Last December, hundreds of thousands of people in cities across India joined in protest against the recently passed Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The law creates a pathway to citizenship for some undocumented residents who have fled religious persecution, but it discriminates against refugees and immigrants who happen to be Muslim—members of India’s largest minority. The anti-CAA movement, as it became known, was India’s most sustained people’s movement since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014.
The size of the protests caught Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government by surprise. Like the ongoing protests led by Sikh farmers against new agricultural laws, the anti-CAA movement was characterized by the ruling party as “anti-national.” But while the Modi government is now negotiating with the farmers to end their blockade of Delhi’s borders, the anti-CAA movement was never accorded any political legitimacy.
