Some amongst the Shaheen Bagh protestors have said that they are ready to meet Home Minister Amit Shah and to place their grievances before him. However, they also felt that the onus for inviting them for talks rests with the Home Minister and the NDA Government. Shaheen Bagh is a genuine peoples’ movement against the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) 2019 and therefore is without a single leader. It is a case of people spontaneous coming together to ask the Government to strike down this law that is potentially communal and goes against the grain of the Indian Constitution which is secular in nature. In December 2019 the religion factor was brought in and it led to spontaneous protests across the country. The 2019 Act allows illegal migrants settled in India up to December 2014 to be given citizenship but only if they are Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, and Buddhists. No Muslim will be granted citizenship under this Act because it is meant to accommodate people of the above-mentioned religious groups that are facing persecution in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh which are all Muslim countries. The assumption is that Muslim immigrants from the above three countries who are illegally settled in India are doing so purely out of economic reasons.
There was no reason to turn a Citizenship Act into a political weapon by using religion as a criterion for granting citizenship, except for one reason and that is vote bank politics. The impact of the CAA, if implemented will be felt in Assam where about 19 lakh people are considered stateless today after the massive exercise of the National Register of Citizens’ (NRC), merely because they don’t have some documents. About 12 lakh out of the 19 lakh are said to be Hindus. The BJP sees then as a potential vote bank. The case is similar in West Bengal. Both Assam and West Bengal are headed for state elections in 2021. The Shaheen Bagh protest has continued for over two months. It is natural to assume that fatigue has set in since most women protestors are housewives and have a duty to their families too. While Delhi was preparing for elections, Shaheen Bagh was a thorn in the side of the BJP but now that the elections are over the Party could well ignore the protestors. This is where strategy matters and also a robust leadership. But Shaheen Bagh also demonstrates that ordinary people with no political alignment can come to the streets and protest state overreach. This movement must be respected because it is democratic and peaceful. The Modi Government has a duty to speak to its citizens since it is elected to govern over India and its people and not only to govern those that voted for it.
