The Grannies of Shaheen Bagh: Hindutva Power and the Poetics of Dissent in Contemporary India

Abstract

The last three to four decades have seen a marked increase in a whole host of social, political, and cultural tendencies in India that are collectively referred to in the political argot of the country as “communalism”: the “Hinduization” of regional and national politics; the socially and culturally separatist tendencies among religious minorities, especially Muslims and even Sikhs; the social and political marginalization of minorities; repeated outbreaks of interreligious conflict; organized acts of mass pogrom-like violence. The most visible sign of these transformations is the rise to prominence and power of the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party; BJP), whose current stint of national power started in 2014, but they have a much wider social, political, and cultural scope. At the core of the far-right-wing Hindu-nationalist social and political ecology throughout the history of postcolonial India has been the neofascist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Organization; RSS), founded in open imitation of the Italian fascists in the 1920s and inspired a decade later by Hitler's systematic expulsion of Jews from German society (Basu et al. 1993: 25–27). The RSS exercises more or less direct control over a now vast group of large and small organizations informally referred to as the sañgh parīvār, or “family” of the Sangh. It is now openly acknowledged that since its founding in 1980, the BJP has simply been the political-electoral wing of the RSS, as, for instance, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council; VHP) is its religio-cultural subsidiary and the Bajrang Dal (Hanuman Brigade) consists of its street-level enforcers. Since the 1980s, scholars in several disciplines have been tracking this rise of the politics of Hindutva—literally, “Hinduness,” but signifying majoritarian and supremacist Hindu nationalism (see Gopal 1991; Ludden 2005; Hansen 1999; Jaffrelot 1996; Van Der Veer 1994; Basu 2020). Even when the Congress Party has been in power in these decades, it has not been able to dent significantly this rise of Hindutva as a whole, and it has itself engaged in communalist politics repeatedly over the decades—most notoriously in perpetrating the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984—despite having been officially committed for well over a century to the secular nature of Indian politics and state. This essay is an attempt to explore some of the preoccupations and modalities of what we might call Hindutva power, both in some of its social-capillary (that is, ground-level) and state-sovereign forms. Wherever and whenever in contemporary India we observe the political and social consolidation of Hinduness across a range of social fissures and hierarchies through the crafting of distinctions from “other” modes of being, we are likely witnessing the exercise of Hindutva power. In addition, this essay also seeks to explore some of the modes of dissent, challenge, and resistance to Hindutva power that have emerged in recent years.

Contemporary Hindutva politics are anchored in a concept of the indigenous—which makes possible a powerful cultural machinery for distinguishing the native from the alien in a whole host of social and cultural fields, including linguistic usage, religious beliefs and practices, cultural and historical imaginaries, social and cultural institutions, and demographics itself. In the all-consuming power of this concept, which appears to be able to divide in this manner any field it encounters, the ideological complex of Hindutva departs even from some of its acknowledged (and much revered) antecedents, such as Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966), who put the idea itself into wide circulation for the first time. To take one example, in his pamphlet Hindutva (first published in 1923), which is the classic programmatic text of the whole movement, Savarkar ([1923] 2003) has no problem in conceiving of the Vedic peoples, to whom he refers, with the Vedic term Aryans, as outsiders who entered India from the West and eventually blended with the indigenous population to create a single, though hierarchical, society—something that is largely anathema in the contemporary discourse with its obsession with indigeneity, and a huge ideological effort has been undertaken in recent years to refute the so-called Aryan Invasion (or Migration) Theory (see Doniger 2009; Swadeshi Indology 2019). In the latest phase, this has even led to the use of advanced paleo-genetics to establish the genetic (that is, racial) purity and continuity of the population of the subcontinent (see Shinde et al. 2019). In this project of indigenization, not surprisingly, the most energy has been expended on rendering anything marked “Muslim” as alien to India and destructive of its national coherence and continuity, a gargantuan and inherently contradictory task, directed as it is at a population mostly of descendants of converts from the lower rungs of Indian caste society. Both “Hindu” (marked as indigenous) and “Muslim” (marked as alien) in contemporary discourse are enormous fabrications that either conceal or try to entirely eradicate highly differentiated fields of social and cultural experience. Above all, what these religious designations seek to conceal is the politics of caste, arguably the most violent dimension of social relations across the societies of the subcontinent (see Lee 2021).

Possibly the most spectacular event in this wider historical process, including in the theatrical sense of the word, was the destruction on December 6, 1992, of the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque in the town of Ayodhya in north India, as the culmination of a yearslong systematic mobilization headed by BJP and RSS leadership to demolish the mosque and replace it with a Hindu temple dedicated to the god Rama (see Gopal 1991). In the vast, heterogeneous, and ancient epic tradition associated with Rama, he is the prince of Ayodhya, and the movement rests on the claim that the mosque was built during the reign of the first Mughal Emperor, Babur (1483–1530), on the exact place of Rama's birth (Rāmjanmabhūmī) after the temple that had marked the spot was demolished (see Thapar 1991; Doniger 2009). News footage showed that the final attack was planned well in advance and executed with discipline, by militants including RSS cadres in uniform, with state and federal security forces involved in the coordination (see Business Standard 2017).

After decades of legal wrangling, the temple is now being built with the imprimatur of a Supreme Court decision, after the performance of bhūmīpūjan, or ritual sacralization of the ground and the construction, by a sitting prime minister himself in the company of priests and the leading and most notorious figures of his party and movement, including the head of the RSS. Finally successful in Ayodhya, the temple movement has moved on to other mosques, including one in Varanasi (Benares) and another in Mathura, both of which now seem headed inexorably toward the same fate as the one in Ayodhya. In the former case, the campaign has resulted in the supposed discovery of a shivliñg (Shiva lingam) in the basement, leading to a somewhat bizarre polemic in the public sphere about whether it is a phallic fertility symbol or a fountain. And even the iconic Taj Mahal has now appeared on the demolitionist wish list. The demolition of the Babri Masjid and the outbreak of widespread violence in its wake in 1992–93 represented a significant event in the history of the subcontinent as a whole, seeming to have momentarily erased the boundaries instituted at the Partition of India in 1947, producing, forty-five years after the partition, a subcontinent-wide map of communal violence, with tit-for-tat riots and acts of violence on both sides of the border. In Bombay, anti-Muslim pogroms led to counterviolence in the form of bombings across the city apparently carried out by a Muslim organized-crime syndicate. The full significance of the Babri Masjid event is not as the destruction of a place of worship of one religious community by members of another, a specific case of violation of the rights of a minority. The destruction of this somewhat undistinguished late medieval structure carried meaning far beyond itself. As I have argued elsewhere, what appeared to have come crashing down that day, without the change of a single word in the Constitution of India, was “the structure of secular citizenship itself” (Mufti 2007: 2). The monumental nature of this event has lent a certain sense of historical inevitability to a decisive shift in the place of Muslims and other minorities in the space of Indian citizenship and nationhood.

Ayodhya was thus a turning point in the history of majoritarianism and struggles for minority rights in India and in the history of the Indian state as such. Beyond the comings and goings of political parties and coalitions at both the state and federal levels, the road from Ayodhya has been marked by the steady intensification of the symptoms of majoritarianism and the fraying of the very fabric of society. After 9/11, the distinctly Indian variety of anti-Muslim ideology coalesced with the global trends that are now referred to as Islamophobia. This new international imprimatur for a set of tawdry local prejudices sometimes creates hilarious misunderstandings and acts of overreach. In 2020, some Indians residing in the United Arab Emirates were called to account by an Emirati princess for openly participating in violently Islamophobic banter on social media platforms and reminded that they lived and worked in an officially Muslim country and under sufferance of its government, reducing them to awkward silence (see “UAE” 2020). And domestic and foreign policy crashed into each other in the summer of 2022 when a senior BJP spokesperson's derogatory remarks on TV about the Prophet of Islam's sexual morality—replicating motifs from the notorious “Rangeela Rasool” (“The Colorful Prophet”) controversy nearly a hundred years ago—caused diplomatic uproar in India's relations with countries of the Islamic Middle East, leading to an embarrassing retreat and the firing of the individual, with a strong statement of the party's commitment to respecting Islam and all religions that produced paroxysms of despair among many of its constitutionally anti-Muslim followers. Since the BJP's return to power in 2014 under the leadership of Narendra Modi, some invisible Rubicon has been crossed seemingly forever. Open calls for genocide of Muslims and Christians can be voiced in front of cameras at public forums by supposed religious leaders known to be close to the party leadership and are routinely met with the latter's studied silence. Until his ascent to his present office, Modi had been a regional politician, chief minister of the state of Gujarat since 2001, where he began the following year to burnish his credentials for national BJP leadership by presiding over anti-Muslim pogroms that lasted over a year and led to deaths in the thousands (see Ayyub 2016; ANHAD 2022). It was in Gujarat that Modi honed the politics of studied silence in the face of brutal violence as an active posture of political affiliation rather than simply as a lack of concern or indifference. So well established is his role and that of those around him in the 2002 violence that he was banned from traveling to the United States for several years.¹ But in a judgment issued in the summer of 2022, the Supreme Court in essence absolved Modi and his henchman, home minister Amit Shah, also opening the way for the arrest and prosecution of journalists and activists and even a former police official who had spent two decades helping to document the violence and the complicity of the state government.

