Locating Gramsci in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh : Perspectives on the iconic women’s protest in India

I am Bhagat Singh’s Courage, Ashfaq’s Resolve, Bismil’s Song; ¹ Rulers of the People, Look me into the Eye, I am Shaheen Bagh!

The Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 ² (CAA), which was passed as a law in both the houses of the Indian Parliament, namely the Lok Sabha (‘the Lower House’) and the Rajya Sabha (‘the Upper House’) on 11 December 2019, has initiated a state of unrest in Indian society due to its blatant anti-Muslim character. The new law creates special pathways to Indian citizenship for people living in certain Muslim majority states and belonging to all the major religions practised in India except Islam on the ground that all non-Muslim people face oppression in those states. Following its initial enactment as a bill, India has witnessed a wide range of social movements against this law, citing its discriminatory nature and a shift towards granting Indian citizenship based on one’s religion – thus destroying India’s secular ethos.

Within the anti-CAA movement, Shaheen Bagh, a small locality in South East Delhi evolved as a shining symbol of resistance against the Indian Hindu far-right. Also known as the Abul Fazal Enclave Part II, it is an area with a relatively large Muslim population – with some estimates proclaiming that the Muslim majority is approaching 100% of the population (Farooqi 2020). Shaheen Bagh is a site where Muslim women had protested for over a hundred days from 15 December 2019 to 24 March 2020, when finally the site was ‘cleared’ by state forces in the wake of the lockdowns initiated by the government as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The sit-in peaceful protest derived its causal impetus from the structural and physical violence unleashed against Muslims in India by the central government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Now synonymous with quiet resistance (Rajalakshmi 2020), Shaheen Bagh, the leaderless movement of Muslim women, continues to be a definitive barricade against the right-wing in India even after the ramping up of state repression.

India is a place where differences due to religion, gender, class, caste and the like have been used time and again by the ruling classes to further their own interests. Contemporary capitalism, also, has moved beyond the limits ascribed to it during the days of Marx and Lenin. However, the evolution of capitalism which was temporarily ignored by post-war academic Marxism has re-emerged recently with a vengeance. The CAA was one such instance of struggle where the transformative evolution of capitalism was exhibited with a fusion of the agendas of communalism and capitalism. The Indian crony capitalists had long since awaited one such event, which could be considered as a watershed moment to bring down wages and bring in further informalisation of labour. For the Hindu communal forces, who base their primary ideas on the thoughts of Savarkar (1928) and Golwalkar (1939) who saw Muslims as a violent community and justified their subordination, this represented a glorious epoch of their agenda where they could categorically vent out their hatred against the Muslims. ³

The protests against the CAA in India have brought to light again, the burning issues of working-class survival within contemporary capitalism, where every aspect of the common lives of innumerable oppressed groups in a society are under attack by the ruling governments. It is necessary to understand in the first place that the protest which took place in Shaheen Bagh by common Muslim women was a civil society movement and not a political movement, in the sense that it did not draw its initial impetus from political parties. In analysing the protests occurring at Shaheen Bagh through a Marxist perspective, one has to revisit the placement of the concept of civil society within the broader Marxist theoretical tradition. In his writings, Marx (2010) takes politics to be a domain which is dominated by the bourgeoisie. He practically analyses the system taking cognisance of this fact as a ‘universal truth’ and tries to provide a framework in which the working class can occupy the space presently dominated by the bourgeoisie.

Lenin saw in civil society an instrument which can be wielded by the vanguard party to further the interests of the working class, as in the socialist state which was founded through the Russian Revolution (Deb Roy 2019). Most post-Leninist theorising, however, has more often than not characterised civil society to be a sort of hindrance to global revolutionary activity.

After Lenin, the two Marxist philosophers who have dominated the Marxist theoretical traditions are Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci. While Althusser characterised civil society indirectly through his analytical framework of the Repressive and the Ideological State Apparatuses (Althusser 2002), it is Gramsci who occupies the pivotal position as far as Marxist ideas about civil society movements is concerned. Gramsci accepted that certain groups tend to dominate society even before they assume formal leadership. Whether the protesters at Shaheen Bagh were an indication of women bringing in radical change further down the line is something which is better left to posterity to fully consider. ⁴ However, looking at the protests through a Gramscian lens, one is bound to be hopeful of radical social change.

