Emulating Shaheen Bagh protest, hundreds of women have been on a sit-in protest on a road in Nagpada area in South Mumbai since the January 26 night in opposition to the CAA-NPR-NRC.
Inspired by the trenchant anti-CAA sloganeering witnessed at the Shaheen Bagh protests, in Delhi, dozens of women in Mumbai sat on the road holding anti-CAA placards and raising slogans against it. Some of the placards held by the protesters read:- “We stand against CAA, NRC, NPR”, “They tried to divide us”, “Respect my existence or expect my resistance”. Slogans hailing Hindu-Muslim unity were also raised by the demonstrators.
Despite repeated requests made by senior officials of the Mumbai Police, the women protesters have refused to budge from vacating the road. Senior Nagpada police station inspector Shalini Sharma said that the protesters were not permitted to sit on the protest but despite the refusal, the protesters continued camping at the road.
Similar to Shaheen Bagh protests, an overwhelming number of women protesters staging a protest in Mumbai are Muslims. The protest has seen participation from women from Madanpura, Jhoola Maidan, Apripada, and Mumbai Central areas, which are predominantly Muslim dominated.
In the aftermath of the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act, that grants citizenship to persecuted minorities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, scores of women launched a sit-in protest in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh since December 15, 2019, against the legislation of the Citizenship law.
There have been numerous incidents when anti-India slogans and communally charged-up remarks were made at the Shaheen Bagh protests, with recently, the mastermind of the Shaheen Bagh protests, Sharjeel Imam, blatantly called out Muslims to cut-off Assam and the North East from the rest of India. Imam also enunciated that the protests at Shaheen Bagh had no secular undertones and they were patently Muslim in nature.