Since the party has returned to power in New Delhi, every few months the country is faced with new outrages and further degradation of the norms of public life and of everyday sociality. It is worth recalling some of the more visible tendencies. “Cow lynching,” meaning the beating or murder of individuals by mobs accusing them of the consumption or possession of beef, is now a commonly used term in Indian English and the vernaculars. These mobs have typically targeted Muslims and Dalits and, of course, Dalit (pasmāñdā) Muslims. Early in the COVID crisis, Muslims were widely blamed for the pandemic. There are ongoing efforts nationally to expunge Muslim-sounding place names from streets, neighborhoods, and entire cities. There are repeated campaigns in different parts of the country to boycott Muslim-owned businesses, and petty vendors eking out a basic living serving visitors to Hindu temples are to be removed from the holy spaces. The realm of private life has not been left unscathed either: militants of the Bajrang Dal routinely harass young lovers in public, especially on Valentine's Day, and a hysterical campaign has been launched in recent years against interreligious romance and marriage, recoded as “love jihad,” a now common expression in all Indian languages, referencing a supposedly programmatic sexual predation of Hindu women undertaken by Muslim men. An app was recently launched that purported to auction off a number of prominent Muslim women, especially journalists and activists, to the highest bidder, presumably to be used as sex slaves. A veritable army of online trolls, including the organized IT cell of the BJP, work nonstop to police online speech and punish dissenters.

In just the first few months of 2022 there were several separate anti-Muslim campaigns in various parts of the country. The first of these occurred in January in Karnataka, starting with a local ban on the wearing of the hijab in schools that spread quickly throughout the state and beyond—a laughable assertion of French-like laïcisme in a region like the subcontinent, drowning in an excess of publicly expressed religiosity. Another took place in April, when the relatively minor Hindu festival of Rama Navami drew nationwide attention as organized mobs of young men and women invaded Muslim neighborhoods across the country, blasting loud music in front of mosques and raising the saffron Hindutva flag over some of them. The young people in these mobs revealed in their frenzied dancing to the music the proximity of mob violence and sexual excitement. Such confrontations had not been unknown during this festival period in the past but, unlike this time, had been more or less local affairs. This organized nationwide campaign reinforced another BJP-inspired neologism—“bulldozer politics” (buldōzar rājnītī)—as local governments razed the homes of Muslims accused of physically confronting the mobs, or of being ringleaders of the riots that have erupted in protest against the Prophet controversy, summarily and without legal proceedings (see Chakraborty and Ranjan 2022). The bulldozer has acquired a complex semiotic charge in the process, emerging, as one commentator has noted, as a symbol for Hindutva itself, a “flat, brute, massive, spectacular machine” whose only goal is to flatten everything in its path (Prakash 2022). In a recent interview with Al Jazeera (2022), the novelist, essayist, and activist Arundhati Roy placed the bulldozer in the larger context of the rise of Hindutva:

This “bulldozer politics” very quickly spread beyond the Rama Navami incidents to other Muslim neighborhoods—including Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi, a now legendary neighborhood to which I return in some detail below—under the guise of “anti-encroachment” drives, as if only Muslim property owners engage in illegal construction in India. And after the home demolitions in the Prophet controversy in June 2022, United Nations rapporteurs apparently accused the Indian government of the collective punishment of Muslims (Wire 2022).

At the intellectual level, these everyday activities of Hindutva are undergirded with a widespread effort—unfolding in numerous institutions and organizations, public as well as private—to rewrite the history of the subcontinent across millennia, especially in school curricula. In popular culture, the last thousand years have come to be rewritten as an eternal battle between Indian polytheism and Abrahamic monotheism in the form of Islam, and later, Christianity, including Christianity secularized into liberal modernity. On one side in this agon is an endless stream of selfless and courageous patriots; on the other, rapacious outsiders seeking to subjugate and exploit India. Any historical detail that does not conform to this black-and-white narrative is to be ignored or actively erased from view (Basu et al. 1993: 2–3). Such senior and respected historians as Irfan Habib and Romila Thapar, with more than half a century of landmark scholarship behind them, have come to be treated as Public Enemy #1, forced, in their sunset years, to defend their craft and discipline (see Bhattacharya 2021). And US-based scholars of the Sanskrit world have not been spared either. Wendy Doniger, Sheldon Pollock, and Audrey Truschke, for instance, have been subjected online to mass vilification and threats of violence for refusing to follow the Hindutva line on ancient India. The maximalist desire expressed in this effort—the erasure of the history of the last millennium and the recoding of ancient mythology as history—is of course an impossible one, whose impossibility of attainment can only lead to more and more desperate escalations.

The police in states controlled by BJP governments (and in the national capital) often seem to have become so close to the party and the sañgh parīvār as to be indistinguishable from them. The bulk of the mainstream media often operate like the publicity wing of the party, and independent and critical journalists and student activists are frequently harassed and hauled to jail. And even storied institutions of Indian democracy like the judiciary and the Election Commission repeatedly appear to be compromised. For religious minorities and the socially marginalized—Muslims, Christians, Dalits, among others—and all political dissidents, a sense of foreboding and fear has been palpable in recent years and gets steadily worse with time. The production of such fear appears now to be an aim and a modality of Hindutva power, at whichever level of the social structure it happens to be exercised. All these developments have produced a visible weakening of democratic norms, a steep rise in the use of force and violence in public life, and the sense of an inexorable slide toward an authoritarian Hindutva acquiring hegemonic status in society—leading to a now widespread discussion, public as well as scholarly, regarding whether Indian state and society, long proudly touted as the largest democracy in the world, are moving toward a partial, incipient, or even outright fascist dispensation (see Banaji 2016a; Sarkar 2016; Simeon 2016; Patnaik 2021; Nigam 2020; N. Menon 2020). At the very least, we can say that this recent stint of the BJP in power has resulted in dramatic changes in the structure of the exercise of sovereign power in India, a topic to which I shall return. Outside the country, much of this has gone largely unnoticed or is actively ignored, and Western leaders—including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, Boris Johnson—have streamed in regularly or invited Modi and his mouthpieces to their capitals and provided the BJP's authoritarian politics with international respectability. Modi's India is too important to the global neoliberal economic order, with the added advantage of demonstrating how to harness frustrated popular aspirations to an increasingly authoritarian exercise of power. And in their turn Modi and his foreign minister constantly tout India's democracy when abroad, even as democratic culture is more and more hollowed out within the country. The vote bank of the BJP may be an expanding swathe of the population, but its patrons are elements of the industrial capitalist class, whose support is rewarded generously by the government in the form of “lavish grants of land and unhindered access to the leader himself” (Banaji 2016a: x; see N. Menon 2020; Patnaik 2021).

However, so far as the figurations of “the Muslim” that are put in circulation by Hindutva power are concerned, it would be wrong to see them as emerging ex nihilo. The history of minoritization of the figure of the Muslim in the subcontinent is coextensive with bourgeois modernity itself. The very emergence of the national idea in the early nineteenth century under colonial rule entailed the question of the problematic nature, origin, and social place of the Muslim population of the subcontinent. Even the secular nationalism associated at least since the 1930s with the figure of Jawaharlal Nehru inherited this problem, namely, how to conceive of India's civilizational “continuity” given the long period of Muslim rule and the mass presence of a population of one form or another of Islamic affiliation. Nehru ([1946] 1985: 62, 72–74) dealt with it, most notably in his Discovery of India (written in prison during the war and published on the threshold of independence in 1946), by speaking of the great assimilative power of the civilization, capable of turning successive waves of outsiders into Indians. This was above all the case, Nehru argued, with the Muslim rulers, who went on to create a distinctly Indian culture that Nehru considered his own. Remarkably for a radical nationalism, Hindutva thought does not share this view of the strength and continuity of Indian civilization. It typically views the period of Muslim rule—a colonial historiographic category—and its long aftermath as a major disruption and near destruction of Indian (that is, Hindu) civilization whose repair and healing has only just begun. The figure of the Muslim was thus already an ambiguous presence in the discourses and practices of secular nationalism in late colonial times. But this concept of Muslim-as-minority remained inadequate to the real structure of social relations in colonial society, failing to account, for instance, for the political power and cultural influence of the Muslim ashrāf caste elites. It required for its actualization in society the Partition of India—that is, the turning of two-thirds of the Muslims of India into non-Indians (Mufti 2007; Mohapatra 2014; Kidwai 2020). The partitioned (secular) Indian postcolonial state thus rested on this minoritization and ambiguity of the figure of the Muslim. This figure is now undergoing a violent recoding, each escalation of rhetoric and each perpetration of atrocities seeking to resolve the ambiguity by pushing the Muslim to the very margins of the space of citizenship and beyond, and contributing to the consolidation of Hindutva as a political and social habitus.

How are we to understand these remarkable developments centered around the idea of Hindutva within a broader conception of modernity in this colonial and postcolonial society? As recently as the late 1990s, one of the leading international scholars of Hindutva could write that

The present conjuncture presents a dramatically different vista in at least two ways. On the one hand, the middle class has dramatically expanded in the midst of the massive neoliberal transformation and globalization of the economy over the last three decades (see Brosius 2010; Varma 2014; Kaur 2020). On the other hand, it appears to be the case that what I am calling the Hindutva habitus—a whole set of orientations and dispositions concerning religious identity, the everyday experience of encounters with religious difference, notions of ritual purity that extend from the personal realm to the national, a contradictory approach to the hierarchies of caste as both essential to the Hindu social order and something to be overcome in order to achieve a standardized and universalized Hinduism, and a complex emotional mix of shame, pride, resentment, and rage toward the history of India over the last millennium, all held together by the sentiment expressed in the slogan “Hindu khatrē mēñ hai” (“The Hindu is in danger”)—has now broken free of the constraints of urban lower middle-class spaces and spread to both vast swathes of the rural as well as urban subaltern social formation and the urban Anglophone professional and managerial bourgeoisie (see Menon and Nigam 2007). The sañgh parīvār movement now finds it possible, at least in some places in the country, to mobilize Dalits in campaigns of violence against Muslims (D. Menon 2006: 1–31). One of the overarching contradictions of politics in India today is that the same political forces that more than any other have pushed the globalization of the economy, and therefore massive disruption and transformation of culture and society, are in fact also the ones that embody the desire (and periodically genocidal drive) for continuity and authenticity (Patnaik 2021).

