someone with whom Feroze had recently locked horns in the triple talaq and Haji Ali Dargah court battles. So instead of reaching out directly, Feroze asked a mutual friend to ring up the politician, who immediately agreed to put up the money. And not a moment too soon: “The gates opened at 12:00.”

The “Muslim-Looking” Crowd

Back at August Kranti Maidan on December 19, 2019, I had approached three men standing together at the edge of the crowd, each with a stethoscope draped over his shoulders. They were smartly dressed—their starched collars and neat trousers suggesting perhaps they had come directly from the office. While their uniformly bearded faces signaled that they may well have been Muslims, the prominently displayed stethoscopes asserted that it was their professional identity as doctors rather than any religious identity as Muslims that they wished to display today. I introduced myself and asked about the stethoscopes. Yes, they are doctors, one of them told me in polite Hindi. I asked if they’d come together from the clinic and was told that no, they didn’t work together; rather, they have joined the protest today as a “friends group.” One of them introduced himself as Dr. Siddiqui—an identifiably Muslim name—and I ask the others whether they are Muslim as well. “Yes,” Dr. Siddiqui responded, then quickly adding: “But we’re here as Indians, not as Muslims. And anyway, what difference does it make that we’re Muslim?”

Whether or not the CAA was a “Muslim issue,” whether or not the anti-CAA gatherings were “Muslim spaces,” and whether and how Muslim imagery should or would inform the anti-CAA narrative was a fraught question—for participants, for organizers, and (not least) for Mumbai’s political class. Much energy was spent that heady winter on efforts to (as it was often said) “control the narrative” regarding the “Muslim” character of the protests. In Mumbai, all the various groups and factions organizing in opposition to the CAA were in general agreement that the CAA was simply the most recent iteration of the ruling party’s broader political logic and longer-sighted strategy of divisiveness—a cynical attempt to politically isolate Muslim Indians. One interlocutor suggested that announcing a national NPR-NRC exercise could only be read as “natak,” since a simple calculation of the time and monetary expenditure that it would require rendered the whole affair practically untenable. In this context, it was argued, to let opposition to the CAA be represented as “Muslim” would be to fall lazily into this divisiveness trap. Preety’s insistent, furious refrain that opposition to the CAA was “a constitutional matter and not a Muslim issue” thus met with widespread agreement among protest-goers; for Rohit, this was precisely why it was so important to stand—and to be seen standing—“with Muslims.”

But of course, the reason that the opposition to the CAA risked being seen as “a Muslim issue” was precisely because it so clearly targeted Muslims. Which is to say: even if many agreed the CAA was technically a constitutional matter and something that theoretically had the potential to affect all Indians, the context in which the CAA was passed (the move to create a National Registry of Citizens and the home minister’s enjoinder to “understand the chronology”)19 left little doubt in many minds as to the CAA’s anti-Muslim intentions. Evidence of this was cited in the fact that it had been students assembled in protest at historically Muslim universities of Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia who had been on the receiving end of police violence that Sunday following the passing of the bill into law—notwithstanding the fact that simultaneous protests had taken place in and around (non-historically Muslim) university campuses in Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, and Hyderabad.20

The crowds that filled the streets of Indian cities and on campuses across India (and the world) in the days following the brutal violence against the student protestors at Jamia and JNU were—by all accounts—animated by outrage at images of violence circulating on both traditional and social media. Foremost among these images was that of the furious, hijab-wearing Jamia students who shielded their classmate from the blows of police batons, and whose palpable rage was caught on camera and circulated on social media. At the August Kranti protest I had spoken with a group of visibly Muslim (hijab-wearing) women—a couple of lawyers and a psychologist. The psychologist introduced herself as Nada and told me that this was the first time she’d ever gone to a public protest. “We had been asleep,” she said, “and Jamia woke us up. The image of those girls,” she continued, “those brave young girls.” She tells me she was profoundly shaken by the image. “Those two twenty-two-year-old girls, they changed everything for me.”

The day after the August Kranti event, news media reported that “it was like Mohammed Ali Road had been transported to Gowalia Tank.”21 Images of this Muslim-looking anger was circulated, rendered as art and subsequently as placards. Indeed, visibly “Muslim” appearance of the demonstrations was unavoidable, even as placard-mediated perspectives were studiously cosmopolitan: “Dalits, queers, and women will destroy the Hindu Rashtra [nation],” read one of the four secular placards held by a cluster of niqab- and hijab-wearing women (see Figure 37). The visibility of Muslims in public space (outside of central Mumbai areas like Mohammed Ali Road) was striking and attention-grabbing, because in the years since the 1992–93 Bombay riots the city’s Muslim community and political leadership had maintained an unofficial policy (working closely with the police) to prevent mass political gatherings, instead organizing broker-mediated “delegations” to various politicians and ministers. In the three decades since the riots, there had been only two instances of large-scale, visibly Muslim mass political gatherings (a 2012 gathering on Azad Maidan was an exception that proved the rule when the crowd turned violent, and the media gushed with praise at the police for their restraint). “Irony of ironies,” Punwani wrote in the aftermath of the August Kranti gathering, “the sense of safety Muslims in Mumbai obviously felt now was thanks to the very forces that had rendered them vulnerable during 92–93.”22

“Thank You Uddhav”

With reports of police violence pouring in from all corners of the country, no one seemed to know quite what to expect of the August Kranti Maidan gathering on December 19. The organizers had taken all the necessary permissions (from the BMC, from the police), and that morning’s Indian Express quoted the joint commissioner of police saying that “adequate police presence will ensure that the protests pass off without any problem. We are in touch with the organisers of the protest and both sides are on the same page. We are confident that the event will pass off peacefully.” Another officer told the reporter that since the protest at August Kranti Maidan “is all over social media, we do not have an estimate of how many people will be attending the rally.” A crime branch officer explained that they fear that “protest may be infiltrated by some motivated elements who may try to incite the crowd and foment violence.” For this reason, two thousand “security personnel” (as they were described) would be deployed.23 While I was not quite sure what the afternoon might have in store, I was confident that the Mumbai police would avoid violence at all cost. After all, this crowd was gathering not only in opposition to the CAA but also (and with official permission) in condemnation of police violence against student protesters, especially in Delhi. It was clear that, in enabling this mass gathering, Maharashtra’s Shiv Sena–led coalition government was of a mind to enable and facilitate an image and spectacle quite different from those emerging from Delhi. And as our merry crowd-parade crossed a narrow lane on the walk from Grant Road Station toward August Kranti Maidan, I spotted a handful of policemen relaxing in plastic chairs, sipping chai as if it were absolutely ordinary for a hundred thousand people to block Nana Chowk on a Thursday afternoon. The police seemed not the least bit worried; the whole city would become a stage that day for Shiv Sena’s display: a peaceful and celebratory gathering of staggering scale.

That the behind-the-scenes hand of the government in facilitating such a smooth and festive event was widely understood was evident in the posters thanking both the police and the chief minister. An image of a hand-scrawled placard reading “Thank You Mumbai Police” appeared in Preety’s Instagram “story” the day after the August Kranti gathering (Figure 38). While social activists and conveners of the anti-CAA protests were in agreement with religious leaders that the demonstrations ought to avoid taking on a “Muslim face,” Mumbai’s political leadership was equally resolute in curating a nonpartisan image of the protests: while maulanas (Islamic scholars) feared the community isolation that would result if the CAA-NRC combine were to be seen as primarily a “Muslim issue,” party leaders were keen to obviate suspicions that genuine outrage over the CAA was being harnessed for mere political gain. And as Preety’s account of having avoided subsequent protests because they were “getting politicized” indicates, these concerns were not unfounded.

