by Jayana Jain 24 April 2021
On 27 December 2019, in the political milieu of the protests led by university students in India against the Citizenship Amendment Bill No. 370, the Twitter handle AnticaaD (Indians Against CAA – Germany) tweeted, “Error 404! Democracy Not Found!” The tweet was appended with a report published by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) concerning the lost spirit of democracy since the Modi-led BJP government came to power in India. Digitally savvy, and no longer bereft of voice and rights, a small yet vocal group of Indian diasporic and migrant academic community in Germany has been indicating, both through offline and online activism, the systematic breakdown of India’s democracy to a form of “electoral autocracy”— a term that the V Dem Institute recently used in Sweden to describe India’s current political situation. Often, the Indian diasporas, many of whom may identify with the Modi government’s Hindutva ideology, have been homogenised and constructed as mere economic tools to consolidate Modi’s political power. However, since the revocation of Article 370 of the Indian constitution and the debates surrounding the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in 2019, the Indian diaspora and migrants in Germany are enacting a socio-political role much beyond their homogenous representation. Not limited by territorial distance or geopolitical boundaries, their digital networking practices serve as a prism to reflect on how relations within and between the local and global are mediated as they encounter the everyday “political, geographical and historical specificities.” Broadly, a study of their digital politics also enables decoding of those affective intricacies that have shaped and are shaped by the dominant Hindutva discourse on nation, nationalism, citizenship, and belonging.
As opposed to understanding the digital activism of young Indian diasporas and migrants only through a hermeneutical approach that involves observing, collecting, and analysing the visible content of their social media posts and tweets, I used multiple data collection and analysis techniques such as online or in-person interviewing and ethnographic observation of their offline activities. I manually chose Twitter and Facebook accounts of Indians in Germany which were active for at least six months since December 2019 based on their location and activities (visible in the form of posts, shared posts, hashtags, tweets, retweets, and comments) with regards to the CAA protests in India and changing dynamics in Indian politics. This was done to scrutinise the collective digital politics of the diasporas and migrants and the changes in the CAA discourse itself. Later, I approached selected users for interviews or discussions about their immigration experiences in Germany, ideas about home, belonging, and opinions on some major socio-political turns in India, such as the CAA and NRC. While questioning, I realised most users are diasporic or migrant students and young professionals based mostly in cities such as Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Cologne. My neutral positionality and identity as a young migrant Indian female student residing in Germany perhaps played a significant role in making my research participants see me as an “insider.” As a result, most of them could uninhibitedly share their experiences and political opinions. Although the participants gave me access to their political networks, many refused to reveal their full names in online interviews (whether pro- or anti-CAA), and the few I met in person requested me not to mention their names in any published study as they feared the possibility of exclusion from other Indians in Germany groups, threats from diplomatic offices or political extremists. These are also some of the dominant reasons why most social media handles of Indians in Germany choose to remain anonymous and often collaborate with other similar ideologically inclined online groups. Such a multi-sited online and offline ethnographic study has led me to some key findings of how the structure of digital platforms influences and is deployed by the Indian diasporic youth to perform their contesting identities and stage claims about the nation, citizenship, democracy, and belonging.
