Kisi Ke Baap Ka Hindustan Thodi Hai: Citizenship Amendment Act Protests, Hashtag Publics and the Enlargement of the Public Space

The oppositional protests against the Citizenship Amendment Bill burst into international consciousness mainly mediated by urgent digital publics on platforms like Twitter on December 12 2019 following police brutality within two historically Muslim university campuses in North India. As campuses throughout the country, along with other public gatherings organised local protests in solidarity with students of Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University, video recordings and photos of police inflicting violence on students were key in the trending of hashtags #AMUagainstCAB, #JamiaagainstCAB, #CABProtests and #CAB2019. The controversy around the Citizenship Amendment Act was therefore linked from its beginning on Twitter with images of student bodies victimised by the Indian State. My main argument in this article is that the effects of rage (#RageResistReject) arising from these online engagements not only marked a key milestone in the enlargement of the existing Indian publics and displacement of boundaries between public and private, political and domestic, and a re-distribution of power between these spheres (J. Ranciere 2014, 55). Here the mediatised urgency around bodily violence affectively propels the framing of the issue as structural and juridical violence (Clarke 2017, 365). Themes of rage against minoritisation and marginalisation of certain issues leads to questioning of the ways in which neoliberal internationalism is continuous with violent quelling of dissent and protests by a nation-state like India.