Aamir Aziz remembers that it was in 2014—after Narendra Modi, leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), won his first term—that lynching Muslims became “a thing.”
Aziz was then a student at Jamia Millia Islamia University, one of India’s finest Muslim institutions. He felt called to witness what was clearly a seismic shift in India’s history. Haunted by this “festival of killing,” Aziz started to pen urgent ghazals about lynching, set them to music, and release them on YouTube. A ballad for a man named Pehlu Khan, lynched by a frenzied mob in 2017, instantly went viral.
The world’s most populous country, home to nearly 1.5 billion humans and free of British rule since 1947, prides itself on being the world’s “largest democracy.” Across the globe, India has enjoyed a reputation as a nation of religious tolerance and stunning ethnic and linguistic plurality. It is considered an exemplary postcolonial state that has remained relatively politically stable despite spurts of war and violence.
Through the decades, India’s close to 200 million Muslims, who constitute the country’s largest minority, have maintained a strong political and social presence. Even when the Partition of India on religious lines at the behest of the British created lingering tensions, for close to eighty years, a uniquely Indian model of Gandhian secularism, which draws on centuries of India’s syncretic culture, continued to hold strong.
When the BJP surged to triumph in 2014, liberals were shocked to see its members openly calling Muslims “infiltrators” and “cow murderers,” accusing them of “love jihad” or sympathizing with Pakistan, with some even openly encouraging voters to take up arms against them. Yet the general consensus was that India would not swing too far right, it simply couldn’t afford to, given the sheer scale of its diverse populations. Yet, slowly over that first term, the opposition dwindled in its parliamentary presence, losing election after election, and soon the Indian electoral map grew increasingly saffron (a color adopted by the Hindu nationalist movement). Simultaneously, an interrogation of Muslim belonging and loyalties started to pervade and become normalized in mainstream media, while vigilante violence against minorities spiked in the streets.
Afreen Fatima was a senior at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in 2015, on a campus known for its robust student politics and long history of Muslim-led political dissent. She remembers watching a traumatizing viral video. In it, a 24-year-old named Tabrez Ansari was tied to a pole by Hindutva mobs and forced to chant “Hail Lord Ram” before being brutally lynched. Hindutva is broadly understood as a religion-based political ideology that seeks to make India a Hindu nation. Under this framework, other religious communities can only maintain second-class citizenship. The BJP is the electoral front of the “Sangh Parivar”—a consortium of right-wing nationalist outfits with paramilitary, student, cultural and political branches, all of whom firmly espouse Hindutva.
“I remember thinking that Tabrez did not even look Muslim,” Fatima says, her eyes blazing at the memory. “He didn’t wear a skullcap, or a kurta pajama. He had bleached hair!”
Shortly after, when she was admitted to a linguistics Ph.D. in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Fatima, who had been a Taylor Swift and Princess Diaries fan, decided to wear the hijab. She wanted to be seen on JNU’s secular, progressive campus thriving as a Muslim.
Meanwhile, the regime’s influence continued to reshape India’s foundational agencies and institutions. Governors, judges, university chancellors, and heads of cultural organizations were replaced with party loyalists and fringe hate-mongers. Cable TV news caved to the jingoism preferred by the regime. Student protesters and young activists were accused of being “anti-nationals” and “urban-naxals,” or militants by prime-time news hosts.
Sara Ather, another young Muslim student with a wide, easy smile, was living in Frankfurt at the time studying architecture. She remembers watching the increasing attacks on Muslim bodies and historic places of worship, the intensifying rumor and hate in WhatsApp groups, the disinformation and distortion of Mughal history in cinema and school textbooks, and she struggled to explain to her European friends how sharply India had pivoted away from its secular core, and that it was now hurtling toward a precipice.
“They didn’t know that India had this history of the Muslim question,” she says. Muslims of Ather, Aziz, and Fatima’s generation, who had grown up in the eighties and nineties, were used to the normalized daily microaggressions and stereotypes related to Muslim diet, language, and clothing. They had learned to suppress their religious identity in order to validate the nation’s secularism. But something had shifted, accelerated even, in this new era of jingoistic Hindutva. Their belonging to land and history was being thrust into question.
