Shaheen Bagh, an unassuming Delhi neighbourhood, was known only by the residents of the city up until 2019 when protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) brought the obscure locality to the limelight. After the Act was passed in Parliament, sparks of discontent ignited dissent in several parts of India, demanding that the CAA be repealed. The discontent stems from the belief that the Act is fundamentally discriminatory—while it gives a fast track to citizenship to non-Muslim migrants from neighbouring countries, it does not have any provisions for persecuted Muslim refugees coming in from the same countries. Moreover, the CAA is linked to the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), which aims to identify and deport illegal immigrants in India. Labelled unconstitutional by many, the NRC is seen to have the potential to render stateless millions of marginalized people, especially Muslims, who are unable to provide documents to prove their citizenship.
The sheer scale of these protests, the extreme use of force by the state to curb them, and the multifaceted nuances of the movement urge us to look at it through multiple approaches of International Security. I will attempt to briefly examine this issue of security in a three-fold manner through Ole Waever’s Securitization theory, Lene Hansen’s critique of it, and through Biopolitics and the PARIS school approach to (in)securitization.
Firstly, looking through Waever’s securitization lens, the CAA was passed in the first place because certain immigrants, and not others, are seen as threats to national security. In describing some illegal immigrants as “termites” by Cabinet Ministers like Amit Shah, the speech act works to securitize and initiate an othering process against (mainly) Muslim immigrants. Therefore, by uttering “security,” the state representative moves a particular development into a specific area and thereby claims a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it (Waever 1995). The means are, in this case, repression and use of force. However, the securitization theory believes that more security is not necessarily effective; that instead of broadening and deepening the scope of security, we should look at the possibilities of handling some of these problems in nonsecurity terms, that is, to take on the problems but leave them unsecuritized (Waever 1995). Instead of ‘speaking’ illegal immigrants into threat objects and framing the state as the referent object, the national government could have adopted normal political approaches like increasing dialogue with neighbouring countries as well as its own citizens. Conversely, instead of a counter-securitization approach adopted by protestors claiming a threat to constitutional values and their identity by the state, they could have used legal means and political negotiations to address their concerns.
Image sources: The Quint, Indian Express, Quartz
Lene Hansen’s feminist conceptualization of security addresses the analytical blindspots in Waever. By dismissing the broadening and deepening of security, Waever does not address the question of individual security and of those who cannot voice their insecurity at all. When male students at Jamia Milia Islamia (JMI) protested shirtless in the biting Delhi cold, they were met with stun guns and tear gas by the Delhi Police and the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). This deployment of force was ostensibly in pursuit of miscreants who had allegedly set buses on fire in the vicinity of the university (Mustafa et al., 2023). Some students were even dragged from the library and the mosque and lathi charges and left with bruises, black eyes and broken bones (Salam 2023). The next morning, the revolution picked pace from an unexpected quarter, Shaheen Bagh. When the sit-in peaceful protests happened, the media blew up the fact that elderly women were leading it.
Hansen's twofold conceptualization framework can be applied in this case. Firstly, even though the protest was portrayed as a symbol of female empowerment and breaking gender stereotypes, one aspect of women leading the movement was obscured: that Muslim men, as in the case of JMI, are viewed as a bigger threat to the state than Muslim women. Hansen conceptualizes security “as silence”: when insecurity cannot be voiced, when raising something as a security problem is impossible or might even aggravate the threat being faced (Hansen 2000). The women were not just trying to break stereotypes but protesting also because male dissent is handled by the state much more violently. Here, ‘silence’ as a tactic was adopted by not women but men after the initial repression because if they spoke, their insecurity would be aggravated. This is not to dismiss the role of men in the movement but to acknowledge why they had to take a step back.
Secondly, Hansen critiques the Copenhagen School, according to which gender-based insecurity only comes into the security optic if articulated around a ‘self-sustained’ gendered community aside from national, religious, and racial referent objects (Hansen 2000). This subsuming logic of security was seen when every headline at the time highlighted how it was a women-led movement. As if the women at Shaheen Bagh were not mostly Muslim, middle-class mothers and grandmothers worried for their children whose Indianness was being questioned. This goes on to prove that gender-based security threats are often characterised by their inseparability from ‘national’ or ‘religious’ security rather than by a clearly delineated gendered referent object (Hansen 2000).
