CITIZENSHIP is a polysemic term; it celebrates a variety of meanings, and each synonym intensifies the glossary of belonging. Of late there has been a clerical, reductive attitude to citizenship winnowing it to narrower concepts like residency and certification. Yet, legality on its own can be lifeless with no sense of what Heidegger called dwelling. In fact, the philosophical distinction between life world and system becomes relevant for understanding the being called citizenship.

A life world is a lived world. A system is formal, abstract and empty. A system invites the impersonal and the analytical. A life world demands storytelling. A system connects the formal parts of an institution, it outlines the skeleton; the life world breathes fresh into it, giving the skeleton a living sense of the body. A legalistic view of citizenship has been overemphasized by the state.

The life world of Shaheen Bagh returned the sense of life world to citizenship. As one watched the protest in its poetic everydayness, one sensed it as a pedagogic act, a message conveying that democracy, myth and ritual has to be invented again and again. Women have led the way in this form of protest. One thinks of the mothers of Argentina protesting the missing-ness of their beloved husbands, their children. Simply standing mute at the plaza carrying placards with names literally brought down the tyranny of the military dictatorship. The protest of mothers standing naked, defying the soldiers of the Assam Rifles to rape them, demonstrated the emptiness of the AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act).

There is an alchemy about these protests which goes beyond political logic and tactics. A simplicity of genius achieves what looks strategically impossible. The protest of Kashmiri women saying they have waited too long for peace adds to the power of these narratives. But Shaheen Bagh is not a protest that is enacted in the middle of war and violence. It occurs in a simple, dilapidated, anonymous slum. It was almost nameless till it entered history.

One has to look at the semiotic logic of Shaheen Bagh more closely. It is an attempt to articulate a theory of citizenship through the metaphor of the body. In fact, Shaheen Bagh emphasizes the return of the body as agency. The body has been the most vulnerable object of today subject to genocidal politics, mob violence, army brutality, scientific experiments and political torture. Yet, it is this very vulnerability of the body that demands it be given agency, a voice, and more than a voice the power of theatre which articulates a theory of citizenship. Shaheen Bagh demonstrates the literacy of citizenship, where protest as a pedagogic act turns into political theatre.

One must emphasize the literacy first. Citizenship has become an empty turn, a badge, a certificate rather than lived reality. Citizenship is an act of bricolage which unites different fragments of belonging together. There has been an embourgeoisment of the idea as a middle class enactment of belonging. But Shaheen Bagh, like a local statue of liberty, puts together all the fragments, the rejected pieces of contemporary citizenship – the vulnerable, the marginal, the feminine, the slum, the informal, the minority. The flotsam and jetsam of citizenship get coherently integrated. Yet, in articulating a theory it goes beyond the usual civics of voice and duty. It shows that citizenship is a theory of caring, hospitality and cosmopolitanism. Only when citizenship is both being and becoming does it carry meaning. Certification emphasizes the facticity of citizenship. Protest and hospitality emphasize citizenship as meaning, as something that goes beyond the objectivity of the survey and the register.

Shaheen Bagh does more as one watches the everydayness of protest. It cuts playfully across the dualisms that haunt citizenship as an idea, and playfully bridges and transforms them. In fact, one must list out seven major oppositions that Shaheen Bagh challenges.

 

First is the opposition between residence and dwelling. Residence is an abstract criterion. It emphasizes the sense of citizenship as housing, not as home. Dwelling emphasizes a sense of embedding, connectivity, belonging and community. Residence requires certification. Dwelling is a summons to memory and storytelling.

Shaheen Bagh emphasizes a cosmopolitanism of citizenship, an openness and a hospitality to strangers. In fact, it follows the dictum of the South African philosopher A.C. Jordan who claimed that for a society to assimilate the other, it must invent a stranger every day. Shaheen Bagh, a little slum in the middle of Delhi claims a connection, an affinity to Assam that expresses the connectivity of citizenship. It also states that a slum, no matter how poor, is an argument for freedom and openness which an internment camp is not.

It emphasized the lived, living aspect of citizenship. It shows that citizenship is an appeal to community and communitas. In fact, this point was brought home beautifully as the women recited the preamble, living the poetics of the Constitution. They claimed they belonged to the plurality the Constitution created rather than to the arid uniformity of the nation state.

 

Often when we talk of citizenship, we talk of formal roles like voting, participation, consumerism. These are formal acts of role playing. What Shaheen Bagh emphasized is that citizenship is empathy. There is a morality, an ethics to its politics which recognizes that belonging demands hospitality, generosity and caring. In that sense, Shaheen Bagh does not demonstrate the negativity of protest but the positiveness of empathy. It says simply ‘I care, therefore I am a citizen.’