Ranajit Guha (1997: 1–99) argued some decades ago that the historical situation of the bourgeoisie in colonial and postcolonial India could be characterized as a case of “dominance without hegemony,” of coercion over consent, rather unlike the situation of the bourgeoisie in the metropolis itself, whose universalist project sought to recreate all of society, to quote Marx and Engels ([1848] 1978: 477), “after its own image,” converting society at large to the universalism of its values. The nationalist bourgeoisie sought to create a historical bloc in order to mobilize the peasant masses in the interest of its project to seize the state from the colonial rulers, and Gandhi was the instrument of this “moment of maneuver” (Chatterjee 1993). Its characteristic attitude toward them was therefore an “instrumental” and pedagogic one, seeking to induct them into the Indian national movement through such mythological forms of identification as Mother India (Bharat Mata), which Jawaharlal Nehru considered appropriate to the backward realm of rural life, as against the cities, which called for “stronger fare” (Mufti 2007: 27; Nehru [1946] 1985: 59). As Hansen (1999: 10) notes, the postcolonial Nehruvian elite maintained “a paternalist sense of being part of a ‘civilizational mission’ of modernity vis-à-vis the masses.” The manner and extent of the systematic spread of the Hindutva habitus in recent years raises the question whether the sañgh parīvār is in the process of attempting to achieve a hegemonic domination through a standardized and universalized Hinduism, a dramatic transformation in the exercise of sovereign power in this postcolonial society and in the nature of religion as belief, practice, and basis of social and political identity. An orthodox-Brahminical, patriarchal, and middle-class religious complex is thus being recoded as “the eternal tradition” (sanātana dharma) of “the Hindus” as such, seeking to eradicate the vast diversity of religious belief and practice across class, caste, gender, sexuality, language, region, sect, and locality (see Basu 2020; Shepherd [1996] 2019). But it is crucial to understand and to emphasize that this social and political field remains open to challenge in a range of domains and through a range of modalities and languages of dissent. In parallel to the growth and transformations in Hindutva power is the emergence of a whole series of modes of contestation concretized in political acts big and small that seek to question and interrupt the exercise of power, up to and including the sovereign power exercised by the higher agents and institutions of the state (see Menon and Nigam 2007).

The overarching sense of inevitability attached to Hindutva on the rise has in fact been significantly interrupted nationally since 2014 on two major occasions of the staging of dissent, both centered on (but by no means limited to) the nation's capital, in each of which religious minorities, in particular Muslims and Sikhs, respectively, have played a prominent role. The more successful of these was in fact the more recent of the two, the so-called farmers’ movement against proposed neoliberalization of the agricultural sector, which in all likelihood would have decimated small producers in favor of massive agricultural conglomerates. Farmers have already been under immense pressure from market forces and government-sanctioned theft of their land and have been suffering almost a pandemic of suicides. The vast sit-in by farmers, often on their tractors, at the northern reaches of the Delhi region lasted sixteen months and eventually forced a retreat by the government on the neoliberal legislation that was in dispute. A fascinating movement in its own right, it is nevertheless beyond the scope of this study. The first disruption, which I focus on here, occurred during the winter of 2019–20.

On December 11, 2019, with its new overwhelming majority in the lower house of the Indian Parliament, the BJP government passed into law the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, or CAA, which stipulates the conditions under which refugees from neighboring countries may be granted Indian citizenship, singling out non-Muslim refugees from three neighboring Muslim-majority countries for swift naturalization. The legislation immediately became highly controversial, for reasons I shall discuss shortly in some detail. We need merely recall here that it codified religion into the definition of citizenship for the first time and singled out Muslims and Islam as markers of state and individual identity. Protests against the act had started even before its passage. But after the bill was passed by both houses of Parliament and received the assent of the president, making it law of the land, protests spread into the main metropolitan centers, including, above all, the capital itself. These protests were focused first in universities, including all the main public universities in Delhi, and after brutal police suppression of the student demonstrations—especially at Jamia Millia in Delhi, widely shared live on social media—spilled out into the streets in numerous cities throughout the country. At some institutions, like Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), these new protests simply fed into the protest movement that had been launched against the BJP's multipronged attack on progressive public educational institutions at least since 2016, with, among other things, student leaders arrested under spurious charges of “antinational” behavior and outright sedition (see Nair 2016). It seemed pretty evident that young women played a leading role in the protest movement in the universities (see Sengupta 2020). In a number of well documented incidents, they stood up repeatedly to the violent tactics of the Delhi police and to at least one concerted attack (on JNU) by members of the student wing of the RSS-BJP, the largest party-affiliated student organization in the country.

What is now considered an iconic event of resistance to the new citizenship legislation took place on December 15, 2019, in southeastern New Delhi, when a large number of women of all generations, including now-famous matriarchs in their seventies and eighties, emerged from their homes in a working- and lower-middle-class neighborhood called Shaheen Bagh (or Falcon Park), children and grandchildren (including toddlers and infants) in tow in the midst of a Delhi winter, and took over a busy thoroughfare in a seemingly spontaneous rearticulation of the politics of assembly and occupation that has become familiar globally in recent years from such cities as New York, Athens, Madrid, and Istanbul, but drawing, closer to home, on the long-established protest form of the dharnā or sit-in. Among the surprising things about this development was the fact that these were primarily Muslim women of decidedly nonelite background in class and caste terms, speaking recognizably nonstandard and “rustic” forms of Hindi-Urdu, most practicing one or another form of the so-called Islamic veil, ranging from the traditional cross-communal chādar (shawl) to the full-body black burka and the modern international head-and-shoulders hijab. They clearly had little or no experience not only of political activism but of simply emerging visibly in public as such, let alone holding press conferences and appearing in television interviews. This sit-in lasted more than three months despite official and nonofficial pressure and succumbed finally to the imperatives of the COVID-19 pandemic. While it lasted, it generated an entire social ecology around itself and inspired dozens of similar protests in many other cities and regions, each coming to be referred to as the Shaheen Bagh of that particular city (Mustapha 2020). The “grannies of Shaheen Bagh”—the vernacular term for grannies is dādīs, or paternal grandmothers—has now entered the vernacular as the name of a new and (for many) baffling political actor at the center of the mass protests. The wider protest movement led in January 2020 to a nationwide general strike that has been billed as the largest in world history, involving a quarter of a billion people. One of the remarkable things about this movement is the way in which the women of Shaheen Bagh, despite their relatively marginal social backgrounds, seemed to have understood that the proposed citizenship policy marked a dramatic shift in the exercise of sovereign power in this constitutional republic that represented a serious danger not only to themselves but in fact to the country as a whole. Their own remarkable framing of their protest as a defense of the Constitution must be understood in this context.

The Shaheen Bagh protest itself, and others like it in Delhi and numerous other cities, spontaneously drew masses of supporters of a range of religious, caste, class, age, and ethnic backgrounds. A sort of spontaneous organization quickly emerged. One group of young people created a protective cordon around the protest site, especially at peak hours; another handled the media rush, and so on. The daily roster of events included political speeches, poetry recitals, music and dance performances, lectures on history and politics by scholars and academics, scripture readings and prayer sessions of the different faiths side by side, and communal meals prepared in a makeshift kitchen established spontaneously in the sacred Sikh tradition of providing lañgar or free communal meals to strangers. On certain days, like New Year's Eve and India's Republic Day, the crowds at Shaheen Bagh reportedly approached a hundred thousand (Chauhan 2020).

The makeshift stage, festooned with hand-painted posters, the national flag, and portraits of such icons of the anticolonial freedom movement as Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, and B. R. Ambedkar, the lead author of India's Constitution and leader of the Dalit rights movement, became, in the words of the artist and critic Shuddhabrata Sengupta, “a stage for an autonomous, spontaneous, totally self-organized, leaderless rehearsal of a new vision for citizenship” (Sengupta 2020). The foregrounding of Ambedkar in particular is not without significance. There is, of course, Ambedkar's leading authorial connection to the Constitution of India. But Ambedkar-Dalit-Constitution is a dense text rich with meaning when it is invoked in the midst of this protest movement, led by this group of women—no other name of that period continues to be so actively linked in the present moment to a political project of mass emancipation. The density of this “text” appears to have been immediately recognized by Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan, the young Dalit leader, a lawyer and head of the activist group Bhim Army, whose personal style—including his clothes, the grooming of his facial hair, the aviator sunglasses he sports, and even the motorcycle he typically rides—is seen as provocative behavior for a supposed untouchable within the codes of the violent caste hierarchy of the semirural area of western Uttar Pradesh where he was born and raised and continues to be based. Using a common Hindi-Urdu word meaning “freedom” or “liberation” that is charged and controversial in contemporary politics due to its connection to the Kashmiri struggle against the repression of the Indian army, one observer has memorably referred to the politics of his style as “azadi with swag” (Kabir 2019). He was drawn irresistibly to Shaheen Bagh and the wider anti-CAA movement, and his remarkable emergence, despite a police injunction, on the steps of Delhi's historic Jama Masjid, holding aloft a copy of Ambedkar's Constitution, in the midst of a huge throng (presumably of Muslim worshipers) protecting him from police arrest, is one of the iconic images of the movement. What this explicit encounter with this particular strand in the politics of Dalit rights makes clear is that Shaheen Bagh broke free from the pregiven script of “Muslim protest”—a script that seems to have been partially restored in the more recent Rama Navami and anti-Prophet controversies. The maintenance of this script, with its inherent codes of legibility of the protestors as lawbreakers, as alien threat to the social order, and as “antinational elements” in general, is of course a significant interest of the sañgh parīvār, at the core of its ability to expand and mobilize its base. Instead of reaffirming the predetermined and already-given margins of the nation-space—the identity politics defined by these supposedly distinct zones marked as “Muslim” or “Dalit,” for instance—Shaheen Bagh represents a revisioning of citizenship and nation from the perspective of an actively imagined and reconstructed “undercommons” of national life, to borrow an evocative formulation from a geopolitically different context—acts of social and political imagination made possible, paradoxically (but, of course, not surprisingly), by the more and more egregious exercise of Hindutva power itself (see Harney and Moton 2013).

