One Year Since CAA-NRC Protests: What I Learned, What It Meant For My Activism

A year after protests against the CAA and NRC broke out in multiple cities across India, the message, the memory pierces through my bubble of privilege. The spectacle of liberal activism, and how it would manifest remain embedded in my mind. 

 

My cab got stuck in an excruciating traffic jam, quite typical of Bangalore. Then I saw the protestors emerging as a collective. They were equipped with banners, microphones and raging energy. I grabbed my poster, hurled cash at the cab driver and jumped out before he could return my change. In a matter of 30 minutes, the entire 250 metres leading up to the Townhall was packed.

 

 

 

The Crowd Was a Collective

 

The protest was a life form, inherently beautiful, articulating itself, defining its contours along the way. Earlier that morning, in the very same spot the protestors stood, police arrested 200 people. There was a chance of cops coming back, but this swarm of new bodies remained undeterred. An electric feeling of Hum leke rahenge, aazadi crackled through the air. We were uncertain how, and equally unsure of where the crowd was headed. Yet, the protest came together everywhere and encompassed each one of us. 

 

 

My friend struggled to spot me in the crowd. Men made sure other men weren’t crowding upon the women, making sure the sanctity of our space wasn’t violated, not even accidentally. Our fear of being arrested mixed in with our demand for justice. With every fervent call and response, the protest kept becoming.

 

 

Eventually, the police did arrive. The first line of protesters adorned the Indian national flag in defence as if to say: we are not anti-national. My section of the crowd couldn’t hear the exchange between the cops and the first line. We waited, half-expecting a violent reaction from the khadi-clad men and women. When I imagined marches, it was a pre-planned movement. The reality of having constant uncertainty of direction and location surprised me. As I looked around, I saw an endless crowd of bodies. I realised there were multiple sections just like mine wondering if they were in the right place, looking for a central axis, and waiting to be told what to do. 

 

When the police thronged into the crowd of protesters, you could feel the vapid multiplication of molecules; fear vibrated and resonated between strangers. Against the cops, we were a collective.

 

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Many Reasons; One Demand

 

For some, protesting on that day meant delving into political dissent without being branded anti-national. For others, it means a better economy and a functional social system. Personal reasons aside, we stood together to oppose an incursion on the secular fabric of India. A week before the protests started, the Citizenship Amendment Bill became an enforceable law. When read with the National Register of Citizens, it meant only Muslims would have to prove their citizenship and ancestry through ambiguous documents. Two hundred million citizens would potentially be stripped of their nationality un-democratically. 

 

My stomach turns at the seeming neutrality in this legal prose. How it circumcises all the blood that will spill between enactment and implementation. How legalese normalised the blatant hatred of minorities, detention centres, rapid internet shut-offs and police brutality.

 

Many Indians felt the same as me, and within a week of the law passing, the internet blew up with venues and timings for city-wise protests. The days preceding and following these marches were a waking nightmare of police brutality. Cops declared Section 144 wherever peaceful demonstrations took place. Still, hundreds gathered to defy an active governmental order to not do precisely that. We were scared of repercussions. But, we knew the state was wrong to squash dissent. The collective fear and frustration galvanised into anger.

 

Circled by Cops

At the Townhall, cops surrounded us with empty police buses stationed and barricades. They settled in to observe a peaceful crowd seating themselves on the road. The night before, they detained a group of law students for holding candlelight protests against the imposition of Section 144. The obstacle deliberately placed to keep us from protesting was also part of the rally.

 

Our Nation, Our Home, Our Responsibility

To me, these protests signalled a remarkable infusion of righteous anger and secular empathy; a collective realisation of how urgent this march was, and how late we have arrived at it. Between hurried print outs of tweets and the confusion in time, place and method – the rally was nervous and angry and disorganised. And yet, when the crowd suddenly broke into a song, hogi shaanti chaaron oor ek din, a high tide of hope washed by us. 

 

 

Suddenly, we were marching towards the Townhall as the crowd shouted nyaya! in rhythm. We walked past bystanders on the pavement and people photographing us from their balconies that had clothes drying out from railings. Hamaare ghar mein gandagi nahi phailaane denge shouts a woman into the microphone as we sat on the road, hard concrete biting into our knees and ankles. The sun rose and set, a police officer approached her and pleaded with protesters to disperse. People embraced each other as food and water were passed around. We stayed.

 

A Single Message Put Out In Many Different Ways

 

 

Banners swam across the mass, and I was thoroughly amused by them. One said kisi ke baap ka Hindustan thodi hai, another declared Secular Republic, not Hindu Rashtra. A man with a hipster man-bun held one that simply said I’m upset. I had a copy of the Preamble hurriedly stained with red lip gloss in the cab. So bad, even the privileged are here. Eat faeces, fascists. At least four banners drew the prime minister’s face next to Hitler’s. One was a photo of Marie Kondo saying this government doesn’t spark joy. Another said I’d rather die than accept CAA + NRC. These signs of cardboard, chart paper, A4 printouts were funny, joyous and fearless. But more than the police, the media, and the politicians, the signs were for us.