In 2002, in the shadow of America’s global war on terror, India’s worst pogrom since the Partition took place in the western state of Gujarat. The state’s chief minister at the time was Narendra Modi. Nearly two thousand Muslims were slaughtered in a televised bloodletting by enraged Hindu mobs, in response to a train burning incident whose perpetrators were said to be Muslims and in which fifty-nine Hindus had been killed. The BJP was leading a coalition government in Delhi at the time, and did very little to stop the massacre. Two years later, when they lost the next national election to a center-left coalition, it felt like Indian voters had en masse rejected this politics of hate. The coalition, led by Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress Party, promised to draw India back from this precipice of religious violence and resurrect the Nehruvian secular social welfare state. But in 2014, after two terms rife with corruption scandals and economic malaise, and with the entry of social media platforms awash with anti-Muslim misinformation, the BJP swept back into power—this time, without needing a coalition, in a bold, single-party majority. Modi, who had been banned from travel to the U.S. and UK after the pogrom in Gujarat, was now branded as a messiah of economic progress, embraced by Obama and the West, and hailed by Indians as the underdog who would represent the everyman versus the dynastic nepotism of the Congress. Social media aided in the shortening and obscuring of political memory. Meanwhile, it also abetted the drastic rise in hate speech and violence against minorities and caste-marginalized Indians, though for young Indian Muslims their feeds became a daily reminder of their vanishing agency in a rapidly shrinking democracy.
Five years later, in 2019, Modi’s government won its second term even more decisively, giving it a strong majority in both houses of parliament. The opposition seemed to be all but wiped out of their legislative seats. Buoyed by this majority mandate, it immediately set out to introduce a slew of troubling legislation.
In July, the regime reworked a problematic anti-terrorism law, making it easier to frame individual dissidents. In August, they revoked Muslim-majority Kashmir’s autonomous status. In November, the home minister promised that a National Register of Citizens (NRC) would be implemented nationwide. People would be required to queue up outside administrative offices with physical evidence that they were born or naturalized Indians. And on December 11, 2019, they passed the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act. The CAA allowed the government to grant citizenship to religious asylum seekers from India’s neighboring nations—but only if they were Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, or Sikhs. Muslims were conspicuously, and in contradiction to India’s secular promise, left out.
According to Adil Hossain, a social scientist from Azim Premji University, right-wing Hindutva proponents and their followers perceive laws like the CAA and the NRC as ways to right a historical wrong.
“[The Partition of] 1947 was supposed to solve the “minority problem,” but they [right-wingers] feel it didn’t fully happen because India chose to frame a secular constitution,” says Hossain.
Supporters of the regime were convinced that secularism was India’s fatal flaw, keeping the country overpopulated, economically crippled, and underresourced—obstructions to India’s global ascendance as a superpower. Thousands of Muslims in the eastern state of Assam, where the NRC had been piloted, were already being moved into detention or being rendered stateless because they lacked documents or spoke the wrong language. and no one seemed to care.
On December 13, 2019, students from Jamia, Aziz’s university, attempted to march to Parliament to protest the Citizenship Amendment Act. The marchers barely reached the end of the lane when police surrounded them and started to fire tear gas.
A few miles away, on JNU’s campus, Fatima and her friends were meeting to discuss the ramifications of this act if it were to be applied nationwide. In a country of extreme low literacy, especially in Muslim ghettos like Jamia in Delhi, it felt urgent to create a simple explainer of the contents of the act. They drafted parchas, or pamphlets, including calls to action, and distributed them in mosques and neighborhoods around JNU and Jamia.
Two days later, the students at Jamia planned another march, this time to the fabled India Gate. Afreen Fathima and Aamir Aziz were among the crowd of hundreds. This time the police broke through the barricades and raided the campus. Nabiya Khan, a young community organizer who lives in the ghetto around Jamia, remembers being on campus with her brother at the time. As chaos erupted all around them, the police charged with batons at students and bystanders alike. Khan describes stun grenades flying over the campus walls and smoke filling the air. Her brother dragged her to the back gate where they sneaked out through the lanes and alleys, trying to find their way home less than a mile away.
