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In an anti-CAA protest in Cape Town, South Africa, a woman named Kathyayini Dash stood outside the Indian consulate, microphone in hand, passionately singing the poem. In a rendition posted on YouTube on December 29, 2019, the poem is sung on the steps of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus, which on January 5 saw violence against students and faculty by an armed mob. ‘Hum Dekhenge’ has been extensively recited or sung during the protests. The use of ‘ Hum Dekhenge,’ as rallying cry, song, visual art, and internet meme, speaks to the widespread citation and circulation of certain Urdu or Hindi/Urdu poems during the anti-CAA protests. Urdu poetry has been central to the protests. While the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s move has roots in the last 70 years, particularly in Assam - where the idea of a National Register of Citizens (NRC) was formed - the CAA and the threat of a nation-wide NRC, which has been promised by the government, alongside the recent annexation of Kashmir (with the abrogation of Article 370 on August 5, 2019) and other policies and Supreme Court verdicts, make this a turning-point. It moves from citizenship based on residence within India to citizenship based on religion. The CAA represents a fundamental reworking of the citizen’s relationship to the nation-state in South Asia. It elides the history of mass migration and the large-scale passage of refugees across the border during the 1947 Partition and the 1971 war that led to the creation of Bangladesh. The spectre of citizenship being granted on the basis of identification papers - which are notoriously difficult to obtain in South Asia, especially for the poor - is particularly scary.
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Protesters at an anti-CAA demonstration in India | Siasat Daily According to a more recent estimate, India’s Muslims, at 195 million people in 2020, comprise the third-largest Muslim population in the world, after Indonesia and Pakistan. Notably missing from this list are Muslims, who, according to the 2011 Census of India, make up 14.2 percent of the population, for a total of 172 million people. Under the new amendment, refugees who are Hindu, Jain, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist or Parsi, even if they do not possess identification papers, may receive Indian citizenship within six years. The CAA proposes a religious basis for citizenship for refugees who have entered India from the neighbouring countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The idea of art as action, which became a clarion call in the 1930s.įirst composed in 1979, Faiz’s ‘ Hum Dekhenge’ has become a rallying cry for protests both throughout India and around the world against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), passed by India’s Parliament on December 19, 2019. The use of Faiz’s ‘Hum Dekhenge’ in the anti-CAA protestsĪlso illuminates the direct link between Urdu poetry and A public debate in the media ensued, as prominent poets, a former Indian Supreme Court judge, and journalists and intellectuals discussed the poem and its meaning. IIT-K responded by establishing a committee to investigate the complaint. This recitation of the poem soon became the centre of a controversy, when a post-doctoral faculty member at IIT lodged a complaint against the poem and its performance, claiming that its lines aroused communal sentiment.
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In a video posted on Twitter, a student recites the poem, which he reads from his cell phone, to a crowd of listeners, some of whom mill about and some of whom listen attentively, with the crowd applauding at certain lines. The protest included a recitation of an Urdu poem, commonly known as ‘ Hum Dekhenge’ (literally, ‘We Shall See’), by leftist poet and revolutionary Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984). On December 17, 2019, a student protest at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT-K) was held in solidarity with students at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia who had been brutally attacked by police on December 15. Why do the leftist poet’s words continue to resonate beyond their original context? From Iqbal Bano singing it to a charged crowd in Lahore in 1986, to students reciting its verses on campus protests across India late last year, Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ‘ Hum Dekhenge’ has continued to inspire activists for decades.