“We Shall See”
From December 2019 through March 2020, India was rocked by protests against two pieces of legislation, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Registry of Citizens (NRC), that discriminated against Muslims. Protests against this legislation were historic, even in a country with a strong culture of political protest: they were marked by inter-religious, inter-generational, and inter-community solidarity and were largely spearheaded by Muslim women. The protests sparked debates about religion and citizenship in a secular state, debates among protesters as well as between protesters and supporters of the state’s laws. This article examines two protest chants that elicited debate: an Urdu poem and the Muslim statement of faith, the Shahada. It argues that the debates illuminate some of the paradoxes of secular citizenship and renew questions that preoccupied anti-colonial nationalists of the twentieth century. Ultimately, the article suggests that these controversies are necessary to and constitutive of politics in religiously-plural states.