Differences within Diasporas: Modi Mania and Migrant Anxieties
The selected participants, despite the differences in age, religion, gender, class, profession, and political inclination, were spread evenly across the major cities of Germany and engaged in the politics of recent legal amendments in the Indian constitution mostly through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. However, it is worth pointing out that many participants were already a part of private Whatsapp chat groups. They conducted everyday conversations and shared their political opinions, feelings, and alternatives. They simultaneously used multiple social media platforms for different purposes depending on the kind of communication that the structure of each platform enabled. While most individuals (nearly 90%) who associated with pro-CAA Twitter handles and Facebook groups were male Hindu students or professionals and aligned themselves with the BJP government’s Hindutva agendas, the anti-CAA Twitter handles and Facebook groups tended to be more diverse in terms of users’ religious background, gender and profession. There was not much evidence of any pre-existing or prevalent forms of hierarchy in both polarised digital groups where the leader-follower image was emulated amongst the users. They often operated through democratic forms of online networking. However, the content of tweets and posts in the case of pro-CAA groups (groups that originated between September 2019 and January 2020) such as “German Indians Support CAA,” “Overseas Friends of BJP Germany,” “Indians Europe Group,” “@OFBJP_Germany,” “@OFBJP_Berlin,” “@OFBJP_Munich” and “@OfbjpH” indicates a form of “Modi mania” where his image is hailed as a saviour and an unflawed hero whose party politics are considered democratic solely based on the number of his Hindu supporters. Notably, in the 8 January 2020 post on the Facebook page “German Indians Support CAA,” the Citizenship Amendment Act was referred to as the “Citizenship Modification Act,” perhaps a Freudian slip that reiterates the “Modi” mania often visible amongst the pro-CAA and Modi-BJP supporters. As the common theme of moral validation of BJP-led Hindutva nationalism runs through the tweets and posts of the pro-CAA groups, a sharp critique of its anti-secular and undemocratic nature underlines the digital activities of the anti-CAA groups. Despite the differences, digital proactiveness and visibility appeared to be crucial for bringing about a collective change across borders and engaging in civic and political campaigns in India for both groups.
Long-distance Solidarity with Alma Mater
For the users of Twitter handles such as “@AnticaaD,” “@IndiaSolNW” and “@IAFHamburg,” there is no hailing of any one hero; instead, the violence against students of their alma mater in India was an alarming factor. The marginalisation of the left-liberal student voices in India was relatable at many levels for the young Indian Muslim and Sikh diasporic and migrant students as alienated minority communities in Germany. Their tweets, the frequency of which tended to be highest on weekends, in the evenings or nights, and during Christmas holidays, are not only indicative of a long-distance solidarity performance with the student communities in India but also the immigrant’s internalised anxieties and insecurities generated by the capitalist tyranny of the week-day life in the host land.
Hashtag Activism: A Marriage of Local and the Global
Considering that it is “not that easy” to organise and announce protest rallies as migrants in foreign lands, social media platforms serve as useful means to not only announce the schedule and itinerary of protest events on the streets but also reach out to local and international media and powerful global personalities. On Twitter, this was often articulated through a combination of retweets, hashtags, and tagging that enabled the reaching out to a wider audience and the shifting of national issues on a transnational scale. Interestingly, online and the street protests led by anti-CAA Indian student groups in Germany reinstate the amalgamation of the local and the global. Video recorded and uploaded on Facebook and Twitter, the protest rallies were held at historically significant spaces (for instance, Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Rote Flora in Hamburg, and White Rose Memorial in Munich), often with German and other international students, and included multi-lingual slogans that constellated several nation-states’ histories of fighting against fascist laws. Such a linking of shared histories and contemporary urgent issues from “streets to tweets” and photo exhibitions and circulation of hashtags such as #allRefugeesareWelcome, #PoliceBrutality, #AllLivesMatter led to the co-creation of pathways for a glocal resistance with other ongoing transnational socio-political movements. The demands for decentring citizenship, free speech, and upholding the secular values of the Indian constitution were also mediated through the cover photos and profile pictures of the anti-CAA online groups. In contrast, the cover photos of the pro-CAA online groups portrayed a patriarchal narrative of rescue and integration of the persecuted minorities (Christians, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains) from the neighbouring countries of India. Although they put up a show of solidarity with “Kashmiri pandits” in their pro-CAA rallies, they indicated anxieties against the dominance of Muslim communities in India and the neighbouring nation-states through their online activities. Such anxieties were justified based on the chauvinistic Hindutva ideologies of Modi and other BJP members, such as Tejasvi Surya, who had even faced opposition from other Indian diaspora groups in Hamburg. Often, the pro-CAA handles also targeted any opposition by referring to them as the “educated class,” “left-liberals,” “urban Maoists,” or “urban Naxals,” who are destructive and disseminating an “anti-India” sentiment. In some instances, they also threatened anti-CAA group members by warning them about “bad posts” and “reporting to German cyberteam,” thereby indicating anxieties against any form of criticism and elaborate discussions. Besides, most of the pro-CAA rally videos of Germany were compiled into one long video by a Berlin-based Indian journalist who uploaded it on YouTube with the hyperbolic title “Huge support for CAA by Indians in Germany,” thereby attracting and trapping viewers into believing that massive support prevailed. However, a closer look at the video makes the viewer wonder if a handful of people can be considered as “huge support.” In sum, the Indian migrants’ and diasporas’ both online and offline movements indicate a spatiotemporal shift in the site of citizenship practices territorially from India to Germany and digitally from relatively smaller social platforms such as WhatsApp to wider public platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. As they articulate, negotiate and mediate their multiple identities using various digital platforms, they provide insights into their constantly differing, deferring, and relational experiences of navigating the interlaced conditions of the local, national, and global.
