Introduction
In March 2020, we set out to see for ourselves what might be called the Indian Tahrir Square, a revolt even in the times of a pandemic – fifty days before the Indian Prime Minister made the Covid-19 infamous announcement of a midnight lockdown in February 2020. Shaheen Bagh, New Delhi, put out this imposing poster of the ‘Constitution of India’ as a common belonging.
Building upon her field notes and encounters with ‘the rest’ of the country, the author seeks to make sense of many reasons why the dominant may have found Shaheen Bagh problematic. This previous engagement with Shaheen Bagh could only result in a long prose-poem summary, before the ‘deconstruction of nothing’. The Shaheen Bagh protest, which began in December 2019, was perhaps the most significant revolt of contemporary India. Initially begun in reaction to the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act – which promised legal citizenship for illegal immigrants of six non-Muslim nationalities/faiths – it overtly resisted the reported intention of the National Register of Citizens updating in India. Though the right-wing Indian State later claimed that it had no plans to initiate NRC/CAA, the protest had already acquired many other struggles, including the study of hard textbooks of constitution, democracy, secularism, peace, and the gender of Allah. No identifiable leader or plan led it, and a vertical part-heroic began only after measures of State suppression. It was initiated by the people of Shaheen Bagh, an area in the south of New Delhi, and gave a slogan – Everything will be remembered – against the proposed agendas of undeclared intended and publicly denied citizenship verification exercises. It grew to other places in the country as Save the Constitution Agitations/Citizenships. The Shaheen Bagh protest was predominantly non-violent and public in appearance, marked by the participation of many Muslim and non-Muslim women and men with dissent – differing from the immediately available secular and nationalist logic of nationalisms divided between Muslim, Hindu, Sikhs, Left/Right, Azadi, or the demand of Undivided India of the cells closer to the Indian State. Like most protests in Indian borders, Shaheen Bagh seeded a fresh body of political articulations and energies. Shaheen Bagh was also seen by the political entourages and media as a discussion of truth.
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Exploring the Narrative of Black Truth
What is a black truth? The immediate responses that come to one's mind when faced with the term will not capture what is meant by it here. It could be seen as something morbid and dark or obvious and heavy. Thankfully, there is nothing obvious about the black truth we are navigating right now when we talk of India witnessing Shaheen Bagh. It delineates something foremost: a world that millions face. It calls into reality a kind of life lived in pitch. It could be life on the borders (or as some might simplify "fringe"). It is true life, alright. If it is centered around "life", then this can also mean it contends with human efforts and experiences that are regularly consumed with their own precariousness as well as arrangements of social, economic, political, and spatial existence hosting that reality. Moreover, it could mean that it is a fuller history as lived than any celebratory or social-unified history would allow. And then, it could delineate our attempts to spell out a meta-consciousness about politics, power, citizenship, and justice at this level. These are rare places, after all, where life is made for more.
In many ways, this site, rather than the ethnic or religious enclaves demarcated as Shaheen Baghs, could be several sites in the cities of the poor and the struggling that contest such life in many parts of India. Let's not merely sentimentalize or simplify these microcosms or zones of India's darkness or simply relegate them in our minds, as they interest some, to a narrative of proximity or exceptional goodness or just limit their texture as spaces marking centuries-old deprivation and expectations. Shaheen Bagh, in various registers, describes this as a cultural, political, and historical sensory world. That it could be a world of radical gatherings that little disrupts is a measure of how our sensors escape narratives that distance themselves. This world can also be de-stunted or lessened. Shaheen Bagh tells of the deadened zoning of these places, almost tattooing everydayness, rendering it all but neutral. Such a neighborhood is allowed to be territorially sequestered, taped off. Shaheen Bagh is a plea. But it is also one moment in which the city forces, like an implement of concern, have to face the policies that have allowed for mini-Shaheen Baghs. The street level is an effect, not of political marches down Pathan Road, although necessary, but as a chronic negotiation between these verrucas and the more regular bodily functions of a city. What's this problem of health when the whole system is infected?
