Almost from the moment of its promulgation, the amendments to India’s citizenship laws have generated protests across the country. The images of a young Muslim woman student from Jamia Milia Islamia who stopped a policeman from assaulting a male student and the crowds of women gathered at a Delhi neighborhood called Shaheen Bagh are now etched in public memory. The image of resistance to the newly introduced Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) has become that of a Muslim woman holding the national flag and a portrait of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution. Younger Muslim women have been active in expanding support to the peaceful protests through social media and a door-to-door campaign to create awareness of the need to resist the CAA. Many of these women are first-time participants in a public protest that has spread nationwide, as Muslim men continue to support them from the side lines.

Paradoxically, many of the Muslim women present at Shaheen Bagh came in their role as mothers and sisters, raising concerns over the government’s brutally violent response to Muslim students protesting against the CAA at Jamia Milia Islamia. This incident shows that social concerns articulated by women based on familial roles can be expanded to address larger debates around citizenship and belonging. These social concerns can form the basis of a wider solidarity, translating their compassion into an ideological agenda articulated in the public sphere (Werbner Reference Werbner, Yuval-Davis and Werbner2005). This calls for attention to Muslim women’s consciousness that considers the motivations in their everyday lives that might lead them to act collectively in pursuit of goals they may perceive as better achieved collectively than individually. The sense of community that emerges from shared routines binds them together within their religious identity and within their neighborhoods and homes. Physical proximity and shared experiences influence what and how Muslim women think, facilitating bonds and networks for collective action. Songs, poetry, and stories as communal rituals constitute Muslim women’s cultural world and enable them to reflect together, creating a consciousness relative to the societal conditions and political upheaval of their times. The protesters transformed Shaheen Bagh in political ways: a community kitchen to feed protesters, an arena for political discourse, a space for artistic expression, and a public reading room and library. The protest at Shaheen Bagh, although emerging from within a localized context of a Muslim neighborhood, reached several sites across the country that joined in support of the protesters, creating trans-local networks of support and solidarity. It inspired many similar networks across the country, bringing Muslim localities with a history of marginalization into a national space (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod2012).

Women’s active citizenship starts from the preestablished cultural domains of female power and rightful ownership or responsibility. These culturally defined domains, or the attacks on them, create the conditions for women’s civic activism. This is the face of female resistance, which evolves progressively to challenge authoritarian structures of power, typically controlled by (in this case, Hindu) men (Werbner Reference Werbner, Yuval-Davis and Werbner2005). The Muslim women who spearheaded the protests against the CAA at Shaheen Bagh entered the public realm because they wanted something more of their own—beyond their private selves—but something they had in common with others: belonging to a nation. Being in the public realm means being seen and heard by others, and it is the presence of others who see and hear what we see and hear that assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves (Arendt Reference Arendt1958, 199). On one level, Muslim women’s emergence as the backbone of the protests points to a tactical move: their presence in large numbers made it difficult for the government to crack down as brutally on the protests as it surely would have if men were in its vanguard. On a deeper level, however, Muslim women’s presence, and often their leadership, offered a fundamental challenge to the assumptions of leadership vis-à-vis both the Indian government (i.e., lurching toward a Hindu state) and Muslim men. Participation in the protests provided Muslim women the opportunity to exercise their autonomy vis-à-vis the patriarchal norms imposed by the government and the family.

Unlike nationalism, which is based on the past myths and imaginations of a common origin or culture (Anderson Reference Anderson2006), citizenship looks to the future. As a political vision, discourses of citizenship constitute horizons of possibility (Yuval-Davis and Werbner Reference Yuval-Davis and Werbner2005). This also is probably why the protesters viewed an assault on Muslim students of Jamia Milia Islamia as an assault on the aspirations of the Muslim community. Higher education became the symbolic domain for struggles over citizenship and the authenticity of the nation, thereby blurring the distinction between the two (Bénéï Reference Bénéï2007). Clearly, the role that Muslim women play in the protests questions the distinction of a private–public binary (Benhabib Reference Benhabib1992). Their apparent prominent roles in the movement caught the government and allied media off-guard, making it slightly more difficult for them to demonize the protests than if they had been led by men.

The nature of these protests reminds us of the centrality of sentimental passions about citizenship and the legitimate authority of political community (Werbner Reference Werbner, Yuval-Davis and Werbner2005). The feminization of citizenship has the potential to overcome the exclusionary tendencies ingrained in the theory and practice of citizenship in India, which not only are inherently gendered but also reflect the exclusion of Muslim women’s experiences and perspectives as they interact with other axes of social division including class, sect, caste, region, language, ethnicity, sexuality, age, and disability. Furthermore, feminization of citizenship supports the inclusion of interests and issues that a Habermasian concept of the “public” labels “private” and treats as forbidden (Fraser Reference Fraser1990). However, the difference then is reinstated as a higher-order value, which encompasses equality through a relational and dialogical ethic of care, compassion, and responsibility (Yuval-Davis and Werbner Reference Yuval-Davis and Werbner2005).