The scene in and around this ghetto of Jamia Nagar felt like “a war zone” to Khan. The usually lively local night bazaar was closed, the electricity cut off, the internet jammed.
Aziz can’t forget that night at Jamia either.
“I had never seen police personnel with this sort of scary body language,” he says. “We’d been tear-gassed and beaten with batons before. This time, it felt like it would never stop.” He was realizing with deep trepidation that over the course of one night his country had irrevocably changed.
Fatima and a friend were drinking chai at the campus canteen when the police entered the university, their batons smashing into students in their way. Fatima and her friend ran into the library, locked the doors, and switched off the lights. Then the police shot tear gas into the library. The students started to choke. They moved floor by floor toward the roof, trapped. The cops finally broke into the library, and with them, armed goons from the local BJP chapters and student wings. They broke university furniture, raised slogans, and beat whoever crossed their path. One student lost an eye.
Fatima called her friend from her hiding place inside the library, a student at her alma mater in Aligarh, asking him to contact the press, to spread word of the attack on social media. Her friend’s response was chilling: The police were already on Aligarh’s campus, also beating and tear-gassing students there.
Not only had indiscriminate, brutal violence been unleashed on nonviolent student protesters, but the police had somehow chosen the same night to attack two of the country’s oldest Muslim institutions. A few hours later, as the firing stopped, Fatima escaped Jamia’s library and hid at a friend’s place.
After a devastating night of state violence against students—much of it nationally televised and live tweeted—the country was flooded with shocking images of police brutality. Hundreds of students had been injured, and dozens arrested. Across India, large-scale vigils erupted in solidarity. Khan smiles as she recalls what transpired the morning after this hellish experience. In the ghetto of Jamia Nagar where she had lived her whole life, she says, “magic happened.”
In Shaheen Bagh, one of the clusters within Jamia’s ghetto, local men and women dragged mattresses and blankets from their homes and into the street. They took over the main road, also an arterial national highway cutting through the heart of Delhi. Students like Fatima and Aziz too arrived to help people set up.
Soon more women stepped out of their homes to join in—housewives and grandmothers quickly emerged as the leaders of this movement—and stayed longer into the night. Students who had organizing experience collected funds and arranged for community tents, others brought PA systems, posters, and books. Poets and speakers lined up. Food arrived from the bazaars and hole-in-the-wall restaurants around. More people gathered. This was all strange and new for Shaheen Bagh, where Muslim women had never politically activated at this scale. Khan says they were forced to, after what the neighborhood, city, and country had witnessed happen to Jamia’s students.
“It wasn’t a mob that had beat their children,” she explains. “It was the state, the police … So, these women were questioning, how are we safe in this country? They were saying: now we will show them.”
News started to spread of this strange phenomenon, in which hijab-wearing housewives and tasbih-clutching grandmothers had occupied a national highway, their husbands, sons, and community ensconcing them, rotating household duties, maintaining a day-and-night vigil, singing songs of liberation in an unheard-of Delhi ghetto. Crowds started to flock to see it. Some days, Shaheen Bagh started to receive crowds of more than 100,000.
Aziz had once rented a room in this ghetto as an out-of-state student. He reveled in standing with the families who had once housed and fed him. “There was a sense of festivity,” Aziz says, “as if people were meeting Shaheen Bagh for the first time.”
He smiles at one particular memory, which to him became emblematic of the site: a young Hindu female student smoking a cigarette beside an elderly, bearded Muslim man drawing on his beedi, both huddled around a campfire, as all around them chants of unity, secularism, and freedom filled the air.
“This is what movements do,” Aziz says, “A society suddenly covers a hundred years of distance in a few days. Every night at Shaheen Bagh felt like a decade.”