The broader anti-CAA movement was thus sparked by a collective political action undertaken by a group of urban “subaltern” women who seemed, on the one hand, unapologetic and unselfconscious about their social and religious background and, on the other, actively alert to the commonality of different forms of marginality under the ruling dispensation. It is thus another index of Shaheen Bagh's departure from the “Muslim protest” script, to which Hindutva power would like to reduce it, that it bypassed entirely the traditional so-called leadership of the Muslim community as a whole—conservative and patriarchal clerics and social and political elites who are almost all men and belong to the ashrāf caste elites of the Muslim population. In the script, the collective marked as “Muslim women” is typically figured as the passive object in a tussle between this upper-caste religious patriarchy and the supposedly secular state. Much like the BJP government and its henchmen, this supposed religious leadership was left in the discomfiting position of passive observers as the dādīs of Shaheen Bagh took center stage.

Two key earlier moments in which this script has been played out on the national stage deserve to be recalled here. The first is the so-called Shah Bano controversy in the 1980s in which the Congress-led national government succumbed to the demand of the conservative Muslim leadership that it find a legislative workaround against a Supreme Court ruling in favor of a Muslim divorcée who had filed a suit demanding “maintenance” from her former husband beyond the provisions of the so-called Muslim Personal Law, a body of patriarchal family law inherited from colonial jurisprudence. This notorious controversy is considered a key moment in the history of majority-minority relations in India, in the history of the Hindu nationalist movement, and in the history of feminism and its relationship to the Congress and the state (see Pathak and Rajan 1989). The second instance is a more recent but related one, the so-called Triple Talaq (“triple divorce”) controversy, in which the Modi government passed a law banning a Muslim mode of divorce that privileges the prerogatives of the husband to the detriment of the wife. Most feminists and various sectors of the Left more broadly support the creation of a Uniform Civil Code, as it is called, to replace the religion-specific codes of family law that are presently the norm. What I am drawing attention to here, however, is the terms in which the controversy played out: the “secular” state, at the behest of a Hindu nationalist party in power, plays the protector of Muslim women from the depredations of Muslim patriarchy. In one sense, Shaheen Bagh, which began a few months after the BJP's Triple Talaq gambit, represents the rebuke, by one group of Muslim women, of the essentialized identity and fake protection offered to them by Hindutva power.

Aside from the social ecology consisting of forms of interaction across class, caste, and religion, social and political commentary and discussion, and experimentation with the forms of leadership and community, the protests at Shaheen Bagh and elsewhere also generated what we might call an arts ecology, the insertion of the various arts into this social and political event. Poetry, music, performance, theater, and visual arts all had a prominent presence in them. I wish to draw attention in particular to the prominent role of poetry in the demonstrations nationwide, which is hardly unique to this particular moment in the history of protest movements in the subcontinent and continues a long tradition of poetry's involvement in political protest. From anonymously and collectively authored slogans that take poemic form—like the famous refrain “Jāmiā kī larkīyōñ nē rāstā dikhāyā hai” (“The girls of Jamia have shown the way”)—to the recitation or singing of well-known political poems, about which more below, and the sensational emergence of new and young poets, like Varun Grover and Aamir Aziz, these cadences and rhythms have provided the “prosody of the revolt,” to borrow Elliot Cola's (2011) felicitous phrase, coined with respect to the practices of Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring uprisings. But a curious thing about these demonstrations in India, almost every single one of them at least in the northern and central “Hindi belt,” is that the three poems most often sung or recited are in Urdu, a language often considered to be endangered in India due to its association with the Muslim minority, accused by right-wing nationalists of being antinational by nature. Adding a further complexity, two of these three poems are written by Pakistani poets, namely, Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–84) and Habib Jalib (1928–93). The third is by Ram Prasad Bismil (1897–1927), who was tried and executed by the colonial state on charges of sedition twenty years before India's independence from colonial rule and the creation of Pakistan. One poem by Faiz in particular, which uses a high Islamic and Quranic vocabulary and images, has become indelibly associated with the broader prodemocracy movement in India and its large and small mobilizations against the authoritarian politics and behavior of the government and the broader right-wing nationalist sphere. In the midst of the Shaheen Bagh protests, its spread and spontaneous popularity became subject to sustained attacks from the sañgh parīvār and the broader Hindutva world. Faiz, well known for his persistent critique of religious orthodoxy and of the Partition of the subcontinent on religious lines, was accused bizarrely of being anti-Hindu. So unconvincing and farcical is this claim that it was apparent that even many of those mouthing it were themselves unconvinced and merely going through the motions. I shall presently turn to Faiz and his role in the poetics of protest in contemporary India in some detail.

How are we to understand the new citizenship politics of the Modi government, embodied in and symbolized by the CAA? What is its place and role in the physiology of Hindutva power? What is the exact significance of the protests nationwide against the CAA? And, finally, why this connection to Muslims and Muslim women, in particular? On the surface, the purpose of the act appears to be a humanitarian one, as it formalizes in law the granting of Indian citizenship to refugees having fled religious persecution from three neighboring countries before a certain cutoff point in time, and the BJP and its allies instrumentalize this surface humanitarian tone in their responses to critics of the law. However, as already noted, the countries in question all happen to be Muslim-majority ones—Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan—and the minorities to be protected are specified by their religion as Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis, Christians, and Jains, in other words, followers of all the major religions of the region with the exception of Islam. Aside from the patent absurdity of the claim made repeatedly by officials from home minister Shah down that no self-professed group of Muslims in a Muslim-majority country could be considered an oppressed minority—we need only think of Ahmedis, Shia Hazaras, and Shias in general in Pakistan—the law also leaves out some of the largest producers of refugees in the region, which happen not to be Muslim-majority countries, such as Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and the People's Republic of China. Both these suggestions, either implicit in the law or explicitly mobilized by its defenders, like the home minister, are evidently counterfactual, but the thing to note here is that the wording of the act singles out Muslims in a number of ways, both symbolic and material and concrete. In other words, the CAA introduces a religious element into the definition of citizenship itself, in the admittedly limited domain of the naturalization of refugee populations, and thus is at least problematic from the perspective of the vaunted secularism of the Indian Constitution, its “equality” clauses (numbers 14 and 15, for example) in particular (see Wire 2020).

But the full significance of the provisions of this new law begin to come into view in conjunction with another policy measure, the National Register of Citizens (NRC), distinct from the census and required by a law passed by a previous BJP-led government almost two decades earlier, whose implementation was finally announced by the BJP government in the midst of the national debate about the submission of the CAA draft bill to Parliament. Simplifying the actual situation a little bit for the sake of our collective sanity—because the legal and bureaucratic reality is so grotesquely complicated, as is possible only in a former British colony—the NRC would require all self-described citizens to prove their citizenship by producing specific types of documents, but not including the voter ID card, the biometric national ID card, nor even the passport, and including in many instances documents concerning parents and even grandparents. Given the realities of Indian bureaucracy, and given the reality of at best spotty documentation of births, deaths, and other major and minor life events in between those two extremes in any of the countries of the subcontinent, this is an unprecedented scenario that will impact every single one of India's nearly 1.4 billion citizens, in effect suspending their citizenship and placing the burden of proof for regaining it entirely on individuals and families.

The final twist, however, is provided by the language of the CAA: among all those rendered aliens in India by the NRC, those who are determined by the state to conform to the approved religious categories of the CAA—Bangladeshi Hindus or Pakistani Christians, for instance—could be brought back into the citizenship fold through naturalization as stateless aliens, but Muslims who failed the NRC test of Indianness could be rendered not only noncitizens but nonnaturalizable according to the categories established by the new law. Internment camps for “illegal immigrants” are already in operation in the state of Assam, the only state where the NRC has been implemented, and more are reportedly under construction in other states in anticipation of its nationwide implementation. It's been argued that millions, possibly tens of millions, of Muslims could thus be removed from the citizens’ registry and therefore from the voter rolls. In Assam, it is reported, close to two million individuals have been declared to not be Indian citizens (Kidwai 2020).² As of mid-2022, given the strength of the nationwide dissent—the movement triggered as well as symbolized by the dādīs of Shaheen Bagh—the CAA-NRC combination has not yet been implemented nationally.