The Phenomenon of Fake Truth
What we call 'fake truth' is contemporary and has a longer history that culminates in flagrant lies of the government and flagrantly fake news narratives distorting reality with propaganda. 'Fake truth' narratives are typically propagated through mass media and social media and are accompanied by flagrant lies by senior functionaries and front organizations of the government. As a consequence of this, a large part of the population internalizes these large syndromes of fake truth and flagrant lies.
Notice under this rubric the micro dynamics through which such narratives came to prevail. The most well-known fake was the fiction of the jihadi plotting against the demonstrators of Shaheen Bagh, which has convinced most of the Hindu majority and sponsored design in the functioning of the government from the highest level to the small-tier apparatchik in India. The uncritical consumption of this fake has led to the failure of any substantial Hindu or Muslim vote in support of the display of patriotism by the campaigners in UP or approaching elections. The violence has been condemned, stating the evident. Yet, it is a useless, failing body, punditry aside. What plausibly is the worst intolerance, pandering, and flagrant advocacy of this fake, than the silence and tacit recognition of such by the maneuver of the Republic. These flagrantly misrepresentative and to this extent fake words formed in everyone the image of Muslims as intolerant, fascist, and jihadi rally. An assertion of that image was a genocidal act or one implementing them; non-citizens or rather anti-nationals would deserve the treatment of Muslims under this image: prison camps. This is the 'reality' that the words in question gave to be seen by the nationalist. Such false narrative was also designs of the government campaign seeking to convert the farmers in want to hang in internment long before the protest was broken up.
Analyzing the Impact on Society and Politics
As the protest unfolded and came to be debated and discussed across the nation, it became clear that the women in Shaheen Bagh were catalyzing conversations in India about the meanings of citizenship, identity, belonging, and the links between human rights and civil and political liberties. In most other cases brought in the Indian Supreme Court against the state for restricting civil liberties or monitoring citizenship negotiations in contentious ways, the poor rarely featured as decision-makers. It was hence quite astonishing that the Supreme Court judgment made an exception for them. It was also disheartening as it revealed to betrayed citizens that a very significant section of the intellectual and political elite had chosen to dehumanize a very diverse community and had justified their dehumanization by resorting to communal essentialization.
A significant part of the grant was utilized in organizing and conducting lectures, discussions, and conferences with others from civil society, primarily in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. These discussions, talks, and interactions have served to provide an insightful sense of the politics of hurt in India and the contemporary contours of legitimate and illegitimate political subjectivity, from the point of view of a variety of interlocutors – Dalits, feminists, victims of state terror, marginalized Adivasi, migrants, minorities, advocates, social scientists, farmers, and youth. This is our analysis today: thousands proceeded to call out every statement in the affidavit for being a bundle of lies. Moreover, like standard police, some members of the governing faculty arrived in his village and “dragged” his mother and “abused” her to confess that her son was “taught anti-national activities by the urban naxals.” The majority of the seminar proceeded to call his report fake news. This is the black and fake truth that currently navigates the streets and newspapers today. We are all now finding it very difficult to draw any firm conclusions from the fact that we live in these times today.
Conclusion
The case of Shaheen Bagh protest has been an important part of recent events and developments in India with potential to define the future course of action for the entire country. Its most immediate and palpable impact has been the electoral outcome: it has favoured the Bharatiya Janata Party in Delhi state Legislative Assembly. This leads to implications- political and otherwise for the citizens and residents of the Capital city, the country as a whole, and global attention.
For India, this should not be a matter of subjection to a scorecard only. What the media called another color revolution is an important political milepost for an identity-driven regime and it calls for a re-presentation of its problems and possibilities – call for dialogue not to be case at rest. Both national and international level debates on the matter are quiescent, presaged and preternaturally desiccated on exaggerated, inaccurate and misleading representation to far from ultimate harmful – bashing the poor migrant Indians in affluent neighbourhoods heavily involved in the movement. If they were really affected, they’d be back home, won’t they? The silent with tact consensus the color of protest was a benign fake truth, and fake army action.
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