The mothers of Shaheen Bagh made us laugh, cry and protest
By Saeed Akhtar Mirza, film maker, author*
“Shoot the bloody traitors” was the response of some leaders in the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) to the thousands gathering peacefully in town squares and city centers across India, singing the verses of a long dead revolutionary South Asian poet. The savage statements took some time coming, but finally, come it did and with it the regime revealed itself.
So, before the COVID-19 pandemic completely overwhelms media headlines and obliterates our recent memory, I need to tell the tale of a satyagraha by Muslim mothers and grandmothers, along with their children, which started in the middle of a cold December 2019, on a short stretch of road in Shaheen Bagh, Delhi. The women sought repeal of recently passed citizenship laws, apparently aimed at depriving millions of Muslims of their Indian citizenship and the right to vote.
The simple act of public defiance, which was initially ignored by the media, soon blossomed into a spontaneous nationwide movement of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Dalits, Jains and Christians, of songs, music and laughter and of sharing and solidarity.
Could the women have successfully blunted the raw visceral appeal of the BJP, which used religious divisiveness as an emotive weapon to win the parliamentary election in 2019? No. And, it would be foolish to expect they could.
But.
What the women revealed was that the regime could be resisted. Poetry was their answer to the brutality of Hindu extremists towards Muslims, lower castes, Christians and other minorities. And this is why they created history.
So, let me begin this tale.
The Shaheen Bagh satyagraha began spontaneously. This peaceful form of protest, first undertaken by Mahatma Gandhi as a way to hold onto the truth and oust the British from India in 1947, was adopted by other leaders including Nelson Mandela in South Africa and Martin Luther King in the U.S.
As the working women gathered and sang songs, while also trying to stay warm in cheap woolen coats and blankets, the BJP and its affiliates, unwilling to comprehend the public anger, responded in the only way they could: with an outpouring of hate. How could a bunch of “illiterate and ignorant” women understand the complexities of constitutional laws, who was funding them and which opposition party or group was organizing them? Didn't the women believe the exhortations of the Prime and Home Ministers that no legitimate Indian would lose their citizenship?
The ministers and the ruling party bosses judged the women by the clothes they wore, by the neighborhood they lived in. What they didn't realize was that the protest was not just about these citizenship laws...there was much more. And the much more had to do with lessons that had seeped into the memories of the women from recent history.
No, they were not ignorant.
The women assembled peacefully every day to tell the ruling regime that they were as Indian as anybody else and that Muslims were tired of trying to prove this for the past seventy-three years, ever since India’s independence. They were tired of hearing stories from their husbands, sons, uncles and male cousins of their ordeal of trying to prove their loyalty to India during every India/Pakistan sporting match and every conflict between the two countries, and after every act of terror in India, perceived to have originated in Pakistan.
They were tired of the relentless communal riots that regularly erupt across India, at times killing hundreds of Muslims, destroying their farms, businesses and homes and no one punished for the crimes. They were also tired of seeing their young men not finding work, especially government jobs. Instead many of their youth are sent to jail on trumped up charges and then, years later, released by the courts for lack of evidence. Who is going to give them back the years of their lost youth, in some cases spent facing unspeakable torture?
The women also learn much from their daily experiences, from the bigotry and discrimination they face on the streets, in schools, at the work place, at ration ships, in municipal and government offices and in police stations.
In recent years, almost every week they become aware of new humiliations merely by watching the news on TV. They watched silently as a saffron-robed member of parliament, while mocking her dress, divided the country into 'ramzades' and 'haraamzades', good citizens and bastards; another said Muslims are 'termites'; a third struts into parliament, famous only because he is the main accused in a slaughter of innocents that has left thousands of refugees.
The fourth one is special. Also, in saffron-robes, and accused of several violent acts to terrorize Muslims, she apparently wanted a seat in parliament to gain publicity as a symbol of Hindu supremacist philosophy, which has taken center stage in contemporary Indian politics.