It is not unusual for philosophers to characterise civil society as the foundations of a society. For Feuerbach, the state in the political order is the subordinate element while civil society remains the decisive element in determining the manner in which the society is steered through (Bobbio 1979). The traditional Marxist conception of civil society hinges on it being the space where social and economic relations are reorganised at a structural level (Marx 2014). For Gramsci, the civil society was part of the superstructure of the society, which in conjunction with the state, is the space through which the ruling class reproduces its hegemony (Bobbio 1979).

Unlike other theories of civil society, which portray it as an antithesis to the very idea of the state, Gramsci saw civil society as a constitutive element of statist hegemony and domination. For Gramsci, the subaltern – to the unity of which he ascribes the fundamental task of challenging the ruling class ⁵ – is constituted of civil society elements (Green 2011; Ligouri 2015). Gramsci talks about how coercion is used by the ruling class to reinstate its own values through civil society mechanisms. ⁶ The beauty of Gramsci is that, while retaining its super-structural character, he nonetheless ascribes civil society the capacity of bringing about radical social change. The notion of ‘being political’ encompasses broad aspects within his overall ideas as he was both a politician, and an ardent revolutionary believing in the primacy of praxis. His ideas regarding politics were much more pragmatic than most of his contemporaries. He reiterates the universality of politics when he states,‘. . . everything is political, even philosophy . . .’ (Gramsci 1931). ⁷

With the further development of capitalism, the internal contradictions within the working class necessitated the theorisation of gender, race and other identity-based exploitation within the working class, which mostly occur within the private sphere but have broader societal repercussions. Gramsci through the concept of ‘hegemony’ explored the relationship between covert and overt forms of domination in the society, which is related to the private and public spheres of the lives of the working class. As Ledwith (2009) says, Gramsci, through his interpretation of ‘hegemony’ established the necessary framework for transforming private modes of oppression into political modes of struggle. In other words, he deciphered the ‘missing link’ in understanding the interrelation between the private sphere of civil society and the public sphere of political society.

Gramsci’s ideas regarding the civil society acting in accordance with the political will and hegemony of the ruling class help in analysing the relationship between the civil and political hegemonic forces within crony capitalist regimes, which led to women becoming the most oppressed and exploited section of the population. There have been no exceptions to this rule in the implementation of the CAA, as a consequence of which Indian Muslim women have suffered the most. There are continuous reports of women being excluded from the National Register of Citizenship because of irregularities in the details of their husbands and fathers (Singh 2018, 2019). Within a patriarchal society, where a woman’s identity is based on that of a man, it is to be expected that they will be the worst sufferers in any kind of indexing mechanism put into process. Almost all the anti-CAA social movements, though diverse in nature, have taken cognisance of this basic reality. Deriving from Steans’ (2007) analysis of the politics of feminist solidarity, if a united front against Islamophobia is to be put up, it is imperative to respect the diverse targets and aims of the coalescing movements focused on the implementation of the Islamophobic document coined by the right wing.

In the case of Shaheen Bagh, the importance of the political character of any movement aiming sustainable and radical change with regard to government policies has been highlighted once again. The most persistent question which has been raised in this respect is whether civil society protests can impact policy decisions at a structural level. While most of the earliest fervour generated against the CAA with regard to the events centring around Shaheen Bagh had been from civil society, political parties eventually joined in the discussion.

There is no doubt that the Shaheen Bagh movement is revolutionary. It carries forward a sense of women priding themselves in their Muslim identity for the first time in contemporary Indian politics as far as women’s movements are concerned. Interestingly, the mainstream parliamentary left – primarily the Communist party of India, the Communist party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist)-Liberation – have come out in support of the movement. The left in India has been often accused of being Islamophobic in nature with reference to their rejection of alliance-based politics with theocratic Muslim political and civil formations. It is a common sight to witness organisations who have alliances with Muslim theocratic organisations to accuse the left of harbouring anti-Muslim sentiments, be it the All India Students’ Federation, the Students’ Federation of India or the All India Students’ Association, the respective student-wings of the CPI, CPI(M) and the CPI(ML)-Liberation. Shaheen Bagh is thus again special because the kind of support it had received from left-wing organisations and parties was unheard of in the history of the South Asian-left in general.