“The Interests of Certain Political Parties”

On December 27, 2019, the same day Rohit displayed his “Kaaghaz ke Fools” placard at the anti-CAA protest gathering at Azad Maidan, the BJP convened its own rally in support of the new citizenship law—just a few kilometers away at August Kranti Maidan (see Map 4 in Interlude III). Indeed, amid the flurry of anti-CAA protest demonstrations in Mumbai during the winter of 2019–20, a scattering of pro-CAA gatherings in Mumbai also took place. These events, while few in number, were notable for the moralizing discourses present in the media coverage that circulated in their wake. At a small pro-CAA gathering (estimated at between fifty and seventy people)24 that had taken place simultaneously with the 100,000-strong December 19 anti-CAA demonstration on August Kranti, a journalist reported that participants had disagreed over what to even call their gathering: while some called the event a “people’s protest,” the reporter was later corrected by a participant when she used that term; this was not protest but rather a samarthan—an endorsement—the purpose of which was to “counter the environment of doubt and negativity” of the protest demonstrations. The anti-CAA crowds ought not be taken seriously, the reporter was told, as it was only because of “the interests of certain political parties” that the CAA was being opposed.25 The goal of this pro-CAA samarthan was to demonstrate that “Mumbai was in support of the CAA”—whatever the throngs a few kilometers away might suggest.

The BJP’s pro-CAA demonstrations sought to frame the anti-CAA protest gatherings as evidence of politically motivated manipulation—a refrain echoed in the ruling party’s critiques of the opposition-controlled Maharashtra government more generally: “Is the State government in its right mind?,” the Marathi daily Maharashtra Times headline quoted former BJP chief minister Devendra Fadnavis the day following the tit-for-tat large-scale rallies on December 27. The article focuses primarily on the logistics of the event itself (rather than debates over the law),26 noting that the Maharashtra police had denied permission for the BJP to hold a procession “rally” and that they were therefore limited to holding a mere “sabhaa” at the August Kranti Maidan ground.27 “Some people are spreading anarchy only for the sake of their chair,” Fadnavis is quoted as saying—where “chair” here is metonymic with holding political power in Maharashtra and therefore a jibe directed at former party ally, chief minister and Shiv Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray. The disproportionately large number of visibly Muslim protestors at anti-CAA demonstrations was cited as evidence of cynical efforts by opposition parties to whip up Muslim fears merely for political gain. And indeed, this very notion that the Muslim appearance of the crowd might render anti-CAA gatherings vulnerable to allegations by the ruling party that opposition to the CAA was being fueled by religious leaders and their party bosses for mere political gain was of course the very same concern over which anti-CAA protest organizers (both Feroze’s outfit and the Alliance) had been wringing their hands. It was for precisely this reason that religious figures and party leaders were studiously avoiding the spotlight at anti-CAA protest events and, as Bhatkar had explained to me, had decided to “let the students and leftists lead.”

And yet notably, just as anti-CAA organizers sought to obviate allegations or suspicions that the protests were “politically motivated,” moralizing talk about the pro-CAA gatherings was framed in precisely those same terms: the demonstrations “endorsing” the CAA were disparaged by anti-CAA protesters for being BJP-organized events and therefore as “not genuine.” In the hours before the simultaneous pro- and anti-CAA rallies on December 27, elected corporator Sayeed Rizwan (whose successful campaign was the subject of chapters 2 and 3) posted two video clips on his Twitter page. The first, under the tagline “Came across this Video on WhatsApp where BJP has set up a team to give Flags so that the protest looks genuine,” depicts a street scene in which Indian flags are being handed out from the back of two tempos28 parked just outside the pro-CAA rally venue. The second, posted a few minutes later, is shot from behind one of the tempos and depicts one man wrapping another’s head in a saffron-colored turban, presumably in preparation for the latter’s participation in the pro-CAA rally.29 “Koi Baap Apne Beti Ke Shaadi Mein Itna Show off Nahi Karta, Jitna Modi ji Aur Amit Shah Rally Mein Karte Hai” [Even a father at his daughter’s wedding doesn’t show off as much as Modi and Amit Shah do in a rally], reads the tagline.

The videos and their taglines claim that pro-CAA gatherings are not “genuine” (but rather mere “show”) because tying of turbans and handing out of national flags is allegedly performed by party workers.30 Amid the comments posted below the turban-tying clip, one reads “Bhai, yeh log nautaki [sic] karne me he toh famous hai”—“Brother, these people are famous for their nautanki”: their drama. These disparaging characterizations of the pro-CAA rallies as not genuine, as mere show off, as only nautanki (which is another word for natak),31 are notable: in contrast to the election-season rallies described in chapter 2—where, as we saw, theatricality (nautanki/natak) was appreciated and valued as a legitimate, desirable, even necessary component of an election campaign—a rally that disingenuously professes not to be party-organized is disparaged as mere “show.”

A few days later, at lunch with a journalist friend, I pulled out my phone and showed him the video, curious to hear his take on the disparaging dismissal of the rally as “only nautanki.” By way of answer, he pulled out his own phone and scrolled through photos he’d taken at the anti-CAA protest at August Kranti on December 19. Pointing at the nautanki video on my phone, he surmised that the pro-CAA event had probably been the subject of popular derision because “it looked just like a political rally.” I asked him to explain. “Just like at a political rally, the flags and all that—they’re all pre-made. And everyone knows that [the organizers] can just hire all those people.” The critique, in other words, was not of the involvement of party politics in staging a spectacle per se, but rather in the genre of the show: the BJP was staging a natak while characterizing it as a sabhaa.

Ultimately however, whatever the assessments of crowd size and party involvement, of money and flags, the big news of the day was the confusion and hilarity that ensued when Fadnavis tweeted his arrival at the wrong venue (Figure 39). The outsized attention paid to Fadnavis’s (understandable) mistake is noteworthy insofar as it gestures to the metapragmatics of collective assembly. Throughout the winter of 2019–20, the language of “crowd” was at once both a performative bid at semiotic dominance through the staging of a “media event”32 and also (and more quietly) a real-time performance of the behind-the-scenes political networks that made some crowd event possible in the first place. As the ubiquity of “Thank You Uddhav” signage at anti-CAA events suggests, there was no doubt about the behind-the-scenes role of party leaders in facilitating or obviating the anti-CAA demonstrations. And yet this inevitability landed the Shiv Sena chief minister in a pickle: whatever the “personal perspectives”33 written on the placards might have been, the loudest message conveyed was the fact of the chief minister’s tacit support for (or at least toleration of) the gatherings. Whatever did or didn’t happen in Mumbai throughout the protest season was fodder for speculative interpretation and a sign of the contradictions and internal frictions: a Shiv Sena–led coalition government presiding over massive Muslim-looking crowds in Mumbai, protesting a measure that the Shiv Sena—erstwhile party of ethnolinguistic chauvinism and antimigrant Islamophobia—had itself supported in the Parliament only a few months earlier.

The anti-CAA protests posed a predicament for the chief minister and his party. A former ally of the BJP, the Shiv Sena had initially voted in the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament) in favor of the Citizenship Amendment Bill, but then withdrew its support after forming an alliance government with former political adversaries, the Congress and National Congress Party—an odd-bedfellows coalition formed primarily with the goal of keeping the BJP out of power in Maharashtra. After becoming chief minister of this fragile coalition, Uddhav Thackeray withdrew his support for the controversial bill, staging a walkout (and thereby abstaining) ahead of voting in the Rajya Sabha (upper house). And while senior politicians from the other parties to Maharashtra’s coalition government were actively involved in the December 19 protest (helping to organize and fund the event, as well as featuring among the lineup of onstage speakers), the demonstration was conspicuously devoid of any overt signs of the Shiv Sena—the party of the chief minister—even as the supportive police (noticeably absent riot gear, and in some areas reportedly passing out water and bananas) ensured that the chief minister’s support was understood, as suggested in the many posters “thanking” the chief minister.

