Shaheen Bagh

The passage of the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act exemplifies legislative populism in its most ethnic format, the National Register of Citizens being its subservient arm or vice versa. The anti-CAA, NRC movement offers a significant challenge to Narendra Modi’s brand of populism, a challenge that is generative of a “new” vision of democracy. It is my contention that Shaheen Bagh protest contains possibilities for redefining democracy. The meaning of the Urdu word ‘Shaheen’ is ‘eagle’,  and is central to Muhammad Iqbal’s decolonial poetic philosophy.

This article explores the remaking of ideas of the "ordinary citizen" in India in the context of Hindu majoritarian politics and changing relationships between the state and private capital. Focusing on one of India's largest privately developed townships, DLF City, which adjoins Delhi, the article explores the ways in which activities by middle-and upper middle-class residents of DLF City produce new narratives of "ordinariness." Within them, socioeconomically privileged groups come to be represented as "the common people," contesting the postcolonial state's historical focus on the welfare of marginal populations. The article suggests that contemporary narratives of ordinariness in India require an understanding beyond its deployment in critical social science literature where it is posited as a politics of speaking truth to power. The appropriation of ordinariness by the privileged in the Indian context is part of a new politics of class, caste, and majoritarianism.

Protests in Hong Kong have seen a significant evolution – from the Queen’s Pier campaign of 2007 to the Occupy movement of 2014, and then to the summer of 2019 – in the concepts of both leadership and space. Conventional political agitations are territory, demand- and leadership-driven, typically mounted against the presumption of an orthodox democratic state apparatus. This basic presumption may however need to be revised both in the light of the new character of the ‘tactically extended’ state, as well as the ensuing populisms that allow a narrow and often culturally gated civil society to arrogate to itself the right to speak for the ‘people’ as a whole. In response to transformations in the very apparatus of governmentality, political protests have queried the concept of citizenship itself (and thus also queried its most visible representations, including those of leadership and authorship), and have turned their tactics instead to amorphous, even invisible, modes of leadership alongside post-Occupy definitions of amorphous and undefined space. This essay is in part a personal account, taking from conversations and texts produced in Hong Kong and India between 2015 and 2020, and it draws substantially on how Hong Kong’s ‘be water’ tactic was viewed in India in late 2019. As the protests began in Delhi against the Citizenship Amendment Act, India saw its own experiments, historical discoveries and transborder similarities, around anonymous subjects and invisible speech, meme-forms and other meanings produced entirely through circulation. It also saw the return of the radical analogue in the context of punitive internet shutdowns

All Tunnels Connect is a speculative long-essay that discusses about the recent migration crisis, mass exodus of daily wage labourers from cities that happened due to the Covid lockdown in India. It connects it with the recent anti-citizenship protests in New Delhi, the ideas of democracy and radicalism in Athens, and the state of exception and living in Kashmir and Palestine. It proposes 'tunnel' that connects people, place and time. And speculate on the idea of the 'other' world, called Home.