In Shaheen Bagh

February 8: Delhi Legislative Assembly Elections
Aam Aadmi Party: 62 seats
Bharatiya Janata Party: 8 seats
Indian National Congress: 0 seats 

On December 11, the Indian parliament, led by Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP, passed a new law, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), that introduces a religious criterion into citizenship and marginalizes Muslims. This law sparked large-scale protests across the country that continue to this day. In Delhi’s mostly Muslim neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh, hundreds of local women have been sitting on the street since January 5. More and more people join them every day from every religion, caste and class across India to raise their voice against the blow to the country’s secular constitution. They draw graffiti—from “we reject CAA” to portraits of Mahatma Gandhi and lines from Bertolt Brecht—sing protest songs, and read the Constitution aloud. 

The provincial elections in Delhi, the country’s capital of 20 million residents, came just under two months later, February 8. In May of 2019, the BJP had gained a dominant majority in India’s parliament in spite of five tough years for the country as the economy struggled, jobs were lost, and social harmony tanked. The results of 2019’s General Elections proved the BJP could rely on religion, India’s deepest fault line, to win elections. 

It was natural to wonder if the capital would go the country’s way.

The new citizenship law is the most controversial topic in India today. It divides politics and society in equal measure. On one side are the BJP, its political allies and its Hindu nationalist supporters. On the other side is everyone protesting the law—rich and poor, students and professionals, activists and actors—nowhere as steadfastly as in Shaheen Bagh. 

As Delhi entered election season in January, Shaheen Bagh became its touchpoint. Thousands protested there every night, and the BJP harped on about them every day. 

On January 25, Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah, until recently president of the BJP, defined the party’s election campaign with clear directions to the voters: “Press the lotus button [BJP’s election symbol] so hard that... the Shaheen Bagh protesters run away.” He said this while addressing a group of “cyber yoddhas,” paid workers of the party who create, circulate and defend its propaganda online. 

In Delhi, the BJP’s biggest rival is the Aam Aadmi Party. Only eight years old, the AAP was forged out of months of protests in Delhi by a group of diverse people against a common issue: corruption in governance. Its leader is 51-year-old Arvind Kejriwal, a former engineer, a bureaucrat and a social worker. When he ran in 2015, Kejriwal was seen by many as an outsider who represented an alternative to India’s usual politics, which is tangled up in family, identity and ideology. In 2015’s Delhi elections, the AAP won 67 of the 70 seats in Delhi’s assembly. The BJP won three. 

Beyond clean governance, however, it’s tough to say what the party stands for. A political party focused on efficient delivery of public goods could possibly work for a smaller country with fewer divisions, but not India with 1.3 billion people, separated by caste, class, language, religion and ideology. 

When laws like the CAA threaten to remake India into an ethnostate, the AAP stands out in its silence. On January 25, on the eve of India’s Republic Day, Kejriwal read the preamble to the Indian constitution at a Delhi stadium and spoke about the “responsibility” of the billion “people of the country to protect it” in order for the country to “sail through difficult circumstances.” But he chose not to mention thousands of Delhi’s residents who have been gathering in different locations and reading the Constitution aloud to protect it against the BJP’s sectarian policies. He also chose not to visit Shaheen Bagh. On one occasion, he called the BJP’s obsession with it a “distraction” from “welfare initiatives” of his government. This was in sharp contrast to his earlier attitude towards the “rival” party. “Narendra Modi is not only a threat to the secular fabric of India but also to the country's international image,” he had said during the 2014 elections. 

He has since seemingly bowed to the populist appeal of the BJP’s brand of Hindu nationalism. Called a “terrorist” and a “terrorist sympathizer” by members of the BJP days before voting began in Delhi, he responded by reciting couplets from a devotional hymn from Hinduism.

 It may have been the politically wise thing to do.

“Contemporary India,” argues Rahul Verma, co-author of Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party Systems of India, “looks more saffron [a holy color in Hinduism] in its ideological makeup than at any other point since [India’s] Independence. The median seems to have shifted so far towards the right that even the opposition to BJP’s politics is either mute or colored in overt-nationalistic sentiment.”