 

 

Police Were Not Our Protectors

 

The march to the Townhall was slow and haphazard, and it stalled often. I later learnt that somewhere, women circled men to protect them from arrests, and somewhere else, men circled women to enable safe movement. People watched over each other because everybody’s safety was at stake. We knew the fate of the students in Jamia, or the people in Kashmir and Assam. Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad saw similar peaceful protests. 

 

In a different city, two students were shot in protests like the one I attended. The police weren’t politely requesting dispersion there. They were charging lathis and launching tear gas shells and bullets. On my way to the protest, I spoke to two lawyers and had multiple friends track my location; I prepped first aid, pepper spray, mini food bars, and water. My over preparedness should have inundated me from fear, but it didn’t. I was preparing to attend the protest and simultaneously readying myself to flee.

 

 

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Recording What The State Doesn’t Want To See is Activism.

 

 

There were more phones out than banners. People were recording, taking pictures, documenting every part of their presence. This is a typical millennial habit, one we get a lot of flack for, but that day I associated no scorn with it. Recording a protest is marking your presence in it, and perhaps without that marker, we wouldn’t be protesting at all. With the government actively shutting down internet access in Kashmir, Assam, UP and parts of Delhi for protests, taking a picture at the march isn’t just pay off for activism – it is activism. The revolution may not be televised, but it will be retweeted and reposted.

 

Privilege and Activism

 

Mine was not the loudest voice in the crowd, nor the first one to be arrested. I was not the first one to call out a rotten political conscience. By the time I spoke up, my narrative was reaffirming an already brimming vessel of anger – I spoke neither to cajole that anger nor stir it. 

 

I didn’t need to be the loudest voice. My presence did not inoculate me from my Hindu privilege. My Hindu privilege did not protect me from the lack of safety afforded to a woman in this country. The stakes are always higher for someone else. The CAA doesn’t just target Muslims and dissenters; it threatens multiple marginalised communities: the poor, the indigenous, the tribal, and trans folks.

 

This is not to say that privilege signifies immersion in self-pity, that privilege itself cannot be free of self-critique and self-awareness. This is to also say that the naive optimism of “secularism” in our Preamble looks very complicated on the ground. Privilege leaves room for indifference and false equivalencies. It often makes a lot of us myopic and apolitical.

 

A reporter asked protesters about their views on the CAA and NRC. I wonder if it’s ever possible to arrive at fundamentally divisive issues like these impartially. To me, political antipathy is like travelling to the opposite end of your intellectual spectrum and burying yourself there.

 

Protest As An Antidote to Political Apathy

The march was unplanned and disrupted; it was full of flawed execution, unlearnt slogans, and tired people. But the protest happened, here and everywhere across India. That matters. 

 

Without the march- there’d be a blank apolitical vacuum where collective activism needs to be. If the parade hadn’t happened — if we too had our internet cut off — we’d all be singular, isolated vessels of despair and disbelief.

 

A Small Start Leading to Big Change

 

The truth about millennial activism is that it may start small on phone screens, but collectively, it is infinite. It’s filled with small acts of resistance and boring acts of preparation. What snacks to take? Should I tell my boss? When will friends reach you? Should I retweet this? What if nobody shows up? What if an entire minority is swept into a detention centre one day and nobody protests at all?

 

We are asking big questions about identities and small ones about itineraries. It’s confusing and imperfect and messy – but the mess isn’t a fault, its magnificence.

 

Realising What Activism Means To Me

 

My activism always felt inadequate and apathetic to me. On my walk home, I realised it doesn’t need to be perfect, I just need to start. Sitting on a hot road with no cell connectivity and being surrounded by hundreds of people, each wondering when we’ll move- that felt like a start. 

 

As I write this in its aftermath, the march is something mystical and glorious. I have to strain my memory to remember the scratches in logistics or the probable repercussions. Profound, glorious, human words spoken at the protest reverberated through every cell of the people listening. You could feel democracy step out of our constitution books and show up in person – precious and fragile and desperately in need of preservation.

 

When I heard my own voice chant aazaadi with the crowd, I felt the cathartic fullness of crowdsourced activism.

 

Our processional had no standard itinerary, and nobody was sure of where the march was going. That didn’t deter anyone. The crowd rerouted venues and recalibrated slogans and retook pictures: we were the march, and it was us.

 

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An unedited version of this piece was first published in The Unography Mag.

About the Author: Sristi Bose is a writer and photographer based in India. She is the co-founder of The Unography Mag, a curator collective running something akin to a local art gallery on the internet. She believes in neutrals, poetry, and above all- that everything is beautiful with the right light in the right place.