What was stunning about Shaheen Bagh, as a drama, was that in the digital age it emphasized orality. It spoke. It was an utterance of freedom. Orality has a drama which the textual and digital cannot match. Orality demands a return to memory and storytelling. Shaheen Bagh demonstrated that the social contract in India now has to link oral, textual, digital and give a sanctity to the oral, to a world without certification where one claims citizenship through an act of connectivity or storytelling. There is a simplicity and authenticity to a claim which says ‘I joined my uncle ten years ago.’ One senses a being which no sense of certification can capture.

Shaheen Bagh demonstrated the cosmopolitanism of marginal groups. Instead of only fighting for their rights, these women through empathy, sensed the suffering of others and fought for them in a language that went beyond rights. A people’s empathy confronts a state’s hostility and a clerks indifference, inventing democracy with a vigour which is both vernacular and cosmopolitan. Shaheen Bagh exposed the pomposity and stuffiness of the nation state in regard to the issue of citizenship. In fact, the government hid behind its legislative power, its correctness of procedure, when Shaheen Bagh like a little panchayat challenged the gravitas of the regime. Its argument also lay in the way it constructed citizenship. Citizenship, it claimed, was not a passive property of membership. It demanded that the citizen be interpretive in reading and assessing laws.

 

Shaheen Bagh also demonstrated that dissent and protest are integral to the plural epistemology of citizenship. In fact, one should read it as street theatre. Shaheen Bagh revealed that it is the streets that must resort to democracy when the regime gets authoritarian. In fact, its display of civic virtue was brilliant. The protests continued even during the Delhi election. People voted and returned to take their place in the demonstration.

One has to emphasize the style of protest. Beyond its integral and intrinsic non-violence, Shaheen Bagh was a protest not of organized cadres and party formations but of a community concerned about other communities of citizens. Daily life intersected beautifully with political protest creating a seamlessness between domestic work and political agency. As a community, Shaheen Bagh showed its ability to challenge the mob. Even the riots in Delhi did not destroy the composure of the community. It emphasized the sheer durability of democracy and citizenship at the ground level.

In fact, as one unravels the regime’s response, one witnesses the sheer power of Shaheen Bagh as political theatre and pedagogy. The first attack came from other NGOs claiming that Shaheen Bagh was a children’s crusade at a time child labour was banned. Even a quick visit would show there was no misuse of children. In fact, the affection with which they were treated, their ease around public forums was a revelation. Shaheen Bagh was then treated as a traffic problem, an impediment to the daily life of other commuters. The Kejriwal government refused to toe the line. Only a health emergency caused by Coronavirus could disrupt the demonstrations. Amit Shah and Modi were quick to add that it was anti-national, but the sheer integrity of the protest turned their statement into a repetitive idiocy.

 

Shaheen Bagh’s pacifism, the ease and style of protest, its symbolic appeal to nation rather than nation state was obvious. The slogans raised, the pictures assembled around the pantheon of Nehru, Gandhi, Azad, Bhagat Singh and Ambedkar sent a secular message to the nation that this was not an act of provincial politics but an appeal for justice. There was little effort at propaganda. In fact, it was housewife gossip challenging the propagandist power of the state. For once, orality, rumour and storytelling had scored over the usual litany of fake news and propaganda. The citizen reminded the regime about the rules of civics it had forgotten.

Shaheen Bagh was like a poor man’s theatre, something the people had evolved like a Grotowskian theatre. It was a community performing, communicating without the frenzy of crowd and mob. There was an ease to it, even a lazy anarchy which made the protest an understatement of style. Shaheen Bagh’s subtlety lay in presenting the everydayness of protest as a part of routine like cooking, cleaning or embroidery. Shaheen Bagh asks the local and the global, micro and macrocosm so effortlessly that rather than being an insular protest, it sends a message of citizenship as caring across the world. By challenging the ridiculousness of CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act), it embraces marginals and minorities across the world. Yet, while being a civic act, it has a sense of the carnivalesque, a mix of Sunday market and a fair.

 

As Mikhail Bakhtin in his study of the carnival in Rabelais and His World suggested, ‘carnivals are acts of inversion, they turn authority, even authoritarian ideas into objects of critique, contempt, fun, playfully dismissing the logic of power.’ Shaheen Bagh in a Bakhtinian sense was a festival of democracy, revitalizing the meaning of citizenship. In unravelling all this, Shaheen Bagh becomes a parable, an anecdote, an epic of citizenship as theatre, a symbol of the fight for citizenship as dwelling and democracy as justice the world over. (One needs to pay a pilgrimage to this little pocket in the slums of Delhi).

Shaheen Bagh is a reflection on citizenship, but as a metaphor it is capable of greater transformations. One sensed this acutely when a student of mine wrote back from New York claiming that ‘we need a Shaheen Bagh of new epistemologies’, where knowledge and a sense of community interweave to make democracy inventive and experimental. Shaheen Bagh in that sense creates new imaginaries for democracy and in doing so it creates a new politics of hope.