Over the following weeks and months, increasingly unsatisfied with mere tacit tolerance, anti-CAA protest organizers (including some Congress and National Congress Party leaders) began to put pressure on the chief minister to follow the example of West Bengal, Rajasthan, Punjab, and Kerala in passing some sort of an official resolution stating that the Registry of Citizenship exercise would not be carried out in Maharashtra, and/or demanding that the CAA be repealed. Yet in the face of repeated efforts to convey this demand, the chief minister remained silent, his attention resolutely elsewhere: the morning of the tit-for-tat December 27 demonstrations—while Fadnavis lambasted Uddhav from the stage at August Kranti and protest demonstrators thanked the chief minister at Azad Maidan—the BMC tweeted photos of poker-faced Uddhav Thackeray in attendance at an urban design exhibition just a few blocks from the protest venue at Azad Maidan, where he was calmly “appreciating” the creative efforts of an international NGO’s architectural proposals for public street space—an initiative supported the Maharashtra government in the hopes of “developing the vision of safe, inclusive & accessible streets.”34

“Delegation” and “Dialogue”

First thing Monday morning—on the heels of the Friday-afternoon anti-CAA protest gathering on August Kranti Maidan on December 19—Uddhav Thackeray met a “delegation” (vafad) of Muslim Mumbai’s political, religious, and community representatives, under the leadership of the Samajwadi Party’s Maharashtra president and elected MLA Abu Asim Azmi. Mumbai’s popular Urdu daily Mumbai Urdu News reported that the delegation had been convened following the “vigorous protest” (zabardast ehtijaj) at August Kranti Maidan a few days earlier, and emphasized that the delegation leadership sought to impress upon the chief minister that—whatever anyone might say to the contrary—it was in fact Muslim Indians who would be most vulnerable to be stripped of citizenship rights by the CAA-NPR-NRC combine.35

The delegation was composed of senior members of Muslim Mumbai’s various community organizations: the Ulema Council (where the young Sayeed Rizwan had cut his political teeth in the aftermath of the 1992 riots; see Interlude II), the Bombay Aman Committee; a few dozen Islamic scholars and clerics; and—last but not least—a significant contingent of Mumbai’s political class of Muslim MLAs, MPs, municipal corporators, and political party workers. That the chief minister so promptly received Asmi’s delegation in the wake of the protest suggests something of the urgency with which Asmi sought to capitalize not only on the highly visible manifestation of mass support for Mumbai Muslims evidenced at August Kranti, but also that with which the ever-busy Uddhav sought to assuage the concerns of Muslim Mumbaikars in the wake of the demonstration—the scale and energy of which appeared to have taken everyone (even the organizers) by surprise.

While details of Uddhav’s meeting with the delegation were given prominence only in the city’s Urdu media (journalists taking care to name individual members of the delegation),36 color photographs of the event featured in all major Mumbai newspapers—English, Marathi, Hindi, and Urdu. The ubiquitous images suggested that the delegation had been received graciously at the chief minister’s Mumbai home—known as Varsha—where, in the presence of Mumbai’s chief of police, Uddhav sought to “instill confidence” in Mumbai Muslims.37 “The government will not allow anyone to seize the rights of citizens of any particular community or religion in the state,” the chief minister told the assembled leaders.38 Muslim Mumbaikars had nothing to be afraid of, the Mumbai Urdu News report went on, because the CAA and NRC would “never be implemented” in the state of Maharashtra. And as for the detention camps, worried talk about which had been making lively rounds on social media, they were being built not for “Indians” but rather for “foreign nationals who have served their sentence for the cases related to drugs or other [offenses].”39 Having sought to clear up any “misunderstanding,” the chief minister rounded off his assurances to the Muslim delegation with a plea: “I request that you please not organize any further demonstrations in the state.”40

The colorful images of Uddhav Thackeray’s meeting with Mumbai’s Islamic leadership splashed all over the Mumbai media was a jarring juxtaposition with the carefully curated, secular one that anti-CAA protest organizers had been working so hard to create. Keen to understand the impetus behind this high-profile media spectacle (whose closed-door facade was readily belied by the open-door invitation to the press), I asked Feroze for his thoughts on the matter. Wasn’t this precisely the image that not only secular activists like him but also Muslim Mumbai’s religious leadership and political class had all been trying so hard to obviate? Feroze explained that while it was true that all were in agreement that this must not be allowed to be portrayed as a “Muslim issue” (“because then we’ll fall into the BJP trap”), it was also true the CAA-NPR-NRC combine obviously targeted Muslims. Muslim Mumbaikars were understandably worried, which is why they kept turning up in such large numbers at the demonstrations. And besides, he added, religious leaders have grown accustomed to being “involved in political matters” through these sorts of officially private yet highly mediatized “delegations.”41

Feroze puts me in touch with a longtime activist friend who had been part of the delegation, a Samajwadi Party office-bearer named Siraj Malik. I ring up Mr. Malik and we meet up a few days later outside the Press Club in South Bombay. It was an unseasonably warm afternoon, so we headed to the municipal canteen around the corner to find some shade and a soda. Once seated, I ask Malik about the impetus behind the delegation of Islamic leaders to meet Uddhav. Echoing Feroze, he begins: “See, the BJP is trying to make this a communal issue, and we won’t let that happen. But at the same time, the public is afraid.” He explained that local Urdu newspapers had been full of talk about detention camps—whether, why, and for whom such camps are being constructed. With everything circulating over WhatsApp, “people don’t know what to believe.” It was in this context that the delegation to Uddhav was convened. “Most of these religious people,” Malik explained, “they’re honest and people trust them. So, it’s important that these maulanas are well informed—that they make public statements and tell people not to be afraid because the chief minister is with us.”

The day after the delegation, the media reported on the chief minister’s verbal promise that no National Population Registry exercise would be carried out in Maharashtra. And yet by all accounts, this outcome was dissatisfying. Uddhav had not mentioned any formal resolution to that effect, nor had he directly denounced the CAA itself. His official position was that the Maharashtra government would wait for the Supreme Court verdict on new citizenship law, whose constitutionality had been legally challenged in the courts. While the Shiv Sena’s post-riot détente with Muslim Mumbai had been sustained over the decades by these sorts of informal, backroom assurances, this time around it appeared that the politics of “delegation” did little to dispel the atmosphere of fear.

A week after the delegation to the chief minister, I woke to a Times of India article posted in one of my Mumbai-based WhatsApp chat groups that had a headline so unlikely that I had to read it twice: Sanjay Raut, Shiv Sena MP and official party spokesperson (executive editor of the Shiv Sena mouthpiece Saamna), had accepted an invitation to speak at an event scheduled for the following day, organized by Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH) and the Mumbai-based Association for Protection of Civil Rights.42 The event was described as a “meet,” the purpose of which (as a JIH spokesperson told the Times reporter) was to “debate” the relationship between the CAA and the NRC in order to “understand their constitutional implications.” Clarifying why Raut was being invited to address the JIH-hosted gathering, the article recalled the Shiv Sena’s unclear position on the CAA, explaining that the Shiv Sena had first supported in the Lok Sabha before abstaining in the Rajya Sabha and was now “waiting” for a Supreme Court verdict on the CAA before considering any official resolution.