Only one of the contesting parties made it a point to champion social and religious plurality: a sign of where India’s politics stands today. This happens to be India’s oldest party, the Congress, led for decades by a single family: the Nehru-Gandhis, long the most powerful family in India. At one point in India, it used to be common for the majority of Indians to vote for the Congress. Today, they have arguably not much to offer to the voters–neither divisive venom nor vision for the future. In the recent provincial and national elections, the party’s role has been reduced to either allying with the regional players up against the BJP or getting out of their way. The Congress party had ruled Delhi through three consecutive terms from 1998 to 2013. This time, the party appeared to clear the way for the AAP. The Gandhis mostly stayed away from the party’s campaign. When they did, they spoke about national issues, not the local election. 

Meeting anti-CAA protesters in Delhi’s neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh, Priyanka Gandhi, granddaughter of the former prime minister Indira Gandhi, said the new law “[would] destroy India.” Speaking at a shanty town in Delhi, her brother, Rahul Gandhi, spoke about the double danger of unemployment and identity politics. “There is only one way to resurrect India, and that is through love and unity,” he said to a cheering, Congress-friendly crowd. 

The comments on the video clips from his speech were full of hate—for him, for his party and for his politics. Most of his haters identified themselves as BJP’s supporters. They stood by the “national” achievements flagged by the party as part of its campaign to win Delhi: abrogation of special status to the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir, initiation of its project to build a Hindu temple on the site of a 16th-century mosque destroyed by Hindu zealots, and a nationwide registry of citizens with an apparent anti-Muslim bias. 

Despite the fact that Modi’s government has failed on its key promises—the economy is growing at 4.5 percent and the unemployment is the highest it has been in 45 years—many Hindu voters, especially young voters, continue to see the prime minister as a messianic figure. Many of them happen to be based in Delhi. On February 3, thousands participated in Modi’s first election rally held in east Delhi. One of them was 18-year-old first-time voter Mohit Kumar. He said he was going to cast his first vote for Modi regardless of the issues of employment and economy. He had his reason: “He is the first prime minister to launch an air strike against Pakistan.” (The inconvenient facts about the air strike neither being original nor effective hadn’t reached him at all.) At some distance from him, four young men posed with a placard. It said: “My Modi, My Future.”

On January 30, a 17-year old man wielding a revolver charged into south Delhi’s Jamia Nagar, mistaking the Muslim-majority neighborhood for Shaheen Bagh, and shot at anti-CAA protesters. One person took a bullet in his leg. One of the shooter’s Facebook posts in the preceding days read, “Shaheen Bagh … Game over!” Two days later, a 24-year-old man walked straight into Shaheen Bagh with a semi-automatic and shot three bullets in the air. He explained his action a few seconds later: “In this country, only Hindus will prevail.” The young men were doing as told. Over the course of the campaign, the BJP’s leaders had instructed crowds in Delhi to “Shoot the country’s traitors.” One of them painted a picture for voters if they failed to vote against the BJP. “They [protesters] will enter your houses, rape your sisters and daughters, kill them. There is time today [for you to prevent that]. Modi and [Amit] Shah won’t come to save you tomorrow.”

14.6 million people—57 percent of the electorate—voted to choose Delhi’s new government. The AAP won 62 of the 70 seats contested, the BJP eight, and the Congress none. Arvind Kejriwal thanked the people of Delhi for validating India’s “new politics of work”, Amit Shah blamed the “hate speeches” made by his party’s leaders, and the Congress celebrated the BJP’s defeat as a kind of quiet victory. The BJP won five more seats compared to its tally from 2015 and increased its share of total votes from 32 to 38 percent. And even in defeat, the BJP’s nationalist rhetoric seems to have taken over Indian politics. One of the first things Kejriwal did after the results were announced was visit a Hindu temple and attribute his party’s win to the “blessings of Lord Hanuman.”