Michel Foucault uses a different approach, examining how power functions. He discusses how, starting in the 17th century, the sovereign’s power over life, or bio-power, evolved in two basic forms: disciplining of individual bodies, and governing and regulating entire populations (Foucault 1990). The CAA-NRC protests were met with state-sanctioned violence. By taking charge of life, power gained access to the body, and by injuring protestors physically, it sought to discipline dissenters. The use of force against some bodies creates docility in the rest so as to manage deviations from what the state considers a threat to its security. The threat of detention and deportation for individuals deemed “illegal migrants” under the NRC served to constrain marginalized populations. Furthermore, according to Foucault, the diverse institutions of power act as factors of segregation and social hierarchization. Through Acts and policies related to citizenship, the government seeks to govern and manage immigrant populations and even disenfranchise Indians who are not able to produce documentation of their citizenship. According to these government and bureaucratic institutions, some refugees deserve citizenship, and others don't, despite all of them facing threats to their survival in their own country. This is rooted in some logic of racism and eugenics- for example, that somehow Pakistani Hindus are more deserving of life and more capable of creating utility, than Rohingya Muslims, who are often viewed as a threat to national security. Moreover, through governmentality, instead of engaging in murderous splendour, power operates more and more as a norm (Foucault 1990). It functions indirectly where the ability to kill the ‘other’ is handed over to the larger population, which remains complicit in death and creates peripheries within the state. This is achieved through dehumanization, which creates consent in complicity.
The point of complicity and indifference connects to Mbembe’s complication of Foucault’s arguments. He says that sovereignty is expressed predominantly as the right to kill and relates biopower to the State of Exception (Mbembe 2003). Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of the State of Exception states that the normal rules and laws of the state do not apply to those people who have been set apart from society and reduced to bare life- existence equivalent to that of animals. The state of exception allows for indifference to the violation of norms. This was the case when anti-protest measures were taken by the state, when university spaces of JMI and AMU started looking like warzones, and when communal riots erupted in parts of northeast Delhi. This was the case when inflammatory chants of “desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maaro saalo ko” (shoot the traitors) were made in a BJP leader Anurag Thakur’s election speech referring to CAA-NRC protestors. While the concentration camp is the literal space of the state of exception, camps are created symbolically as well; they can permeate through society. Here, surveillance of potential threats among the dissenters, arbitrary arrests through sedition laws like the UAPA, and even the killing of people who were exercising their democratic legal right to protest are all manifestations of the state of exception.
Foucault states that the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower are inscribed in the way all modern states function (Mbembe 2003). According to the PARIS school, if we accept this premise of biopolitics that the state of exception is the normal, it is implied that every situation of security is actually a state of insecurity- that there is a continuum between the two, a state of (in)security. So, while the Indian state attempted to quell protests through securitization, it was insecuritized at the same time by communal riots and dissent.
To conclude, the 2019 CAA-NRC protests in Delhi were marked by tensions between security and insecurity, power and resistance, and governance and identity in contemporary India. Critically analyzing these protests through multiple theoretical frameworks allows us to better understand the underlying dynamics shaping security discourse in the country.
References
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, Vintage Books, 1990.
Hansen, Lene. "The Little Mermaid’s Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the Copenhagen School." Millennium, vol. 29, no. 2, 2000, pp. 285–306.
Mbembe, Achille. "Necropolitics." Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 11-40.
Mustafa, Md, et al. “Four Years After CAA Protests, Why Jamia Students Have Lost Faith in the System.” The Indian Express, Indian Express, 15 Dec. 2023, indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/four-years-caa-protests-jamia-students-lost-faith-system-9069346.
Salam, Ziya Us. “How The Women of Shaheen Bagh Stirred a Nation to Stand up for the ‘Idea of India.’” Frontline, 13 Mar. 2024, frontline.thehindu.com/books/how-shaheen-bagh-women-stirred-a-nation-to-stand-up-for-idea-of-india-anti-caa-protests-anniversary-book-excerpt-being-muslim-in-hindu-india-ziya-us-salam/article67630103.ece.
Waever, Ole. "Securitization and Desecuritization." On Security, edited by Ronnie Lipschutz, Columbia University Press, 1995.
it's really interesting how you cover the intersectionality of identities, including gender, religion, and class, playing a significant role in shaping the experiences and perceptions of individuals involved in the CAA-NRC protests in Delhi. For instance, women leading the movement in Shaheen Bagh challenged gender stereotypes and brought attention to their concerns as mothers and grandmothers. However, the disproportionate targeting of Muslim men by the state suggests a different perception of threat based on gender.
You were right Naisha about how muslim migrants are devoid of the benefit of the act. I have one observation: Why only muslim-women were protesting, where were the men? even in the image you attached there are only muslim women.
Hi Naisha, your blog was a very interesting read. I specifically like the way you applied Hansen's framework to your analysis since it is important to think about individuals who cannot voice their insecurity. I know you talk about the women in Shaheen Bagh and their role in the CAA-NRC protests and point out the difference in treatment of males and females by the state but I want to know what you think about the importance of participation of non-muslim citizens or civil society organisations in such protests. I am asking this question relating it to what Hansen said about the involvement and role of international organisations as securitizing actors. Thank you! Looking forward to your response.
Hi Naisha, I think your blog is really interesting and thought-provoking. I had a question with regard to the securitization approach. Specifically, the government’s tactics of terming certain sections of the society as “termites” and denying them citizenship. Whose interests do you think are being served here? Does this indicate a potential drawback of the securitization approach itself?