Citizenship protests: A new politics of resistance

A possible way of sustaining numbers is to broad base the protests by adopting other connected demands

By their sheer spread, the ongoing protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) have become difficult to ignore. But they are instinctive and without a strategic core. This is their weakness.

The current protests will fail if they lose momentum or turn violent in the face of an unresponsive government. That would be disastrous. A protest that fails and dissipates, emboldens its opponents. And violence will weaken the cohesion of the protestors and erode their moral position. There are already attempts to undermine the protests through coercive action and by projecting them