As weeks passed, a handful of sister sites rose. In the southern cities of Bengaluru, Chennai, and Cochin, coalitions of artists, activists, and students encouraged people to take to the streets. They translated and circulated pamphlets explaining CAA-NRC. They translated Faiz’s revolutionary Urdu hymns into southern languages like Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam and formed human chains across their cities, singing arm in arm. In Germany, Ather and other students marched in a large multifaith and multinational contingent to the Indian Embassy. For the first time in her life, Ather says, she witnessed a deep and genuine intersectionality. She was introduced to Dalit (anti-caste and anti-untouchability) politics at a protest in Berlin. She started to recognize that marginalized groups like Muslims and Dalits were often purposefully pitted against each other and kept away from each other’s oppression despite obvious overlaps. The centuries’-long playbook of treating Dalits as untouchable and subhuman had now been pointed toward Muslims with the same vengeance.
As sites continued to mushroom across the country, Afreen Fatima toured them, often addressing crowds of tens of thousands. Soon her words were singled out by cable news pundits who took offense to the Islamic-ness of her rhetoric. A clip went viral in which she says, “If your idea of India does not allow me to protest as a Muslim, then I reject your idea of India.”
Despite the overlaps in oppressions, the truth was that this time, the CAA was specifically targeting Muslims, and Fatima says, “Muslims wanted to protest as themselves,” not give in to oversimplified ideas of secularism that stripped Muslims of their identity.
Nabiya Khan, like Fatima, also traveled to the different sites, reciting poetry. She felt frustrated to see that most of these sites were typically organized within a Muslim neighborhood. Why were Muslim spaces, already economically depressed and ghettoized, shouldering the burden and risk when the attack on secularism would affect everyone? Why wasn’t the majority organizing?
Away from the main spotlight, in Kolkata, Hossain observed an exciting overlap. Late one night, Hossein and a female friend met for tea in their city’s encampment, in what Hossein says used to be a “male-dominated area.”
“We were there at 3 AM, discussing citizenship. And the men around us had accepted this as normal. These conversations on what it means to be Muslim, or a woman or a caste-oppressed person, what does shared struggle mean––a sort of generational transformation happened.”
In Bengaluru, the Muslim theater activist Nisha Abdulla felt similarly that she was in the midst of a personal do-or-die moment.
“I realized while sitting in Bilal Bagh (Bengaluru’s sister site) with Muslim and other marginalized protesters that we cannot have this conversation of secularism without holding these plurals, some of them uncomfortable ones—of being Indian, Muslim, woman, of an oppressor class or caste, a previously colonized body––within our bodies.”
Back in Shaheen Bagh, the students and women set up interfaith, anti-caste community libraries, teach-ins and speeches took place around the clock; a community deprived of access, which had witnessed its only historical institution under siege, was educating itself, even as it maintained its Muslim dignity. Every Friday, many of Shaheen Bagh’s women would fast. All day they would study the Qur’an. The women were modeling an ethic, curating from their religiosity an independent political feminist vocabulary for themselves, and through them for their community.
Aziz describes this moment as “an oppressed people remembering a language.” An older political memory, untethered from formal education, was resurfacing, as the women in Shaheen Bagh articulated the role Muslims had played in various phases of the anti-imperialism revolt, as well as in the construction of the secular democratic nation afterward. Muslim elders masterfully quoted Qur’anic and Hindu texts and the Indian Constitution in the same breath, illustrating a clear and expansive intuition for true secular thought.
“People were remembering and talking about things as far back as the 1857 revolt. The women would call it a ‘gadar,’ a mutiny.” They were saying if guns were pointed at the children, they would need to pass through the mothers. A language of such compassion can only come from a culture rich with resistance,” Aziz says, beaming.
“When people think of India, we only imagine myth as the Hindu epics,” psychologist Zehra Mehdi says. “Which is great, but they aren’t the only ones. Minorities are the ones with a dual consciousness. The colonized have always been forced to know more than the colonizer. We understand Hindutva better than its followers. Because they only know the aim of their oppression. We know the aim and we feel its impact.”
Mehdi feels India’s left-liberals had conveniently overlooked this nuance when they expected protest to be sanitized, free of all religious meaning and symbol.