The “debate”—or “dialogue” (vaartaalap), as Saamna described it in Marathi—was to take place the next day at the Marathi Patrakar Sangh (Marathi Journalists Association), a striking choice of venue (since the conveners themselves are largely Urdu-speakers) that seemed to identify the event as a variety of press conference. Among the participants who would dialogue/debate with Raut was senior advocate and president of the Association for Protection of Civil Rights, Yusuf Muchhala—the Mumbai lawyer who had represented Mumbai Muslims at the Srikrishna Commission in the aftermath of the 1992–93 riots. Muchhala is a household name among Muslim Mumbaikars (at least among the generation that remembers the riots), because his cross-examination of senior Shiv Sena leaders in the aftermath of the violence had played a key role in the commission’s eventual indictment of the Shiv Sena for its role in the riots. Muchhala worked tirelessly in the years following release of the Srikrishna report (through the Association for Protection of Civil Rights) to advocate for implementation and legal action on the commission’s findings, and action on the report is still pending. Needless to say, the idea that the Shiv Sena’s spokesperson was going to engage Muchhala (among others) in a public debate hosted by the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind at the Marathi Patrakar Sangh struck me as a show I would do well not to miss. Would Raut really turn up? If so, in what language would he address a crowd of Urdu-speaking Muslims? I read the article again, but the Times of India didn’t give any details regarding the timing of the planned event. I googled around, but the handful of articles I found seemed more interested in the incongruous fact of Raut’s speaking at a JIH event than in details about when and how to attend it.43

I forwarded the article to a few contacts, asking if anyone knew anything about it. A few minutes later, I received a WhatsApp response from Junaid (the Urdu scholar I’d met during Sayeed’s election campaign a few years earlier): a digital poster advertising the event, which (curiously) did not mention any of the names of the speakers listed in the Times of India announcement (Muchhala, for instance) but instead included a long list of the twenty community organizations and NGOs whose charitable contributions had made the meeting possible. While most of the sponsoring groups were Islamic organizations, there was a motley crew of others as well, including a Catholic charity, a police reform advocacy group, an association of human rights lawyers, and a Sai Baba devotional association. In contrast to the “you’re-not-going-to-believe-this” tone and substance of the Times of India’s announcement, the WhatsApp poster advertising the program seemed to have different goals: not to sell newspapers (or earn “clicks”) but rather to fill a room. As earlier chapters have demonstrated, people tend to turn up at some or another event when the event has been endorsed or supported by a known and trusted organization or “main,” and when an invitation has been extended personally, over WhatsApp—rather than broadcast over Facebook or advertised in the media. The event’s organizers appeared to be assembling a media-facing event in which the Shiv Sena spokesperson would address a distinctly Muslim crowd.

At first blush, the event’s goals appeared identical to those of the previous week’s delegation to the chief minster: “to clear misconceptions floating around on social media,” as JIH spokesperson Salim Khan explained to reporters.44 But although these sorts of meetings with delegations of Muslim leaders to hear petitions or “community concerns” had become a staple of Shiv Sena politics in post-riot Mumbai, this was something different: this time, a Shiv Sena spokesperson would be meeting Muslim Mumbaikars on their own turf, as an invited guest to a “debate”—rather than as a host receiving a petitioning supplicant.

I arrive at the Marathi Patrakar Sangh at 5:45—fifteen minutes before the advertised start time—and a friendly fellow seated at a card table downstairs asks me to sign my name in a register before he directs me to the third floor. The room is freezing—the air-conditioning turned up high in anticipation of the rush of warm bodies. Media people are futzing with cameras at the back of the room, but most of the three hundred or so stage-facing chairs are still empty. I head back outside, where I wait in the warm evening breeze as watch as people arrive and mill about excitedly, greeting one another. Junaid arrives around 6:30, flanked by Kareem Enginwala—the scrap-dealer-turned-real estate-investor I’d met during Sayeed’s election campaign—and by that time the room is packed. It strikes me that, for a Bombay crowd, this one is remarkably punctual, presumably because Sanjay Raut is coming. A section at the back has been designated for “ladies,” and forty (or so) hijab-clad women are seated there. The rest of the crowd is mostly men, less than half of whom display any visible signs of Muslim identity (caps and so on). I sit down next to Junaid (himself a practicing Muslim but not visibly so), eager to avail myself of the poet-scholar’s boundless “who’s who” knowledge of Muslim Mumbai—and also to be within earshot of his incisive and witty commentary. “Who are all these people?,” I ask Junaid. “Are they mostly Muslims?” “Mostly,” he says, looking around; “Maybe two-thirds.” Behind the stage is an enormous printed poster that reads (in English):

Relationship between CAA, NPR and NRC

A dialogue to understand constitutional implications and line of action

At the right side of the poster are listed the names of three “Guests of Honor”: Shiv Sena spokesperson Sanjay Raut, Peoples Union of Civil Liberties president Mihir Desai, and Yusuf Muchhala, whose contribution to the evening’s events is labeled “Presidential Speech.” Beneath Muchhala’s name appears the long list of sponsors that I’d seen on the digital poster. A podium has been arranged at the right side of the stage, and at the center of the stage is a long table covered with a white satin cloth. Behind the table is a line of eight red, audience-facing chairs and behind the chairs, men mill about chatting amicably, clasping hands. The first two rows are reserved for media people, and in the row just in front of us is a cast of characters that changes continuously throughout the introductory remarks and first few speakers. Raut is nowhere to be seen, and indeed, it is not until he arrives (midway through the third speaker) that the crowd settles down.

A slim man in a brown cap takes the podium, and Junaid identifies him for me as JIH Mumbai president, Abdul Haseeb Bhatkar (this was a few weeks before my earlier-recounted meeting with him). Bhatkar speaks in measured, polite Urdu, rehearsing the purpose and agenda of tonight’s gathering: “People are pareshaan [troubled, disturbed],” he begins, because they don’t understand the relationship between these things—the CAA, NRC, NPR. “Is this a policy of inclusion or exclusion?” The thrust of his speech is that—contrary to so much speculation—the combination of policies and procedures will affect all Indians, not only Muslims.

The next person to take the dais is advocate Mihir Desai,45 who speaks fast, in a Bombay-style mix of Hindi and English, and cuts to the chase—listing the “three questions that is in each of our minds”: What is this CAA, and whom will it affect? What’s this National Population Registry exercise that’s slated to begin in April, and what’s the connection to the National Citizenship Registry? And third, what is the purpose of this National Citizenship Registry anyway? He begins on a philosophical note: “What is citizenship? It’s the right to have rights. The right to speak, the right to vote.” He explains to the crowd that all the other rights depend on this one thing, citizenship. He gives a breakneck-speed history of India’s changing citizenship laws over time. The Indian Constitution outlines various paths to citizenship: until 1987 it was only through birthright; then in 1987 it was birth plus one parent had to be citizen; then in 2004 it was that the other parent couldn’t be illegally in India—where “illegally” means overstaying a visa or having crossed illegally, without proper documents. But see, Desai explains, this is where things get tricky, because it’s not possible to prove that someone crossed illegally if they don’t have documents; so the NRC is a way of shifting the burden of proof to everyone individually. “In a country where 70 percent of people don’t have birth certificates, this is a big deal.” And of course this is no surprise; since migrant laborers can’t prove their residence, where on earth would they get birth proof? So who will be excluded? Not just Muslims, of course; the poor don’t have documents more generally. He ends on the same note as Bhatkar: this is not merely a “Muslim issue.”

I’m rapt by Desai’s take-it-to-the-mat outline of the scope and scale of the matter, and glance over at Junaid to gauge his response. But Junaid doesn’t appear to be listening. Rather, he’s tapping away at his phone: he’s clicked a photo of the stage and is posting it to a WhatsApp group along with a message about the lineup of speakers and Raut’s anticipated arrival. For Junaid, the import of the evening appears to inhere less in what’s said (after all, what Desai was saying was hardly news) but rather in the fact of the event itself. I look around to see that nearly everyone is texting. I steal a glance at Enginwala’s phone screen (he’s seated to my right) to find he’s scrolling through an article about high-end wristwatches.

The next speaker, a black-hatted fellow with a long white beard that matches his bright white button-down, is introduced as Maulana Daryabadi.46 I whisper to Junaid: “Who’s he?” “He stays in Bhendi Bazaar,” says Junaid, suggesting that in this context, the geographic location of Daryabadi’s life and work in South Bombay’s Bhendi Bazaar market district is the maulana’s most notable and identifying characteristic. (A quick Google search identifies Daryabadi as general secretary of the All India Ulema Council, Mumbai, the organization where the young Sayeed had volunteered after the riots awakened his political consciousness; see Interlude II). Daryabadi begins, and at this point the speeches are becoming repetitive—“They’re trying to divide our country with this unconstitutional and discriminatory citizenship law, but anyway it’s a misunderstanding that this only impacts Muslims.” I glance down at my phone and see that Jyoti Punwani has responded to my message asking whether she’s coming. “Only to listen to Raut,” she writes.