This entire scenario calls immediately to mind the conceptual framework that Hannah Arendt began to develop during the World War II years for understanding the upheavals in European politics in the aftermath of the previous war: the dramatic transformation of political practices, institutions, ideas, concepts, and categories in the disappearance of a number of multinational empires in Eastern and Central Europe and the establishment in their stead of a system of nation-states. Arendt speaks of the stateless (as opposed to the national citizen) as “the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics,” embodying in their very political, legal, and social condition the larger crisis of the modern system of states, the inherently split and unstable nature of the nation-state as a form, a hyphenated articulation of two vastly different political logics—that of nation, people, ethnos, language, culture, and the mythos of common origins, on the one hand, and that of state, citizenship, and equality before the law, on the other. In the rise of Nazism to power, Arendt ([1951] 1979: 277, 275) argued, nation had overpowered and conquered state. Whether the ongoing degradation of democracy in India represents a similar historical transition is one of the most challenging questions of our times, and I shall turn shortly to this debate. At the very least, however, we might say that under the guise of a humanitarian law offering ease of acquiring citizenship to (some) asylum seekers from (some) neighboring countries, India is poised, given the demographic scale, to become potentially one of the larger producers of stateless refugees in the region and possibly the world.

Degradation of the rights of the citizen has been formally encoded in the CAA-NRC combine, but this devaluation has been at work repeatedly in a series of national policies that have had devastating consequences for the citizenry. We may think here of such political acts as the so-called demonetization in 2016 that forced tens of millions of Indians to line up for hours and days at banks to exchange the old currency for the new one; or the brutal COVID lockdown declared with four hours’ notice after the emergence of the Delta variant, which threw millions of newly unemployed and homeless migrant workers out on the streets and highways, forced to make their way back to their home villages and towns, often hundreds of miles away, on foot, receiving beatings from the police along the way. In the media, the use of the word migrant facilitated their refashioning as a threatening outsider presence for the middle-class residents of the cities and towns in which they suddenly found themselves to be aliens. The scale of the catastrophe in this instance may be judged by the fact that it is widely thought to be the largest mass movement of people in the subcontinent since the Partition and transfer of populations in 1947. As a range of commentators, such as Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Siddharth Varadarajan, and Apoorvanand, have recently noted, while no emergency has been formally declared, the government routinely uses emergency-like powers to intimidate its critics and stifle dissent. Apoorvanand echoed a widespread sentiment when he observed that the BJP's overall approach to governance appears to be to create a constant state of “anarchy” (arājiktā) in the country (Wire 2022).

How are we to understand this aspect of the life of Hindutva power in contemporary India? The apparent intention to unleash chaos on the citizenry from time to time is itself an authoritarian one. To be a bit more precise, we can perhaps say that some of the BJP's most consequential policies in recent years embody an authoritarian definition of the sovereign, capable of bypassing key norms and institutions of liberal democracy without abrogating (for now) the constitution as such. It is this recurring bypassing of the normative that produces the perception of anarchy. In the case of CAA-NRC, this authoritarianism reaches an apogee of sorts. A government elected by its citizens—or, to be more precise, by about 37 percent of those who cast their votes and a mere quarter of all registered voters—once elected, suspends their citizenship, putting the entire citizenry in abeyance, as a step toward its selective remaking and reestablishment. This appears to be the remarkable intention inherent to this multifaceted policy. It reimagines the citizen as a pliant subject of sovereign power that owes its very membership in the political community to the sovereign.

The most well-known authoritarian definition of the sovereign is of course the one offered in the 1920s by Carl Schmitt ([1922] 2005: 5) in his book Political Theology, eleven years before Schmitt emerged as the leading jurist and political theorist affiliated with the National Socialist German Workers’ Party after its rise to power: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception [Ausnahmezustand].” A brief analysis of Schmitt's framework is not out of place here for our goal of throwing light on the modalities of Hindutva power. As a decisionist in political and legal theory, Schmitt views the sovereign decision as one unhampered by “the checks and balances” of “a liberal constitution” (7). For Schmitt, therefore, “all tendencies of modern constitutional development point toward eliminating the sovereign in this sense” (7). Against these tendencies in political theory and practice, he argues for the priority of the sovereign with respect to the law. But the constitutional procedures and prescriptions for the application of abstract rules to concrete situations require, Schmitt argues, a “homogeneous” social medium for their operation and fail in moments of chaos or true emergency—“a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, and the like” (13, 6). A state of emergency is thus viewed as a condition of social heterogeneity, making necessary the linkage between the sovereign decision and the state of exception. For Schmitt the sovereign is thus the individual, collective, or institution (though always preferably the first) that decides both when such a state of emergency exists and what to do about it, that is, how to re-create a legal order when the existing one is threatened with chaos and destruction. But it becomes clear from the very beginning that for Schmitt, “sovereign” is also a limit or “borderline” concept (Grenzbegriff) of the prior decision that undergirds any juridical or constitutional order, however normative or rule-bound it might claim to be (5). In other words, sovereign power is in its essence constituent power, and the (Schmittian) study of sovereignty is thus the study of “the locus and nature of the agency that constitutes a political system” (Strong 1985: xi).

Political Theology contains a theory of sovereignty as such, not of dictatorship, let alone of the distinctly fascist form of authority. Schmitt's ([1921] 2014) interest in dictatorship itself is a fairly narrow one having to do with constitutional provisions for the granting of (temporary) dictatorial authority, more specifically in the Weimar constitution. Nevertheless, the authoritarian nature of his conception of the sovereign obliges us to ask what relation sovereignty in this sense has to dictatorship and, ultimately, to fascism itself. We may begin to formulate an answer to these questions by noting that for Schmitt, the sovereign and dictator were typically distinct in history, in both Rome and early modern absolutism, for instance. In fact, the dictator exercises his extra-legal power, or rather, is constituted as (“commissarial”) dictator, under the authority of the sovereign. It is the mass event of revolutionary politics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—once the sovereign is redefined and reorganized as the body of the citizenry, that is, once it is reconstituted as the popular sovereign as the characteristic form of legitimate authority in modernity—that leads to the historical fusion of sovereign and dictator. In critiquing the nineteenth-century Catholic reactionaries who rejected outright a whole range of consequences that followed from Enlightenment philosophy and revolutionary politics in the eighteenth century, Schmitt concedes that monarchy can no longer be the basis of legitimation of a political order. But his definition of the sovereign is in part an attempt to vitiate, to hollow out from the inside, the very notion of popular sovereignty by making the sovereign decision on the exception prior to the democratic constitutional order. According to Schmitt, liberal constitutional democracies try to disperse and erase the overt signs of sovereign power, making the sovereign and the sovereign decision illegible to the citizenry. But since for Schmitt the constituent power of “the people” under conditions of popular sovereignty is in reality prior to any legal or constitutional order, this raises at once the question of the constitution of the people as such. This is what makes necessary Schmitt's ([1927] 1996: 26) famous “criterion” for a definition of “the political”: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” The making of this distinction is constitutive of the community and way of life that is to be protected from the “enemy”—“friend” and “enemy” are mutually constituted in the very process of being distinguished from each other. The “popular” sovereign dictator, far from simply expressing or restating the “will of the people,” creates the “homogeneous” social and cultural space that makes the populace, and therefore the popular will, possible. Taken together, these writings of Schmitt's from his pre-Nazi era already indicate the way in which social engineering, the fabrication of the populace, is imbricated with the exercise of sovereign power as he conceives of it, and the latter depends upon it for its very functioning.

Whatever reservations Schmitt may have had about the Nazis and their brand of politics as they gradually increased their political power in the late Weimar Republic, as one of the parties that were hostile to the republic but given, he feared, free rein by its constitution to operate and engage in political competition, once they came to power, his views shifted dramatically. In the immediate aftermath of the Reichstag fire four weeks after his becoming chancellor, Hitler (and Hermann Goering, then president of the Reichstag), blaming the Communists and the Comintern for the arson, convinced von Hindenburg to issue a decree—under the same Article 48, section 2 of the Weimar constitution that had been Schmitt's main object of analysis in the book on dictatorship a decade earlier—suspending most civil rights. The decree explicitly mentioned the supposed imminent threat of Communist subversion. Then, nearly four weeks later, in a truncated Parliament devoid of Communist and even some Social Democrat deputies, all of whom had been arrested, the Nazis and their parliamentary allies passed the so-called Enabling Act, giving the chancellor and his cabinet the right to rule by decree. Throughout its existence, the Third Reich was based on this act, which had to be renewed on two subsequent occasions (see Rabinbach and Gilman 2013: 47–48, 52–53). In the midst of these developments in 1933, Schmitt came to see in Hitler what he thought Germany desperately needed: a politician who could without ambiguity “decide on the exception.” He had spent the years of the Weimar Republic arguing for a strengthened authoritarian presidency that could introduce the friend-enemy distinction into politics and prohibit the participation of anti-republican parties. In the events of early 1933, he now saw the Nazis outstripping all he had dared to hope for within the constraints of the Weimar constitution. Almost immediately he threw in his lot with them, and quickly emerged as the leading jurist associated with the party (Mehring 2014).

A certain type of Schmitt apologia has it that his personal political opinions and actions have nothing to do with, and can tell us nothing about, his work as political and legal thinker. This is the position associated, for instance, with the editors of the journal Telos, which did more than possibly any other group or institution to introduce Schmitt for the first time to the Anglophone world. This is a spurious and ultimately nonsensical claim, because, of course, his theoretical work concerns precisely the kinds of processes at stake in the political and constitutional developments he lived through and took positions on, developments to the understanding of which he mobilized his theoretical vocabulary. The two are inseparable from each other. Translating these political positions of Schmitt's into the terms of his conceptual system, we might say that Schmitt's theorized and imagined sovereign is already involved in the exercise of what we would normally take to be dictatorial power, and the latter contains within itself the scaffolding for the fully fascist form of authority. His entire conceptual framework accommodates the possibility that the sovereign may create the concrete emergency (Notfall) that appears to bring about (more abstractly speaking) a state of exception (Ausnahmezustand) that is then “recognized” and “decided on” by the sovereign. Schmitt's political actions from 1933 on make clear that the ultimate motivation of the theoretical apparatus built in the 1920s was to explain what it would take to, first, eliminate the Left from politics entirely and, more broadly, refashion society as a whole as a “homogeneous medium.”