The news broadcasts reveal more insults to the women in Shaheen Bagh. Why are dozens of Muslim men lynched, often in broad daylight, only because they were trying to make a living selling milk from cows? As vigilantes carry out the attacks in the name of cow protection, some ruling party officials celebrate their crime as acts of heroism. Then, a Supreme Court judgement, while acknowledging the destruction of a mosque was illegal, grants the vacant land for the building of a Hindu temple. And in Kashmir, a region with a majority of Muslims, political leaders and hundreds of others were jailed or put under house arrest, civil rights suspended and phone and internet communications cut since the BJP government in New Delhi wants to exercise total control.
Days after the new citizenship laws were passed in December, the women of Shaheen Bagh wondered where had we reached after nearly three quarters of a century of independence from British rule...what happened to the Constitutional principles of respect for all religions, protection of minorities, equality and voting rights? Reaching the end of their tolerance, they launched their satyagraha.
Waving the Indian flag, in front of a display of the Preamble to the Indian Constitution, they paid homage to the sacrifices of past satyagraha participants, notably Mahatma Gandhi, who led the peaceful struggle for independence from British rule and B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution, as well as others…all heroes who fought for an India which treats everyone equally, with dignity and respect. The women understood the astute strategy of Gandhi and Mandela that peaceful protests expose the brutality of a regime, thereby undermining its legitimacy and support.
The women sang the Indian national anthem as well poems, including this one by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who passed away in 1984. The poem reminds people of the inevitable arrival of Judgement Day:
Lazim hai hum dekhenge
Woh din jiska wada tha
Hum dekhenge
We shall surely see
The day that promised
We shall surely see
Inspired by the women, students from two nearby campuses in Delhi began protesting peacefully. The police beat the students, lobbed tear gas and broke into the libraries. Students in other parts of India joined the protests, some of which turned violent. In Uttar Pradesh, a state ruled by another saffron clad monk, students were shot, their homes raided and businesses burned down.
Meanwhile the women of Shaheen Bagh calmly continued with their satyagraha. Then a remarkable transformation occurred – they became a beacon of hope for others. Overnight and spontaneously, hundreds of thousands poured onto the streets in Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Kolkatta, and other cities and towns demanding that all religions and civil rights be respected. They were lawyers, doctors, teachers, writers, teachers, singers, painters, musicians, actors and poets and workers and farmers and women and children. On February 15, I joined one in Azad Maidan, Mumbai. Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and Sikh priests participated in the gatherings, jointly reciting prayers.
Apparently, the question that most bothered the BJP was: how could the women of Shaheen Bagh emerge from their “ingrained backwardness,” in burqas and hijabs to protest on the road? How were they able to inspire people nationwide…it had never happened before?
In February, about fifty people were killed, mostly Muslims, in Hindu Muslim riots that broke out in Delhi. Once again homes, shops and businesses were torched, leaving hundreds as refugees, while the police openly assisted the Hindu extremist mobs, according to media reports. The women of Shaheen Bagh bore this latest insult and continued with their satyagraha.
On March 23, the women were forced to end their satyagraha by a deadly threat from nature - something not achieved by the false propaganda against them by BJP leaders and pro-BJP commentators on major TV channels, official threats, arrests and legal cases, police shootings and violent attacks. Fearing that the spread of coronavirus could infect their children and them, the women of Shaheen Bagh returned to shelter in their homes.
Following government orders, the police cleared everything at the site of the satyagraha, including whitewashing walls painted with photos of Mahatma Gandhi and other leaders of India’s independence. But the BJP officials are unable to erase the prayers of religious tolerance, sung jointly by Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh and Christian priests, from the memories of the millions who recited them at rallies in support of the women of Shaheen Bagh in towns and cities across India.
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*Saeed Mirza, based in Mumbai, has directed major classics of Indian cinema and TV serials and is a best-selling author. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0592595/.
A version of this story was published in Scroll.