A tall, bespectacled fellow in a smart woolen waistcoat and a furry black cap boisterously breezes in while Daryabadi is speaking—smiling and greeting people loudly, seemingly oblivious to Daryabadi’s in-progress oration. An usher directs him to a seat in the press section, directly in front of us. I throw Junaid a puzzled glance, and he rolls his eyes, chuckles, and whispers that he’ll tell me about this fellow later on. Then suddenly everyone is on their feet and the room is filled with camera flashes. Amid a handful of large bodyguard-looking men is Raut. Dressed smartly in a gray waistcoat and white button-down (with ready-for-business rolled-up sleeves), Raut is confident and compact in stature, with a thick mop of jet-black hair and an extraordinary, impressive mustache. The furry-hatted fellow who arrived just a few moments earlier leaps to his feet and strides past the bodyguards to wrap Raut in a high-profile bear hug; Raut seems to recognize the man and reciprocates the embrace while cameras flash. Unable to contain my curiosity, I turn this time to Enginwala: “Who is he?” Enginwala, seemingly as unimpressed by the fellow as Junaid, tells me the man’s name is Hashmi, and—with a dismissive handwave—adds that “he edits a magazine.” I make a mental note to follow up and turn my attention back to Raut, who is receiving a rock star’s welcome—as much by the giddy-on-its-feet audience as by the camera-happy media—as he makes his way up onto the stage.

Raut is introduced by retired justice Khosle Patil—the Alliance’s Maharashtra convener—who opens his remarks by attributing credit to Raut for orchestrating the Shiv Sena’s bold split from its erstwhile ally, the BJP. After Patil’s short, rambling speech to an increasingly impatient audience, Raut takes the podium. The room falls silent. He begins with a laugh and a smile, asking—in Marathi—the question that was at the forefront of my mind as well: “In which language should I speak?” The audience responds with nervous laughter and responds with a mix of shouted responses—“Hindi!” “Marathi!” Raut, visibly enjoying himself, begins in Marathi: “This program is in Mumbai, at the Marathi Patrakar Sangh,” he says slowly, speaking over the sound of the murmuring audience, “so I will have to at least start in Marathi.” The crowd erupts into relieved laughter. Raut—a master showman—waits until they are quiet before continuing. “You’re all Mumbai residents,” he says, his poignantly cheeky reference to the darker context of this meeting—which is animated precisely by concerns about proving residence—elicits a wave of affirmative murmurs and applause from the audience, “which means that you all know Marathi. You all understand Marathi and can speak it also. I know this because whenever you come to [the Shiv Sena offices]—when you come to Saamna or to meet Uddhav—then you all speak in Marathi.” The audience is rapt, responding with laughter and shouts of “Yes! We know Marathi! We can speak in Marathi!” Raut pauses before adding that “today, circumstances are such that I am happy that you have welcomed me,” this last phrase powerfully reframing what could be taken as an act of concession (the Marathi chauvinist party spokesperson addressing a Hindi/Urdu-speaking audience in their own language) not as an act of deference but rather of reciprocity: when the Hindi speakers come to the Sena offices they speak in Marathi; thus, as an invited guest at a Jamaat-e-Islami Hind–hosted meeting, he will speak in Hindi.

Raut continues, switching to Hindi: “Khosle Patil has said—rightly said—‘Don’t be afraid’ [Daro mat]. I have also come to say this—that the one who gets scared is dead [jo dar gaya mar gaya].” Raut pauses to wait for the roar of applause to subside, before adding: “Being scared is not permitted [darna mana hai].” This is the overarching theme of Raut’s twenty-minute speech, whose breathtaking irony was noted by Punwani in the next day’s paper: “Here was the spokesman of a party which had terrorized Muslims for the better part of its existence, asking them not to be afraid.”47 “Stand up!,” Raut told the mostly Muslim audience, “but don’t just stand for your own religion. We are all citizens of this country, and wherever there is injustice on each other then we must stand for each other. They [i.e., BJP leaders] are afraid of this—that if we stand up for each other, then what will happen to them? And in any event,” Raut added in a remark so audacious that it took my breath away, “the Shiv Sena’s relationship with the law is different. You all know this. We don’t think much about the law. The law is only on paper [kaaghaz pe]. Our laws are different.” The significance of Raut’s words—judging by the gasps of surprise and outburst of shocked laughter—was not lost on this crowd of mostly Muslim Mumbaikars, who had so often been on the receiving end of the Shiv Sena’s disregard for the law. “We’re not afraid of any law,” Raut continued, “and you shouldn’t be either. Nothing is going to happen. Nothing is going to happen. So remove the fear from your hearts!” He hammered home the point that, as long as the Shiv Sena was in power in Maharashtra, Muslims had nothing to fear from any law: “On behalf of Uddhav Thackeray, I say that there is no reason to be scared. We are with you. Bhiyu naka! [Do not fear!],” Raut concluded, speaking the final words in Marathi—bringing the crowd to its feet with cheers and applause.

Raut steps away from the dais and back toward his place at the table next to Muchhala, where—whether on the inspiration of Justice Patil or that of the media people (in the excited commotion it was hard to tell)—the seven men lift their arms high into the air, posing for a victory photo. It’s a baffling image: Shiv Sena spokesperson Sanjay Raut sharing a victory pose with Yusuf Muchhala—the advocate who had worked for decades to bring to justice Shiv Sena leaders deemed responsible for the 1992–93 violence—at a JIH-hosted function. After the photo, Raut and his entourage of bodyguards and camera-toting others make their way up the aisle and out of the room, glad-handing along the way. Hashmi dives in for another hug. Most of the media people follow Raut out of the room, along with a significant portion of the audience. I follow too, completely forgetting—in the heady commotion—that Muchhala is scheduled to deliver the “Presidential Speech” next. Standing outside, I message Junaid, who tells me Muchhala has just finished his speech—which only then do I realize I’ve missed. Kicking myself, I wait outside for Junaid, hoping he might tell me what Muchhala has said—and also perhaps tell me about this Raut-hugging Hashmi.

Junaid and I chat as we walk toward the train station. He tells me that Muchhala’s speech was, predictably, a little critical, pointing out that while Raut had said “Daro mat” (“Don’t be afraid”), he had been silent on the matter of an official resolution against implementing the CAA-NCR in Maharashtra; and of course Muchhala had also pointed out (as if this audience needed to be reminded) that the Shiv Sena hadn’t been terribly helpful as far as implementing the Srikrishna Commission report was concerned. Overall, however, the tone of Muchhala’s speech was that the Shiv Sena seems to be open and willing to be helpful now. It was hardly a ringing endorsement, but coming from Muchhala, it was remarkable.