In one of the very earliest writings of his Nazi period, Schmitt claimed that the Nazi conception of the “tripartite organization” of the social and political “totality” (Einheit) into state, movement, and Volk was restoring to the German nation “the great traditions of German thinking about the state as founded by Hegel,” which “had been displaced from the consciousness of the German Volk in the second half of the nineteenth century under the influence of liberal and alien thinkers and writers” (Rabinbach and Gilman 2013: 59; for the original German, see Schmitt 1933: 13). In another, he commended the Führer for clearly understanding the “false neutrality” and “inner contradictions of the Weimar system, which destroyed itself with this legal neutrality and turned itself over to its enemies” (Rabinbach and Gilman 2013: 63). The significance of Schmitt for a project like the present one, concerned with a contemporary case of the slide from a distinct type of liberal democracy to right-wing authoritarianism, is that his work lays out a frank and unapologetic case for what it sees as the need for such a transition from a liberal-constitutional dispensation to an authoritarian one as well as a demonstration of how the incompleteness and remaining hesitations of the latter can be overcome in a fully fascistic order.³ In other words, Schmitt is useful and important for us because, not despite the fact that, he was, for a certain period in his life, from 1933 to the destruction of the Third Reich in 1945, formally speaking a Nazi. On the other hand, the use I have made of Schmitt here represents a worldly reading of his work against the ways in which concepts like state of exception have been treated as free-floating theoretical concepts that do not require an excavation of the historical density of their elaboration and dissemination.

There is no doubt that after eight years of Modi's tenure as prime minister, the political culture of India has undergone significant transformations toward authoritarian and violent forms of political relations and interactions. The historian Jairus Banaji (2016a: x) has gone so far as to argue that “the public culture of democracy is so radically hollowed out and degraded that in the end it yields a mere mask, a form of legitimation, for a regime immersed in criminality.” But in what way precisely does the concept of fascism, which comes to us from the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, come into play in our assessment of the Indian present? It is now a routinely used description of Hindutva politics in public debates in India—fāsīvād is the word in at least the north Indian languages. And for a whole range of deeply learned and perceptive commentators, including Nivedita Menon, Prabhat Patnaik, Dilip Simeon, Aditya Nigam, Aijaz Ahmad, Sumit Sarkar, and Banaji, the fascism of the sañgh parīvār is not (or not anymore) a debatable question.

Let us consider this question in some detail. First of all, to begin as it were at the top, there is clearly a cult of personality surrounding the prime minister, tinged with a definite sense of menace toward nonbelievers and dissenters, that is immediately familiar to students of fascism from such cases as Mussolini as Duce or Hitler as Führer. Like his European forebears, the Narendra Modi of this cult of personality is made up of sometimes contradictory elements. It emphasizes his political as well as personal prowess, an asceticism as well as a warrior ethos: he is a self-described fakir and yogi, on the one hand, and in possession of a chhattīs inch kī chhātī (a fifty-six-inch chest), on the other. The list of those who have, with varying degrees of seriousness, accused Modi of being a Führer extends from opposition leader and Nehru family scion Rahul Gandhi and former prime minister of Pakistan and one-time cricket star Imran Khan to Pink Floyd cofounder Roger Waters and actor John Cusack! However, the widely expressed fear that the BJP's endgame is to amend the Constitution to both declare a Hindu Rashtra and install Modi in an authoritarian presidency is real and palpable, and its realization would be in line with the line of development of Hindutva in power since 2014.

Second, Hindutva ideology has circulated a radical right-wing nationalism—a sine qua non of fascist movements—for which the nation is a disfigured and mutilated entity whose restoration to its ancient glory has only just begun and is resisted at every step by its internal and external enemies. In this regard, the German nationalism of grievance that morphed into Nazism is far outshone by Hindutva: the former displayed a narcissism of recent injury—the crushing terms of the post–Great War Versailles settlement—while the latter extends it over a millennium. The spread and inculcation of the Hindutva habitus has made this culture of grievance part of the political instincts of vast swathes of the social spectrum. Third, the vast and organized cadres of the sañgh parīvār engage in what Arthur Rosenberg, in his early analysis of Nazism as a mass movement, referred to as the “stormtrooper tactic”: taking extra-legal action against perceived enemies that is either ignored entirely by the legal system or results in perfunctory and pro forma punishment (Banaji 2016b: 262). These cadres can be mobilized seemingly at moment's notice, in small or large numbers, to threaten or actively punish those deemed to be recalcitrant elements in open defiance of this or that prescription of Hindutva power. Finally, the historical transformation of the figure of the Muslim from secular nationalism to Hindutva parallels in some ways fairly closely the reinscription of the Jew from the ambiguous insider-outsider figure in post-Enlightenment liberal culture to the implacable enemy and threat in fascism. In light of all these developments over the last several decades, it is a measured judgment to say that in all these ways, India appears to be approaching the edge of a chasm, and a leap or tumble into this abyss will likely change things irrevocably and forever.

Georgio Agamben (2005: 84–85) has argued that the Führerprinzip of the original and personal power of a unique leader that emerged in Europe in the early twentieth century combined charismatic authority (in Max Weber's sense) with auctoritas, as conceived in and derived from the Roman tradition. But Agamben does not note that for Weber ([1922] 1978: 246–50), “charisma” is a sort of liminal condition, recurringly subject to “routinization,” a return to the ordinary and unexceptional, whereas fascism in power seems to attempt to permanently defer this routinization of the leader's authority and to revive and repeat its originary moment of the foundation of an original (that is, radically personalized) form of authority. Consequently, much of fascist politics may be comprehensible as an open-ended series of attempts at the deferral of the routinization of the charismatic authority of the leader—hence the permanent sense of crisis that typically surrounds fascism in power, and hence the endless series of escalations that seem only to lead to catastrophe. The recurring anarchy (arājiktā) characteristic of Modi's rule is of this order, each episode arising out of what can only be called the infliction of major policy instruments on the citizenry, which leave the latter scrambling to survive in social (and even simply physical) terms. The policies—demonetization, the CAA, the farm laws, and the recent military recruitment “reforms”—are formulated typically without much (or no) debate in Parliament, and entirely without extended public discussion. While each purports to be merely responding to one emergency or another, in reality it brings about conditions of crisis and emergency. It is almost as if democratic good governance would be destructive of Modi's charismatic authority, the instrument of its routinization.

The development of fascist movements in and out of power has taken different forms in each society and polity where it has occurred. In the content and the genealogy of its ideas, in its nature as an organized movement, in its ability to inculcate more and more sectors of society into its sense of an elect Hindu nation, and in its creeping subversion of different aspects of the democratic state, Hindutva presents a distinct case and variation in the global history of fascist movements in power. But it also appears to be the case that authoritarian Hindutva power may be objectively constrained, at least for the moment, from evolving into a recognizably and classically fascist state and societal dispensation by the unmistakable (if considerably reduced) strength of democratic political culture in the country and its tradition of organized dissent. Even the country's participation in the neoliberal economic world order and its geopolitical system of alliances might act as an objective constraint to some extent. While the world powers with which it is partnered, especially the United States and the European Union, may be indifferent to, or even tacitly support, authoritarian management of restless populations by their allies, they might have more difficulty ignoring, for instance, acts of mass genocide. The BJP leadership in power and even the leaders of the RSS have so far not heeded the call of many of their followers for an outright dictatorial dispensation, especially with respect to Muslims, other minorities, and what they deride as adharmī (that is, “unrighteous” or “heretical”) Hindus. Society itself still does not conform entirely to the Hindu nationalist idea of India. For legions of the foot soldiers of the sañgh parīvār, this situation of unprecedented (but necessarily not total) power is experienced as a form of “suffocation” (ghutan), as one BJP leader recently put it (DO Politics 2022). Hindutva in power displays many of these features of what is sometimes spoken of as the “fascist minimum,” but it has still not quite reached the level of the “fascist maximum,” a movement radicalized in this manner that is in totalitarian possession of society and state (Paxton 2005: 206). However, the popular pressures produced by the failure of the state to create an economy that responds adequately to the needs of India's huge population, and especially the youth facing rising underemployment and unemployment—in other words, the very pressures produced by the imbalances of participation in the neoliberal global economy—lead in the direction of the “maximization” of authoritarianism in a fascist direction, the mobilization of the youth for actions against perceived enemies rather than economic redistribution and social justice.

