One of the more remarkable features of the country-wide protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) surely has to be the fact that women have taken the lead in signaling their dissent against the heavy-handedness of the Indian state and the increasing encroachment upon constitutional liberties.  Perhaps, in describing this as “remarkable”, I may be thought by some to be doing, if inadvertently, women a disservice in suggesting that they have not been prominent in previous civil disobedience movements. That is indubitably not the case:  they were highly visible in the demonstrations that took place all over the country in the wake of the brutal sexual assault against “Nirbhaya”, just as they were in 2004 when twelve women, the Mothers of Manipur, stripped themselves naked in public to highlight the sexual violation of a young girl and, more generally, the ongoing and systemic problem of sexual violence against women.

The extraordinary courage and presence of mind that female students and indeed women from all walks of life have brought to the present demonstrations signify a more enhanced role for women in Indian public life and point to the strengths they bring in steering India towards a more democratic future.  There is a widespread feeling that the agitation against the CAA (and the Citizenship Amendment Bill that preceded the act) and now the NRC caught the government unawares, but I would also hazard the argument that one of the many things that has rattled the government is the resistance, much of it wholly unexpected, put up by women.  The statist view in India has never bothered to expend much thought on girls and women, except in its paternalistic role as conferring benefits on them as a form of “empowerment”, striving to have them retain the sacred aura of “Indian womanhood” and yet be emblematic of the “modern working woman”, and so on.  There have been countless poster campaigns by successive Indian governments enjoining the citizenry to understand that to “honour women is to honour the nation”, urging people to “protect the girl child” and suggesting that in the “education of girls lies the salvation of the nation”.



The women of Shaheen Bagh, a predominantly Muslim neighborhood in Delhi’s Jamia Nagar, have been waging a silent demonstration against CAA and NRC for over two weeks. They have occupied a portion of the main highway connecting the city to NOIDA. Some women have not gone home for days, others are accompanied at the sit-in by their children.  Those who are illiterate are nonetheless fully aware of what is at stake in the government plan to roll out a nation-wide NRC. They all understand that women are even more vulnerable:  property papers are generally in the name of men, and many don’t have the required documents to prove Indian citizenship.  Above all, their very presence, grit, and disciplined resistance gives the lie to the claim that the demonstrations have been fueled by “the opposition” or “outside instigators”.  These women offer as decisive a repudiation as any that could be mustered of the specious claim that the demonstrations have been violent.

 (Bengaluru: Protestors display placards and raise slogans during a protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act-CAA, National Register of Citizenship (NRC) and National Population Register(NPR) in Bengaluru, Saturday, Dec. 28, 2019. PTI Photo)

That women have been at the helm of a nonviolent affirmation of the constitutional promise of equality under the law and nonviolent resistance to state thuggery would have come as no surprise to Mohandas Gandhi. He had been a keen observer of the suffragette moment in Britain and as early as 1907 wrote a piece in Gujarati, “Brave Women”, in their defense.  Women were, in his view, naturally predisposed towards nonviolence—though, as he pointed out repeatedly, it was necessary to make a distinction between “nonviolence of the weak” and “nonviolence of the strong”.  By “weak” he meant to designate not women as such, but rather those, whether men or women, who turned to nonviolence not from choice, deliberation, or moral reasoning but from dint of habit, instinct, or, most importantly, circumstances.  Women, Gandhi was convinced, could be the ideal satyagrahis, if their natural disposition towards nonviolence could be turned to generate a disciplined and systematic movement of nonviolent social transformation.

Writing in the pages of his weekly Harijan over the years, Gandhi made known his view that “woman is the incarnation of ahimsa.  Ahimsa means infinite love, which again means infinite capacity for suffering.”  Love and suffering are perhaps not the keywords of our times as much as are “equality” and “rights” in the discourse of nonviolence.  But, whatever language strikes one as the most apposite, the emergence of women in the present civil resistance movement is doubtless the most promising sign that the country has not yet surrendered to the tone-deaf authoritarianism of a state that is drunk on its own victories.  Women, now as many times in the past, will surely demonstrate that the democratic spirit is incompatible with naked muscularity.

(Vinay Lal is a writer, blogger, cultural critic, and Professor of History at UCLA)

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