I cut to the question that’s burning in my mind: What’s the story with this hatted fellow Hashmi and his apparent desire to be seen at a public gathering hugging Sanjay Raut? Junaid laughs and waves his hand dismissively: “He’s a chamcha.” Literally meaning “spoon,” chamcha is an epithet used to suggest that someone is shallow and lacking in substance, whose words and comportment are just for show—like the shininess of a spoon. Hashmi has a “glossy Urdu magazine,” Junaid explains (the characterization of the magazine as glossy echoing his characterization of the man; Junaid is a poet, after all), which is why he was sitting in the press section. The magazine is vacuous in terms of content, Junaid tells me, but Hashmi gets “political people” like Raut to pay for advertisements. “It’s good PR for Raut and his ilk,” Junaid continues, “because they like to show that they’re good friends with a maulana-type person. But Hashmi’s not actually a maulana or even a devout person. He’s a businessman. But people like Raut can’t tell the difference,” Junaid says dryly, “because he dresses like a religious type. Hat and all.” I ask Junaid about Hashmi’s business, and he tells me that Hashmi has recently returned from Saudi Arabia—from Mecca, where he had a tailoring business. Earlier he had been a ladies’ tailor here in Bombay, where he worked in the film industry. He also had a shop in South Bombay that grew popular among visitors from the Gulf; so eventually he moved his business to Mecca. He returned a few years ago, after learning Arabic, cultivating a Gulf aesthetic in dress and comportment. He runs a travel business now, processing visas and making arrangements for Mecca-bound pilgrims. He needs government contacts for his travel business—visa processing and so on—so that’s why he’s always trying to please these political people. “He’s a dalal,” Junaid tells me—a “broker”48—disdainfully summing up his critique of the man as two-faced: on the one hand, he is described as cultivating an impression of himself as a “devout person” in order to forge contacts with people like Raut (recently Hashmi had organized an Urdu cultural program, inviting BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS]49 leaders as guests of honor); on the other he uses those contacts in his private business, making a profit of others’ actual religiosity (i.e., Hajj pilgrims). Junaid surmised that all the Raut-hugging was to show off his cozy relations with Raut—a performance for this “who’s who” audience of Muslim Mumbaikars of his connections with powerful people.

While Junaid’s assessment of Hashmi is his personal assessment, the significance of the explication is less in its accuracy per se than in the broader relational landscape to which it gestures and to the moral evaluation it yields.50 Indeed, while the event at the Marathi Patrakar Sangh initially seemed to bear the trappings of a media-addressing affair (perhaps even a variety of press conference)—Mumbai news reporting on the event (and its unlikely guest speaker) the following morning was limited. While at least one Marathi paper had found the event itself noteworthy enough to announce in advance, the only post-event Marathi reporting was in Raut’s own paper, Saamna, which ran an article made up entirely of excerpts from Raut’s own speech and accompanied by the post-speech victory photo.51

The English-language press was little better. Except for Punwani’s substantive article,52 reporting mostly rehearsed the “get-a-load-of-this” fact that Raut had accepted an invitation to speak at a JIH function at all: Indian Express devoted significant space in its brief write-up to Raut’s laugh-line statement that “There was a question among people whether I will come to the event or not when this organization invited me.” The Mumbai Mirror’s post-event coverage merely printed the victory photo, accompanied by a caption and a three-sentence text box.53 Coverage by the Urdu media, by contrast, thoroughly detailed what had been said and by whom: “Jamaat-e-Islami Mumbai made a wonderful effort to bring all sects and groups onto one platform,” a Mumbai Urdu News reporter wrote;54 Inquilab devoted most of its long article to direct quotations from the various speakers, giving equal space to Raut, Patil, Muchhwala, Daryabadi, and Desai.55 And while the Urdu papers published images of the onstage speakers, selected images were not of the victory shot but rather of Raut addressing the gathering (and his co-panelists) from the podium.

Judging from the media coverage the event appears to have been the site of multiple agendas and took on different meanings for its myriad audiences. On the one hand, the Shiv Sena’s (and Raut’s) erstwhile animosity toward Muslim Mumbai meant that some old-timers might need to be “convinced” that they could trust this professedly “secular” coalition government led by their not-so-long-ago-after-all antagonists.56 In this spirit, by inviting Raut to engage in a friendly “dialogue,” JIH leaders (who were at the forefront of the anti-CAA campaign in Bombay) sought to demonstrate to Muslim Mumbaikars that they were now batting for the same team. Inviting Raut to share the stage on Muslim Mumbai’s own turf—at a JIH function chockabloc with prominent Mumbai Muslim personalities—afforded an opportunity for a performative enactment of this new relationship that worked in both directions. That this event was not taking place on the Shiv Sena’s “home turf” was acknowledged by Raut himself when he conceded to speak in Hindi as an act not of necessity but of reciprocity. Just as Muslim delegations to Shiv Sena offices make their petitions and requests in Marathi, Raut explains, he would extend the same linguistic courtesy to his Hindustani-speaking hosts. The JIH-hosted “dialogue” with Raut sought to enact this new relationship between the Shiv Sena and Muslim Mumbai—a staging (quite literally) of these reconfigured relations of representation. Raut’s concluding onstage pronouncement (uttered in Hindi, no less) that “there is no reason to be scared. We are with you”57 was less an effort to persuade the audience than to describe what his preceding twenty-minute onstage performance had sought to accomplish, with the victory photo (which was prompted by Raut’s own media team) seeking to testify to the success of Raut’s performance when it appeared the following morning on the front page of Saamna.

I was initially puzzled by the dearth of media coverage—puzzlement that brought to my attention (and called into question) my own latent, wrongheaded presumption that mediated communication with non-present publics was the point of the gathering (which, after all, was hosted by a journalists association). Closer consideration suggests that, while I hadn’t been entirely mistaken, the material infrastructures of mediation in question were not merely (or even primarily) the cameras and headlines, but rather (and also) the social-communicative relations embodied by the people in the room: the association leaders, religious scholars, businesspeople, and other trusted “mains” whose words were quoted in the Urdu news and who—it was hoped—might go on to reassure their friends and neighbors and clients and students that, with the Shiv Sena in power, Muslim Mumbai had nothing to fear and that there was no need to demonstrate the strength of their numbers by gathering in the street. “Stop counting your numbers,” Raut had said (echoing Uddhav’s appeal to the Muslim delegation the previous week to stop gathering for demonstrations), “because if you are 20 crore [200 million], we too are 110 crore [1.1 billion]. Instead of counting our respective numbers, we must fight together for the country, all 130 crore [1.3 billion] of us.”58 In some ways, and notwithstanding the disparaging valences of the words, Junaid’s characterization of Hashmi as a “chamcha” and a “broker” (for using contacts with powerful people born of a cultivated public performance of “Islamic credentials” for private purposes) seems to describe the ambivalent valence of this entire event. On the one hand, posing for the victory shot with Raut, Muslim Mumbai played its part as “onstage extras” to Raut’s performance of his relations with this political constituency. And at the same time, Muchhala’s conclusion that the Shiv Sena “seems to be open and willing to be helpful now” suggests that this just-reaffirmed relationship can (and by Muchhala’s reckoning ought) to be put to instrumental use in advancing the interests of Mumbai Muslims.

“To Silence Protests”

Notwithstanding the feel-good photos and what appeared to be a mutual willingness to be “helpful,” the Shiv Sena’s continued evasive stance regarding any Maharashtra resolution against the CAA-NRC combine was a reminder of the precarity of such verbal promises in a context where the survival of the governing coalition in Maharashtra hinged on the Shiv Sena’s not alienating its Hindutva-sympathetic cadre.59 What was more, just as Shiv Sena leaders vociferously condemned police antagonism toward protesters in BJP-controlled states, the Mumbai police’s own relationship with protesters began to show signs of strain. Just as Raut uttered strong words in support of anti-CAA protesters at the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind event—proclaiming that while the BJP was “trying to silence protests, . . . the youth of the country knows what is right and what is wrong”—only the previous day the Mumbai police had refused a request by feminist groups, LBGTQ+ activists, and Mumbai students for permission to hold a “Stand against CAA, NRC and NPR” rally on the occasion of the nineteenth-century feminist reformer Savitribai Phule’s birthday. The permission request letter had stated that the organizers expected up to a thousand people and therefore requested permission to use a microphone and loudspeaker. The police’s written response (in Marathi) not only denied the requested permission—citing concerns that a “problem of law and order [is] very likely to happen”—but issued a notification (and thinly veiled threat) under Section 149 of the Indian Penal Code: if the protesters were to gather anyway, in spite the event’s being denied permission, then anyone present at the gathering could be held liable for any “cognizable or indictable offense arising out of an anti-national act or statement” that might occur. The rally’s organizing committee (which included at least one young activist lawyer among its ranks), not to be intimidated by police threats that they could be charged with “anti-national” activity (and certainly not to be outmaneuvered), drafted a letter in response. “We have perused the contents of your letter/notice dated 1st Jan 2020 under section 149 of CRPC 1973, in response to our subject letter,” their (English-language) letter began, continuing:

In light of the contents of your letter, which do not deny permission to hold the peaceful protest as intimated by us, we presume that there is no objection to us going ahead with the protest. This is to clarify that there is no question that any anti-national, communal or unlawful content will be used in this peaceful protest by us which we are holding in accordance with our constitutional rights. However, if any outsiders or troublemakers try to create problems, the same is not our responsibility. Needless to state, that if any unlawful activity takes place at the hands of such outsiders or troublemakers, police are required to take any appropriate action against them as per law. We trust you will cooperate with us in this regard.