This possible passage to the maximum is in many ways what the protest movement and the scene of contestation of the CAA-NRC combination are about. Coming back to the politics of citizenship embodied in the latter in light of the foregoing discussion of sovereign power and sovereign decision, authoritarianism, and the nature and structure of fascist authority, we might now say that this political gambit is meant to restructure the exercise of sovereign power by first gathering sovereignty at the very top of the power structure of the ruling party and its parent organization, the RSS. Discrete functions of this centralized sovereign power are then redistributed to critical sites within state and society, such as local “law and order” institutions—police, magistrates, judges—and the party's and its affiliates’ various street-level cadres, in order to create an extra-constitutional network for the exercise of sovereign power in which state and nonstate institutions and personnel begin to lose their distinctness. This transformation has already been underway at rapid pace since the BJP's return to power in 2014. Here too there is a convergence with the authoritarian concept of politics that comes to us via Schmitt: the aim of the CAA-NRC policy appears to be to establish the social contours of “enmity” and “friendship” in the very institution of citizenship and, we might say, to bring into being a wholesale state of exception, redefining the structure of the sovereign exercise of power in order to found a new polity—referred to in the political vernacular of Hindutva as Hindu Rashtra. Paraphrasing Brecht ([1953] 2003) from another context a long time ago and a long distance away, the BJP's manifest intention appears to be “to dissolve the people / and electing another.”

This fantasy of totalized constitutive power was unexpectedly interrupted by the actions of a new and most unlikely actor in the mobilizations of late 2019 and early 2020. In fact, this event marked the emergence of a new political subject, “the dādīs of Shaheen Bagh,” producing a politics of citizenship and constitutionality from the imperiled margins of the nation-space—a quintessentially democratic event, in Jacques Rancière's ([2000] 2013) sense of that phrase, in which those who are “uncounted,” who cannot be heard or seen, penetrate the order of power in the very process of being constituted as subject, transforming the “aesthetic” coordinates of the community, the communal “distribution of the sensible.” Modi's knowing remark to a rally of his followers during the Shaheen Bagh protests that the identity of the malcontents could be determined by their clothing is not simply a dog whistle to his base. It also reveals a deep anxiety about a new mode of subjectivization of the demos. Modi and his henchmen, clearly spooked by these developments, sought to recode this subjectivized form of the demos as in reality its primordial enemy—the Muslim, the Pakistani state, Islam itself. But this attempt to neutralize this subject qua subject via long established codes of visibility and legibility of the Muslim missed its mark and failed to eliminate the possibility of the claim to political subjectivity and citizenship on the part of the protestors.

The Shaheen Bagh protests were a unique event, despite their final outcome, for they momentarily shattered the fear of breaching the semiotic or aesthetic order of power in BJP-ruled India—the fear that had been, in the then five years of its rule, a modality of the functioning of the order itself. New types of speech act became possible immediately in the aftermath of the protests, drawing on longstanding speech practices and speech genres that, for instance, involve ridicule, satire, and shaming, which had been suspended and suppressed in the order of power inaugurated with the national rise of Modi and his enforcer, Amit Shah. To use just one small anecdotal example, whereas just a few months earlier, stand-up comics would routinely confess on stage to being afraid of making even mild jokes about the duo, in the midst of the protests the two came to be openly mocked in public as Ranga and Billa, the nicknames of two notorious gangsters convicted and executed for the kidnapping, (possible) rape, and murder of two teenaged siblings in Delhi in the 1980s. Laughter diminishes the authority of the one being laughed at, as Dimitris Vardoulakis (2020) has reminded us recently. And it is also a strategy of controlling one's own fear instead of letting one's actions be controlled by it. As Hindutva in power extends and expands its repressive apparatus, this managing of fear presents itself as an endless and recurring task.

By way of a final elaboration, however, I turn to a very different aesthetics and poetics of dissent in the face of sovereign power than that of mockery and laughter, considering instead a poem in Urdu to whose appearance in the protests, and the firestorm of dissensus in which it is now enmeshed in India, I have already drawn attention. The poet in question is Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and the poem is known popularly as “Ham dēkhēñgē” (“We Shall See”). It is not an exaggeration to say that it has become more or less synonymous with prodemocracy and anti-fascist protests in India, drawing often deranged responses from Hindutva forces. In order to understand this complex literary, political, and social phenomenon, we need to consider certain aspects of the history of Urdu literature and its entanglement in the history of the Muslim question in colonial and postcolonial India. Faiz is the towering presence in Urdu poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. Over a few decades starting in the late 1930s, Faiz and his generation of poets largely refashioned the place and role of poetry in society, liberating it from the mannered and socially isolated existence of the elite (and “feudal”) ashrāf social castes of north India, a language and a poetic tradition that had formerly been associated with a declining Mughal Empire and the rise of British rule in India (Lelyveld 1978). These remarkable individuals were mostly associated with the All-India (and later, Pakistan) Progressive Writers Association, which was founded in the mid-1930s in London by young Indian writers and conceived from the start as an umbrella organization of writers associated with the anticolonial cause, but retained at its core a group of revolutionary writers linked to the Communist Party of India (see Coppola 2017). Faiz has long been considered its most significant poet, although he was never formally associated with the party. Perhaps the greatest aesthetic accomplishment of Faiz and his contemporaries was opening up poetic expression to the social field and its questions while also remaining strictly attached to the subjective demands of the Urdu poetic tradition and its characteristic lyric forms, above all the ghazal.

A fuller analysis of the historical nature of Urdu as an Indian and South Asian literary language is of course beyond the scope of this essay, and I have undertaken such a discussion in Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Mufti 2007). But it bears repeating here that, since the rise of nationalism in the subcontinent, Urdu has appeared, on the one hand, to be quintessentially a literature of exile, by which I mean a corpus of writing practices whose most consistent effect is the displacement of any stable matrix of relations between place, language, and people. In this respect, it has excluded that possibility of “bardic nationalism” (Trumpener 1997), a concept that fits rather well with developments in many Indian literary traditions, including Hindi, but to which the history of Urdu poetics seems not to conform. Throughout its modern history, that is, ever since the bifurcation of the space of vernacular literary practices in North India in the early nineteenth century into distinct “Hindi” and “Urdu” practices and traditions, it seems never to have managed to generate the völkisch mood and atmosphere that has facilitated the restructuration of cultures of writing into the national institution of literature in numerous societies across the world. This is an orientation of Urdu literariness that has somehow survived nationalization of the language itself in Pakistan after the Partition, and even since the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971. In its very constitutive practices, therefore, prior to any polemical or programmatic intent, Urdu literary culture in the post-Partition era calls into question the cultural categories and cultural effects of the nation-state system in the subcontinent, in whose institution through the Partition of British India this very question of Urdu and its relationship to Hindi had, of course, played a significant role.

As I have argued at some length in Enlightenment in the Colony, Faiz's verse exploits fully this potential inherent to Urdu literariness. The central drama of his poetry is the dialectic of a collective selfhood at the disjunctures of language, culture, nation, and community. The foremost preoccupation of Faiz's poetry, which defines it as a body of writing, is the suffering of a divided or (we might say) “Partitioned” subject, caught between the desire for union with the beloved (or viṣāl) and a recognition that this distance from it (or hijr) is the very condition of its selfhood and its movement through life. While it desires unification with or subsumption into the beloved, it cannot quite let go of its condition of distance and alienation from the object of desire, since this is its very condition of being. And it is precisely in those of his poems that are closest to being “lyric” in structure and sensibility, that is, those in which the inward or subjective turn is most sustained, rather than in such explicitly Partition-themed poems as “Freedom's Dawn” (“Ṣubh_.-e a āzādī”), that we may glimpse these social meanings in their fullest crystallization. In a historical register, therefore, the overall effect is that the supposedly autonomous national selves that emerged from Partition are revealed to be what they are—moments or elements within the dialectic of Indian modernity. Thus, within the traditional language of the separation of lover and beloved, self and other, which is instantly legible to readers and listeners of Urdu poetry, Faiz manages to insert and hide a critique of the Partition. In more abstract terms, we might say that in Faiz's poetry both the degradation of human life in colonial and postcolonial capitalism—namely, expropriation—and the failure to achieve a collective selfhood at peace with itself—the larger cultural logic of Partition—find common expression in the suffering of the lyric subject. Faiz thus manages to reconcile, at the level of poetic image, what theory, and Marxism in particular, has struggled to reconcile at the level of concept, namely, exploitation and exclusion.

Let us now look at the poem in question in some detail. Through what means, exactly, is it able to reach out from its linguistic, literary, and historical contexts and engage a wider civilizational and historical space? It was written in 1979 during the repressive military and Islamic fundamentalist regime of General Zia ul-Haq and while the poet, living in self-imposed exile in Beirut, was visiting the United States. It was made famous when the singer Iqbal Bano performed it at a live event in 1985 in Pakistan with a reported audience of around fifty thousand, the audio recording of which began to circulate widely on cassettes underground. The actual title of the poem is a phrase from Arabic—to be precise, a line from the Quran, verse 27 of the fifty-fifth sūra, or chapter, called “al-Raḥmān” (“The Merciful”): “Wa yabqā wajhu rabbik” (in Marmaduke Pickthall's [1930] translation: “There remaineth but the Countenance of thy Lord”). In full, verses 26 and 27 of chapter 55 read as follows: “Kullu man ‘alaihā fānin. Wa yabqā wajhu rabbik ẓū al-jalāli wa al-ikrām” (All that is thereon will pass away. There remaineth but the Countenance of thy Lord of Might and Glory.) The chapter has a uniquely poetical structure even for the Quran, with a refrain repeated after every verse: “fa bi ’ayyi a'lā’i rabbikumā tukaẓẓibān” (Which is it, of the favors of your Lord, that ye deny?).