As Shaheen Bagh continued to gain attention, influencers, indie musicians, Bollywood actors, and left-leaning politicians started to show up. The site became a photo-op for left-leaning politicians. Slowly the hit pieces followed. One write-up called it a site for budding romance. Another alleged that women were running a sex-work racket. BJP ministers were caught on record calling Shaheen Bagh a den of “rapists,” “murderers” and even an “ISIS-like module.” In parliament, a Congress MP sided with the BJP’s attacks, criticizing the use of “La ilaha illallah” as a resistance chant. Muslims around these sites wanted to be witnessed, listened to, and to welcome allies. Instead, they experienced whiplash between the right-wing’s slander and the liberal left’s tone-policing.
Then, in late January, the violence began. First, a 17-year-old opened gunfire at the protesters shouting, “Who wants Aazadi [freedom], come, I’ll shoot you.” Three days later, another gunman shot at the encampment. Videos of his arrest showed him yelling, “Only Hindus will prevail in this country. This country is ours.” Both attacks took place mere days after the minister of state for finance led his supporters at a campaign rally in chanting “The country’s traitors must be shot.”
On February 23, violence broke out in northeast Delhi, as Hindu mobs attacked Muslim homes and businesses in multiple waves of destruction. Over three days of looting, murdering, burning, and police gunfire, fifty-three people were killed, two thirds of them Muslim. Even though the pogrom, as it is now called, took place several miles away from Shaheen Bagh, news channels quickly homed in, assigning blame to the Shaheen Bagh protesters.
“As soon as the violence started, the future was decided,” says Aziz. “It was demonic, for a protest like ours to turn into a pogrom. We knew immediately that Shaheen Bagh could not continue.”
Over the next few days, Aziz, Nabiya, Fatima and others despaired at how quickly solidarities crumbled. The false binary between peaceful versus violent protest being peddled by news media and even liberal allies had completely obscured any critical questions one could pose about the violence: Who had started it? Whose homes, businesses, and loved ones had the rioting consumed? What hate speech had led to it? Instead, by the end of that week, turnout at the encampment drastically dropped. The women of Shaheen Bagh, now realizing the very real risk to their lives, children, and homes, became wary of reporters and legal agencies. One woman told an interviewer, “The government, police, and media have become murderers.” In the days and weeks that followed, many of the movement’s leaders––young students, poets, and activists, most of them Muslim––were rounded up and charged with sedition, terrorism, and conspiracy under the same anti-terrorism laws the BJP had amended in 2019. Others watched helplessly as the collective that had formed fizzled and the guilt around their fellow-protesters’ arrests started to gnaw.
By the time COVID broke out, in March of 2020, Shaheen Bagh had dwindled down to a symbolic smaller group. Their modest encampment was manned through the day by a handful of masked volunteers. The witch hunt of Muslim students and activists and protests continued, even as news media and public attention shifted to the global pandemic. Khan had to relocate. A friend of hers attempted suicide after she was doxxed and harassed. Earlier, Khan says, educated young people like herself would never dream of leaving their communities even if daily life in a ghetto was hard. Now her friends languishing in prison were sending her messages to take any opportunity she could and leave the country.
On March 24, more than a hundred days after the people of Shaheen Bagh took over the streets to assert their humanity, what remained of the sit-in site was raided by the Delhi police. The last nine campers, six of them women, were forcibly removed and detained. Khan, who still lives in Jamia Nagar, says there has been a constant police presence in Shaheen Bagh ever since.
By 2022, the regime had found and perfected a new punitive formula to control and suppress dissent. In June 2022, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh where Afreen Fatima’s family still lived, local BJP leadership ordered the demolition of her home, claiming it was illegal construction. Fatima’s father was arrested and imprisoned for nearly six months.
“When my home was demolished, my mother was sitting on the prayer rug,” Fatima says with remarkable candor and dignity. “My sister and I were huddled around a mobile phone watching the real-time demolishing of our home. And for a split second I looked at my mother. And she looked at me. And she simply said, ‘Hasbunallahu wa ni’mal wakil.’ And it calmed me down.”
Today, young Muslims like Aziz, Fatima, Khan, and others, especially those who live in BJP-controlled states or in vulnerable ghettos, are experiencing an ever-increasing precarity. News of lynchings, home demolitions, neighborhoods refusing housing to Muslims, schoolteachers spewing hate speech in class rooms, and politicians calling for genocide at rallies has become pervasive.