Having thus challenged the police’s attempt to preemptively place upon the protesters the burden of responsibility for any potential “unlawful activity” that might transpire—rhetorically tossing that burden like a hot potato right back onto the police before circulating the letter through social media, where it was published online60—the organizers proceeded with their rally, strategically changing the venue to a location where permission had not been officially denied, and dispensing with the permission-requiring sound system.

While the evening passed without incident, the next day’s media reporting (both traditional and digital) was full of raised eyebrows: while some wondered whether the permission-denial episode signaled a souring of relations between protesters and the police, others were focused the behind-the-scenes dynamics of permission-brokering, because another request for permission from the Mumbai police to demonstrate (against police brutality against anti-CAA demonstrators in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh) had been granted on the very same day. The latter gathering was convened by known personalities from South Bombay’s political class, including (notably and unsurprisingly) Muslim Mumbai’s go-to police whisperer, the Bombay Aman Committee. While transgender and feminist activists scrambled for a new location for their rally, the BAC-mediated gathering convened theirs directly outside the offices of the state government, (the Mantralaya) where they chanted “Mumbai Police Zindabad” (Long live the Mumbai police) and “UP Police Murdabad” (Down with the Uttar Pradesh police), praising the former for “restor[ing] people’s faith in democracy.”61 The Indian Express published articles side by side on the two gatherings, effectively inviting the reader to speculate over the meaning of the Mumbai police’s inconsistent position toward anti-CAA protests.

The more inscrutable and inconsistent police behavior became, the more vociferously protesters sought to attribute responsibility for the behavior of the police directly to the Shiv Sena—and even to Uddhav himself. Which is to say, protesters seemed less interested or concerned with figuring out what was really going on or what the police behavior was a sign of than in “controlling the narrative” regarding how police behavior should be widely interpreted, that is, as the hand of Uddhav. Whether or not Uddhav or the Shiv Sena government was actually behind the police’s behavior was anyone’s guess; after all, the acting Mumbai police commissioner had been appointed by the previous, BJP-led administration. But the unwavering assignment of responsibility for police behavior to the Shiv Sena landed Uddhav in a pickle.

Uddhav’s Pickle

Uddhav’s pickle erupted into a full-blown crisis a few days later when, following violent attacks by masked assailants on university students in Delhi, Mumbai students convened a late-night, unauthorized sit-in protest at Gateway of India—bang in the heart of Mumbai’s tourist district, right across from the iconic Taj Hotel. I woke on the morning of January 6 to find my WhatsApp chat groups flooded: dozens had been injured in the violence the previous evening on the JNU campus in Delhi—a traditional site of leftist activist politics and whose student leaders had been at the forefront of anti-CAA protests in that city. While all political parties condemned the violence (Congress blamed “fascists,” while the BJP pointed to leftist “forces of anarchy”),62 what was clear enough was that notwithstanding the university administration’s having alerted the Delhi police, the authorities stood by for hours while masked assailants roamed the campus with clubs and hockey sticks—characterized by opposition party leaders as deliberate government inaction. “What we are seeing on live TV is shocking and horrifying,” the Indian Express quoted Congress Party senior politician and former home minister P. Chidambaram; “Masked men enter JNU hostels and attack students. What is the Police doing? Where is the Police Commissioner? If it is happening on live TV, it is an act of impunity and can only happen with the support of the government.”63

At the time of the attacks, fifty or so of Mumbai’s more active anti-CAA activist-organizers had been gathered outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel in the western suburb of Santa Cruz, holding signs, singing protest songs, and handing out flowers as a preemptive token of gratitude to the “cooperative” Mumbai police officers standing guard outside the hotel64 where BJP minister Piyush Goyal was holding a “Dialogue over CAA” with Bombay-based film personalities (a notice of which had been leaked to the media).65 Viral images and videos of the violence at JNU flooded social media, and by 10:00 p.m., Mumbai student activists had circulated a social media “call for Occupying Gateway”:

Call for OCCUPYING GATEWAY

Appeal to all the Students/student groups

We the students of TISS [Tata Institute of Social Science], IIT [Bombay], University of Mumbai etc. have actively and successfully occupied the heart of the city at Gateway until we don’t know when! We need more representation across student groups/collectives/fronts. Please come and join in large numbers with your banners. We need food, warm clothes, newspapers and a lot of you here.

By 11:28, an IIT Bombay (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay) student activist group tweeted a video posting in which hundreds of student protesters were gathered; by 2:30 a.m., South Bombay hoteliers had sent food, water, and other provisions. Around 11:00 the next morning I called Feroze, who had spent the night at Gateway. “At 2:00 a.m. cops came to talk to us,” he told me. “They said, ‘We’ll give you another location. You can go to Azad maidan.’ But we said, ‘We’re not shifting,’ and they backed off.”

I reach Gateway of India around noon. Police are everywhere, milling about, smiling and laughing, and generally having fun, like it’s party. I wade into the crowd to get a feel for the energy, a sense of who is there, and (as there’s no sound system, only some megaphones floating around) to get closer to where I might hear the songs being sung, the poems being recited. In the crowd, I bump into a friend—a university professor who’s there with some of her students. We chat for a while, but before long, one of the squawking crows in the tree above us relieves itself on my head and I leave to search for paper towels. Making my way to the back of the crowd—between the people and the water—I come upon an open space where a group of students is painting signs: “TISS stands with JNU”; “Stop violence against students”; “Delhi police down down”; “Don’t turn universities into war zones.”

I take a few pictures before skirting along the edge of the crowd. The space where the crowd meets the road is thick with media people interviewing some or another politician or film personality. I click a photo of a young man who’s holding in the air a hand-drawn placard that reads “MUMBAI POLICE THANK YOU; DELHI POLICE SHAME ON YOU” (Figure 40). He has positioned himself so that his placard might be captured by media cameras trained on a person being interviewed (someone I don’t recognize). The young man is not in the crowd of protesters but rather in the media crowd (indeed, he is the sole placard carrier in the vicinity), signaling that the intended audience of his placard-mediated message—either the police allow us to stay here, or Mumbai is no different from Delhi—was perhaps not actually the explicit addressee of the message (i.e., the present police) but rather the Maharashtra government, whose orders any police action would ultimately be interpreted to reflect.