The poem begins with a promise made and remade, in lines 1 and 2—“We shall see / it is inevitable that we too shall see.” But the very next line (3) makes clear that the promise is about another promise, already made, “on the tablet of eternity,” the promise of a day of some sort of reckoning. In a series of cascading images framed in the future tense (in lines 5–12), the poem then lists the signs of this promised day: the seemingly immovable mountains of tyranny will become light as cotton wool, flying away in the wind; the earth will “beat” loudly beneath “us,” those who are the subjects of some power; and over the heads of those in power, there will be deafening thunder; finally, the “sanctuary of God's Earth” will be cleared of all “idols,” all false Gods. These apocalyptic images evoke specific Quranic passages, in particular from chapter 99, “al-Zalzala” (“The Earthquake”), but the Quranic elements might themselves have Biblical sources, for instance, Isaiah 24. From line 13 on, we get some sense of what sort of reckoning exactly is being promised here. It is, above all, a this-worldly reckoning: crowns and thrones, that is, the symbols of sovereign power, will be upturned and removed from their customary place of authority, and “we,” the “righteous and rejected” of the world, will take our rightful place. The first-person plural of course marks the place of a subject, first of all simply in grammatical terms, but also more broadly in discursive terms—in the poem, the place of an emergent subject with a key role to play in the apocalyptic drama that unfolds. It appears four times in the poem (once each in lines 1, 2, 7, and 13), and in lines 21 and 23, it appears, we might say, in concealed form, concealed by virtue of being split in two: “main . . . aur . . . tum” (me . . . and . . . you). In other words, here the scene of emergence and self-expression of the collective subject marked by the first-person plural pronoun is replaced with a negotiational interaction of the self and an other, an intimate other marked by the second-person singular-familiar pronoun.

Finally, “masnad” (line 14) is a prop or seat of some sort, but not unequivocally a “throne,” which is indicated by “takht” (line 16). It carries the sense of a seat of honor, and here that honor is reserved for the meek and rejected. To be more precise, it appears as the sign of a form of authority to come that bypasses the discourse of sovereignty—which is evident in “throne” and “crown”—and in fact comes to replace it. What the poem offers overall, therefore, is a critique and rejection of the discourse of sovereignty. Coming after this apocalyptic vision, these lines in Faiz's poem (that is, 13–16) offer, broadly speaking, a “world turned upside down” vision in which the downtrodden, those crushed routinely and seemingly with no recourse against their oppression, come to take their rightful place of dignity and authority. What it seems to foreground is the historicality and thus transience of every social order, every social artifact, however primordial or permanent it may appear or claim to be. Every exclusive and abusive social order sees its own end, its day of reckoning—this is the “promise” that the poem elaborates.

In the final seven lines (17–23), the poem takes a more fully philosophical turn. This final segment begins with an invocation of the name of God as that which ultimately remains—this is a translation and paraphrasing of the Quranic phrase of the title—and then offers (in lines 18 and 19) a nondualistic conception of the divine Absolute, which is both absent and present (that is, both unseen and seen), both the viewer and the spectacle. The source of this nondualism is first of all the metaphysics of taṣawwuf (Sufism), to be more precise, the philosophy of waḥdat al-wujūd (“the oneness of existence” in Arabic), one of the preeminent philosophical traditions in Sufism in India and, according to the influential critic of the mid-twentieth century, Muhammad Hasan Askari, the philosophical ground of the ghazal's lyric tradition in Urdu and of Indo-Islamic civilization more broadly. But it cannot not at the same time also invoke the philosophy of advaita (“not two” in Sanskrit) or Vedantic nondualism, because the parallels between these two philosophical systems—the one of Near Eastern, North African, and Andalusian origin in the Middle Ages; the other emerging out of post-Vedic culture in Ancient India—themselves constitute a theme in Indo-Muslim religion and culture, from the early Sufi thinkers of the Chishtiya order to the scholar and statesman Abulkalam Azad, a leading critic of Muslim separatism who wrote in the first half of the twentieth century, in the decades before the Partition of India (Rizvi 1978; and Mufti 2007).

In line 20, this theosophical nondualism is given a specific content, namely, “ana al-ḥaq” (I am the Truth), but because “al-ḥaq” is also, in Sunni orthodoxy, one of the so-called ninety-nine attributes of God, the expression verges on the blasphemous, tending to reduce, if not cancel out entirely, the distance between God and his (human) creation. This ecstatic Sufi utterance, or šatḥ, associated with the mystic and martyr Mansur al-Hallaj, executed by Abbasid authorities in 922 CE on charges of blasphemy and political treachery, is turned here into a rallying cry. The execution of al-Hallaj, who is known more commonly as Mansur in the languages of the region, is the subject of numerous ghazals and other poetic compositions in many languages, including, beside Urdu, Persian, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Sindhi, and so on, and numerous other works of art throughout the Persianate world over centuries. This phrase is thus arguably the most famous expression, in capsular form, of Sufi antinomianism, expressing the constitutive tension within Sunni Islam traditionally between piety and devotion, the muftī and the mystic. Faiz's invocation of al-Hallaj caused controversy in Pakistan on the poem's first appearance, seen by the upholders of religious orthodoxy in the era of General Zia's violent and repressive Islamization of the country as a heterodox and even blasphemous gesture. But the reception of the poem in India in recent years makes clear that Faiz manages to somehow translate this imagery of Sufi antinomianism into a secular language of resistance and rebellion.

Having invoked the Hallajian expostulation, which seeks to overcome the polarity of the immanent and the transcendent—“I,” finite and immanent, am “Truth,” that is, simultaneously transcendent—the poem ends by leaving us with the work of the constitution of the “we,” the collective subject, as an exchange between a self and an other, each marked grammatically as singular and familiar, the first introduction of a second-person addressee in the poem. In this form of address, in which the subject speaks to an intimate other—the word in lines 21 and 23 is “tum,” Hindi-Urdu equivalent, we might say, of the “thou and thee” form no longer operative in English—the intimacy of the other keeps it from being permanently frozen in the position of other, as object of the subject's desire. As in so many of Faiz's poems, this exchange between self and other takes the form of a dialectic, and one of the semantic valences of this form of appearance of self and other in Faiz's writing points to the problematic of a self-in-partition, an unresolved and dialectical entanglement as the very scene of the emergence of the self.

Writing in self-imposed exile from a Pakistan undergoing a violent so-called Islamization under military rule in the late 1970s, Faiz, who was vilified by many in the country as anti-Pakistani and pro-Indian, enters fully into the language of this totalitarian project at the intersections of religion and state in an Islamic setting and shows how it can be turned against the authoritarian state and its instrumentalization of religious belief and practice. In heavily ironic language, the imagery of monotheistic iconoclasm is turned inside out to reveal the iconoclasts themselves as false gods, claiming the authority to stand outside and above, and able to suspend, the normal course of things. It is a remarkable fact that this poem, with such clearly Islamic markings, could also become available to critics of the authoritarian imbrication of politics and religion in contemporary India. The young people in Delhi who first adopted it for their protests against the attempt of the BJP-ruled state to change the nature of their educational institutions, whom we can safely assume are not for the most part trained in Urdu poetics, and for whom Urdu is, furthermore, meant to be a despised alien and antinational language and culture, seem to have instinctively understood and taken up the poem's invitation across the borders of language, religion, culture, and nation-state. They understand that the oversize political personae of Modi and Shah are “false gods” demanding unquestioning submission and devotion, and recognize in this little poem and song from across the border the civilizational resources for orienting oneself to stand up to tyranny. It is also remarkable that Hindutva attacks on the poem and attempts to recode its linguistic, cultural, civilizational, and political complexity as simply “anti-Hindu” language have failed to stop the insertion and reanimation of the poem in the scene of dissensus that has emerged around the ruling party's attempt to reinvent the Indian polity. These attacks have if anything strengthened the popular attachment to it, and its singing and recitation in public have almost become ways of trolling and triggering its critics. In a strange twist, the poem has even been appropriated in song form in a controversial recent film, The Kashmir Files, which excoriates progressive students and professors as antinational and attempts to upturn emergent (and insurgent) narratives about the Indian military's violent presence in Kashmir.

What I have attempted to describe here is a struggle, a scene of “contestation” of power, as Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam (2007) have put it, of authoritarian and antidemocratic forms of majoritarian politics that verge on their edges toward recognizably fascistic forms, by prodemocracy mobilizations coalescing around the goal of protecting the Constitution. The unapologetic appearance of the dādīs of Shaheen Bagh in public space as Muslim women as well as Indian citizens is experienced in itself as an act of aggression in the dominant discourse of Hindutva. This emergence sought to redistribute the mode of signification of “Muslim women” in postcolonial India, which, as I have briefly noted, has its own distinct history in which, historically speaking, the figure of Muslim woman has been situated as passive object of control in a competition between the discourse of the state and the patriarchy of the Islamic religious establishment. It momentarily produced a “redistribution of the sensible,” in Rancière's phrase, overturning the political designation and myth of all Muslim women as oppressed victims requiring the protection of the state, recently reiterated by the BJP government itself in the passage of the Muslim divorce bill, which everyone, including its supporters, understood as a political maneuver. The “Islamic veil” itself in all its forms was recoded and refunctionalized in the course of the protests as the participating women openly espoused their goal of protecting the secularist Constitution of India and as they enacted a politics of coalition with the movement for Dalit survival and rights. The dādīs of Shaheen Bagh mark a remarkable emergence at the intersections of the politics of emancipation and citizenship, the poetics of protest, and gendered passages from private to public spaces. Their activism offered no final word but drew concrete and urgent attention to the threat that Hindutva poses to democracy and also performed the very possibility of refusal and dissent.

I wish to thank a number of individuals for sharing with me their personal impressions of the Shaheen Bagh protest: Pankaj Butalia, Ruchira Gupta, Farida Khan, Mohammad Yousuf Nomani, and Kavita Singh. I am also grateful to Nasser Mufti for his comments on a draft of this essay.

Notes

References