Since the massacres in Gaza began, the anti-Muslim rhetoric has spiraled to take on an even more insidious, international quality, says Aziz. He describes how even the cigarette seller he frequents near his home is celebrating the slaughter of Palestinians because he thinks they’re all Muslim.
“Even the BBC is now reporting [on Gaza] like our local [right-wing Indian] TV used to. Workers from central India are going to Israel (to take the place of Palestinian workers),” he says. As right-wing movements across the globe normalize and profit from Islamophobic rhetoric, Aziz believes Muslims will need to also think transnationally.
These people who witnessed the birth and death of a powerful movement now feel a growing impatience with Indian Hindu liberals. They watch their former friends and allies, especially those in the upper classes and castes, scroll past the daily social media carousel of loss and terror that has become the Indian Muslim’s reality. Aziz says the liberal Hindus perhaps suffer from an “aftermath ideology.”
“They are waiting for gas chambers before they declare something as fascism.”
Still, many feel that the Shaheen Bagh movement left them with hope. Ather, for instance, who was inspired by Shaheen Bagh from a continent away sitting in Frankfurt, says when physical spaces were raided or closed, online communities became the public archive and forum. A generation of young Muslims in India and in the diaspora are demanding to be seen and engaged with through their religious identity and politics.
Hossein calls the Shaheen Bagh movement and the subsequent repression a “moment of rupture.” Perhaps now, India’s sociopolitical contracts—between state and citizen and between citizen and citizen—would be forced to be reckoned with and reimagined.
“The CAA-NRC protest allowed for some public articulation of constitutional citizenship,” he says, “and a stronger expression of one’s Muslim identity. It was a politics of recognition.”
For seventy-odd years after its independence, India had held onto a certain “Nehruvian contract” as he calls it, a tacit understanding of protection, if not equal citizenship between minorities and the majority. But this protection, even when offered by liberal ruling elite, had sought to maintain its caste and class hierarchies. Such agreements, Hossein thinks, were always going to be tenuous. They never truly committed to true equality. And the right-wing movement had simply swept in to make interventions that served them. Hossein sees this moment as an opportunity to reexamine and rearticulate what fighting for a basic equal democracy and rule of law can look like in this century.
The 2024 national elections offered a glimmer of that opportunity. After two terms of majorities in both houses of Parliament, this third time the BJP barely scraped through, and has been forced back into a coalition government. At this moment the regime is being forced to hold joint parliamentary committees, and opposition leaders have been elected back to their seats.
Nisha Abdulla, who continued her theater activism after Shaheen Bagh and leads several citizen education initiatives in the south, sees this as a sign for cautious optimism.
“They [the opposition] are reaping the benefits of what we actioned.” Abdullah smiles. “They didn’t do this. We forced them.”
The Congress-led coalition collected small and large regional parties from across the country under the umbrella message of unity and secularism. For the first time in decades, they specifically named the violence Muslims and Dalits have faced.
“You have to do this little dance between now and the future,” she says, with a twinkle in her eye. “What is my role? How can I scaffold this movement, however defeated or fledgling or strong it is?” When asked if this gets tiring and if cynicism creeps in, Abdulla smiles.
“Every day is like a tsunami. And it feels like we’re holding a towel to fight it. But I’ve got mine and you’ve got yours, and that’s all we have to do.” Abdulla, like Hossein, takes a longer view of histories of emancipation, that perhaps the job is to stay put and hold ground till the next person shows up to take one’s place in the fight.
Fatima doesn’t celebrate the inches regained in the 2024 elections. In fact she fears that whenever the right wing’s grip on power weakens, violence escalates. She also believes that the hate Hindutva has stoked, whether or not the BJP are defeated in future elections, will take decades to extinguish. But she, too, looks at the many concurrent protest movements still ablaze across India as a sign that the people are not giving up. She points to the truckloads of poor Indian farmers currently blockading another Delhi highway, disrupting business as usual, steadfast in their opposition to another contentious bill, this time for agriculture reform. “We are a people not willing to give in, to be silenced.” Clearly, even under this tsunami of authoritarianism, the will to fight remains strong. That anti-colonial memory in India’s Muslims and marginalized runs deep.