The placard gestured toward the delicate dance of images that was being played out at Gateway. In his press statement on the JNU attacks—made earlier that morning and immediately reported by the Mumbai media66—Uddhav had stated that “students are safe in Maharashtra” and that “nothing will happen to them.” When asked about the students gathered in protest at Gateway, he had responded: “I understand their rage . . . Shiv Sena is with young people, so they need not worry.” The “Mumbai Police Thank You; Delhi Police Shame On You” placard appeared as a holding-to-account on this promise that Mumbai was a safe space for student protest as well as a warning that police action toward student protesters would be the measure by which the government of Mumbai would be differentiated from that of Delhi. And indeed, the next morning, the Marathi daily Loksatta printed the chief minister’s statement that “students are safe in Maharashtra” snugly alongside an image of the “Mumbai Police Thank You; Delhi Police Shame On You” placard.67

I spent the evening following along on social media from home—the energetic singing and poetry, the dancing and speeches that continued through the night. For the most part the evening’s events were festive and celebratory (notwithstanding what Feroze later described as the “chaos” that broke out after the megaphones died). But things heated up after a young woman had held aloft a placard that read “FREE KASHMIR” and the image exploded on social media. When I woke on Tuesday morning, that poster seemed to be all anyone wanted to talk about. A Twitter spat had erupted after the BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis shot off a tweet in the wee hours: “How can we tolerate such separatist elements in Mumbai? ‘Free Kashmir’ slogan by Azadi gang at 2 kms from the [chief minister’s office]? Uddhavji are you going to tolerate this ‘Free Kashmir’ anti-India campaign right under your nose???”68 Fadnavis’s challenge drew a sharply chastising response from NCP’s Jayant Patil, who tweeted back (at 6:36 a.m.): “Devendraji, it’s ‘free Kashmir’ from all discriminations, bans on cellular networks and central control. I can’t believe that a responsible leader like you trying to confuse people by decoding words in such a hatred way. Is it losing power or losing self-control?”69

The woman holding the “Free Kashmir” sign—a Maharashtrian woman named Mehak Mirza Prabhu (the media was quick to note that Mehak is not Kashmiri)—was charged with posing a threat to “national integration” under Section 153B of the Indian Penal Code. In a tearful apology posted on Facebook, Mehak—a self-described “storyteller” by profession—explained that the separatist construal of the placard had been a misunderstanding; she had picked up the placard (which she claimed she hadn’t made herself), taking it to be a reference to freedom of speech for people in Kashmir in the context of the ongoing internet lockdown. “They should also have freedom to express themselves. So keeping this thing in mind, I picked up the placard,” she said. For its part, the Shiv Sena too came out in blazing support of Mehak’s self-accounting, Sanjay Raut claiming in a widely cited editorial in Saamna that “a Mumbaikar Marathi woman could understand the pain of Kashmiris. . . . If the Opposition [i.e., the BJP] and its supporters feel expressing yourself fearlessly is sedition, it is not good for them and the country.”70

By the time the “Free Kashmir” poster hullabaloo broke out, the image wars at Gateway were already heating up. By Monday evening, right-wing organizations had applied for police permission to hold their own event—not far from Gateway of India—in a protest demonstration against what was described as “left-wing violence” at JNU. “Allowing permission to some and denying others would not have sent the right signal,” a senior officer told the Indian Express, adding that “There was also a threat that there could be law and order problems if other protests were allowed.” The Indian Express further reported that at some point on “late Monday” evening—whether before or after Mehak picked up the “Free Kashmir” placard is anyone’s guess—“the top police brass, in consultation with the state government . . . decided to move the protesters from the [Gateway of India] site.”71

At 10:40 the following morning, the Mumbai police tweeted: “Dear Mumbaikars, Azad Maidan is the designated place for all agitations in South Mumbai. . . . However some agitators gathered at an important South Mumbai location for a long duration without any permission . . . thereby causing immense inconvenience to office going Mumbaikars, local residents, tourists & also caused major traffic congestion in the area. Despite repeated sincere endeavors from local police to convince them to relocate to Azad Maidan, they remained unreasonably adamant. Consequently, in the interest of the general public, they were relocated to Azad Maidan in a peaceful & professional manner.” After a few hours of WhatsApp posts reporting on the confusion inside Azad Maidan and debating about what do to next, at 3:02 that afternoon a WhatsApp post announced: “Just in—Protestors detained in Azad Maidan have been released.” A few minutes later, a student leader circulated a message announcing the time and place to convene that evening for a “debrief” meeting and to decide how and whether to reconvene the protest.

“We Need the Parties”

Around sixty people have turned up—mostly young people, as well as a handful of lawyers and activists like Feroze. The student leader who had called the meeting, a PhD student at TISS named Farid, announces that we should begin. We’re seated in a large hall, with chairs arranged in a large circle around the edges of the room. A young activist-lawyer named Leena opens the meeting with a recap of what happened earlier that day. They rounded up five hundred people and transported them to Azad Maidan, but overall it was nonviolent and the police behaved themselves. Students were detained inside Azad Maidan for a few hours to collect personal information before releasing them all a few hours ago. This wasn’t a violation of the students’ rights; the police are allowed to detain them for up to twenty-four hours. Since morning, there had been a lively debate on WhatsApp about what to do now. Should they reoccupy Gateway? Reconvene the protest at Azad Maidan? Something else? So that’s the agenda of the meeting. I’d seen the WhatsApp debate, and most seemed to agree that convening on Azad Maidan was pointless: “It could go on for months without anyone seeing or taking notice.”

Leena opens the floor, asking for reflections and thoughts. A young man raises his hand, introduces himself as Sameer, and tells us the name of his college. “I was there for twenty out of the thirty hours of the occupation,” he begins. “All was very good. Only problem was with coordination. People broke off into their own groups and factions; everyone was doing whatever they wanted [apni marzi]. There were so many conflicting messages—was it called off? The communication gap was a problem.” Next a young woman speaks, a recent college graduate named Paromita. She says, “I have three points,” and turns to the notebook where she’s written them down. “First, we need legal knowledge. We need to know who are our experts—who to ask when we have doubts. Second, we need do self-censorship, because one unconstitutional word and we’re done.” The crowd hums a bit at talk of censorship. Paromita continues: “Third, if media is pressing you for a byte, just give some vague statement.”

One of the HBKL organizers chimes in next, a young man named Arun. “People want to contribute, and that’s good,” he says, “but people need to know who to listen to. If someone wants to use this or that slogan—‘Free Kashmir’ or whatever—we need to figure out how to deal with this. Because see, I approached one person to say I thought her poster was inappropriate and she got angry, told me that she was expressing herself. . . . We need to have a team of volunteers [with legal knowledge],” he concludes. A young man raises his hand and recalls how he had been instructed by someone he didn’t know but who claimed to be an organizer, telling him that a “media blackout” had been declared and instructing him not to speak to any media people whatsoever. “But it’s not good to have a media blackout!,” he exclaimed with no little frustration, “because then the media can just give whatever bad press they want; but we need to control the narrative.”

Leena nods vigorously: “We need to coordinate, to curate the message. But how do we do that when the whole thing was unplanned? There was no coordination because we weren’t prepared for such a long duration. We didn’t know how long we’d stay. People just came spontaneously. But we need to make all decisions collectively because there are possible legal implications for all of us. If someone says something off-script and it goes viral? . . . Everything goes viral now. So we need to have leadership.” Feroze has been sitting quietly but now speaks up: “Speaking of leadership, I think we also made a mistake by not doing more to involve party people. We need the parties. If the parties had been involved, then things might have gone differently. We could have given each party some number of minutes to speak something. The netas [politicians], they all came to Gateway to support us but we didn’t let them speak! If we had let them speak then the cops wouldn’t have chased us off so quickly. It damages the movement to exclude the parties.” A young man pipes up: “But the netas will politicize it! They’ll make it a party thing!” A student leader quips: “And what’s so wrong with that?” He laughs and adds—presumably referring to Raut’s editorial—“Besides, the Shiv Sena’s messaging on the Kashmir thing was awesome.” Feroze nods his agreement: “Everyone has their role to play, even the parties. For instance, I could never have thought up Gateway of India as the right spot. That could only have come from a student.” Leena interjects with a laugh: “Actually, it wasn’t a student who thought of Gateway; it was an IT person, a marketing professional.” Everyone laughs. It’s getting late and people seem tired. Someone I don’t recognize chimes in: “Look, whatever happened at the end, Gateway went really well. And we can build on this, because now mahol ban gaya”—the atmosphere has been created, the scene set.72