Description
This paper engages children’s active participation in the 101-day long anti-citizenship Shaheen Bagh protests in Delhi, India (2019-2020) which began in resistance to the ruling Hindu supremacist BJP party’s passing of a citizenship law (Citizenship Amendment Act, CAA). This, in tandem with two other laws (National Population Register, NPR, and National Register of Citizens, NRC) criminalises Muslim, Adivasi (indigenous), Dalit (lower caste), and migrant existence in India.
I argue that the children’s cultural productions of resistance at Shaheen Bagh disrupts these disciplinary functions of the neo-colonial Indian nation-state in two ways. Firstly, I argue the children’s play – banner and art-making, face-painting, and slogan chanting – transformed the protest site from being a ‘reasonable’ anti-CAA-NPR-NRC protest into a playground of political possibilities for living otherwise (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018). This disrupts mainstream media coverage and liberal commentary which reduces the protests to being ‘sensible’, i.e., focusing on formally repealing the laws alone, rather than questioning borders and citizenship per se – as well as centring the ‘respectable’ protestors: the dadis (grandmothers) and mothers who ‘don’t usually protest’. By shifting the focus to the disruptive, playful praxis of children, I offer one way of reclaiming the resistance’s radicalism from this depoliticisation. Secondly, this move disrupts the hegemonic Hindu supremacist understanding of children as builders of a muscular, masculine, fascist Hindu nation. This resonates with Baspehlivan’s (2022) argument that the praxis of children’s im-maturity, i.e., play, has revolutionary potential for negating the mature functioning of the state, thus offering novel possibilities for futurity.