Voices in social media have been bustling with the need to counteract the hate spread by the CAA. However, the dominant apolitical narrative in social media disregards the political nature of the movement. Shaheen Bagh or the numerous others which had crept up in the wake of the anti-CAA protests in India provided the erstwhile mute Muslim women with a voice (Ahmad 2020), perhaps for the first time after the Indian independence in 1947. Although many women had joined in the anti-CAA protests, the Shaheen Baghs ⁸ were the only places where they actively asserted their religious identity.

Gramsci’s primary agenda in his writings on the subaltern was to reinstate the primacy of the ‘political and revolutionary’ subaltern. For Gramsci, the success of a movement demanded that the subalterns of all variants unify politically and socially to overthrow the ruling class in totality, forming a new oppression-less social order. Hegemonical descriptions of the protesters of Shaheen Bagh from the ruling class have attempted to characterise them of participating in the protests for financial gain with some targeting the women specifically. In spite of all that, the unique aspect of the protests was its emphasis on transgressing the dichotomy of civil–political society and instil within itself – and beyond – a belief in social change with women from the minority community leading the process.

Gramsci realised the immense importance of being critical of the powers instituted within civil society, while at the same time remaining a believer in the power of the civil society (Patnaik 2012). If one looks at the Shaheen Bagh protests, they are to the purist mere civil society protests because there is effectively not enough political motivation embedded within them. But the inherently political character of the protests can also not be overlooked. In coming out of their homes, in what is otherwise an extremely patriarchal set-up, these women have been political in multiple ways.

The unique characteristic of spaces like Shaheen Bagh is that they are resistances in themselves. The inherent discussion about the political character of the protests in Shaheen Bagh is that they had been able to redefine the very definition and character of the political as far as the ‘political’ is considered in Indian women’s movements. The anti-CAA movement is perhaps the only movement in modern Indian history which has witnessed such large-scale mobilisation of people from all walks of life. This raises some very pertinent questions regarding class, caste and gender with reference to this immense mobilisation which will surely be the subjects of many studies to come.

Shaheen Bagh represented a space where women, coming from the lower echelons of society, challenged the power structure. While most analysts viewed Shaheen Bagh as an identity-based space, Shaheen Bagh protesters inherently came from the lower echelons of the society and had a sufficient class identity. Shaheen Bagh was unique because it disrupted the traditional rally-based structure of the protest culture in India. In Shaheen Bagh, the speeches and politicians took a back seat and the protest still challenged the dominant political atmosphere of the country. It was political because it spoke the language of a broader politico-civil social movement.

Part of the larger Jamia Nagar (Farooqi 2020), Shaheen Bagh was a colony which was almost non-existent within the larger public consciousness till December 2019, when it witnessed a ‘once in a lifetime’ event, which Jamil (2020) aptly describes as a historic opportunity for the Indian Muslims to finally establish themselves as equal citizens of India. The inherently revolutionary character of Shaheen Bagh transgressed state–national boundaries. While there are numerous images of Indian freedom fighters along with Indian flags, there is almost a continuous rendition of international revolutionary songs and poetry, from Hum Dekhenge (‘We Shall See’) of Pakistan ⁹ to Bella Ciao (Goodbye Beautiful) of Italy ¹⁰ (Rajalakshmi 2020). Shaheen Bagh showed that it is possible to create a united progressive resistance against oppressive regimes while still holding onto one’s identity constructed by victimhood.

Since the days of partition, perhaps no other social movement or protest by asserting Muslim citizens has gained as much support from the progressive bloc as Shaheen Bagh. Shaheen Bagh depicted that it is possible to integrate the civil and the political even in times of aggressive communalisation. It also showed how Islam can be interpreted by the progressive forces not as a hindrance to developing progressive social consciousness but rather as a simple question of personal faith. It is important for one to understand that for the protesting women in Shaheen Bagh, the entire exercise represented multilayered battles against patriarchy, religious victimisation, statist oppression and so on. From a Gramscian perspective, this can be an initiation for the much-needed subaltern unity to displace the hegemony of the ruling class in India and progress towards establishing a subaltern working-class hegemony.