The Fading Protest
In a paper titled “Millenial India: Global Digital Politics in Context,” scholars have argued that “its momentariness weakens the promise of empowering digital virality.” In the case of hashtag activism around the CAA issue, this stands valid for several intertwined reasons. For many users, the movement lost its momentum after introducing stringent lockdown measures due to the Covid-19 pandemic. For some anti-CAA individual user handles, the fear of violent threats emanating from Hindutva supporters and soft threats from diplomatic offices for being vocal and in the digital limelight are so strong that they have shifted to more private and apparently secure applications like Telegram to share their political views with other members. They also indicated five other reasons that have made their networked resistance against the discriminatory CAA regulations even more challenging. These can be summarised as follows— i) heightened precarity as unemployed/jobseeking students or temporary professionals, ii) anxieties related to changing domicile laws in the host land and homeland, iii) the multiplicity, diversions, and polarities within the different Indian diasporic groups in Germany, iv) the expanding hold of disrupting Hindutva narrative bots on Twitter trends, and v) fear of suspension of online accounts as seen in the case of some students in India. During my ethnographic research, I observed the closure of two such accounts—one based in Berlin “@berlinForIndia” and the other based in Munich “@Munichagainstn1” (link no longer unavailable).
Conclusion
As a young Indian migrant student myself, residing in the city of Münster in Germany, where the Peace of Westphalia (1648) was signed, and the Westphalian state system of “high politics” emerged, thinking about state sovereignty and geopolitics of postcolonial India inevitably implies a mental mapping of our shared history of global political border systems. Throughout history, the irrational imposition of political borders and draconian citizenship laws for national security and sovereignty have only triggered radical displacement and extreme conditions of statelessness. The digital activism of many young Indian students in Germany illustrates that comparable to the anti-Semitic and racist sentiments of Nuremberg Laws (1935) of the Third Reich in Germany, the implementation of CAA and NRC in India may also generate a new politics of vulnerability and heighten forms of exclusion for South Asian Muslim migrants across the globe.
In a 1998 study on cultural and ecological diasporas and the need for a cosmopolitan bioregional sensibility, Mitchell Thomashow (123) alerted that, “In the twenty-first century, having a homeland will represent a profound privilege.” When millions of migrants across geopolitical borders are confronting the dire consequences of displacement and heightened forms of precarity, we need to urgently reflect on our present-day citizenship laws that blatantly privilege and value some human lives over others. A National Herald report on the 154 European Parliament members’ anti-CAA resolution has highlighted that “India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) could trigger the largest statelessness crisis in the world and cause widespread human suffering.” In such a scenario, the Indian diasporic youth’s solidarity with the students residing in India and their anti-CAA and anti-NRC digital activism has certainly “inspired a new vocabulary of citizenship.” However, we require new critical methodologies that might trace the digital constellation of activist, legal and aesthetic sensibilities and celebrate diverse psyches, habitats, and multiple forms of belonging. As we acknowledge the role of the world wide web in intricately weaving the global “networks of outrage and hope,” we need to reflect on how social media discourses led by young Indian diaspora and migrants are navigating the changing nationalistic imaginaries and Hindutva agendas of the BJP-led government in India, along with the Islamophobic and anti-immigrant sentiment prevalent across the globe. Equally, we must scrutinize how the performance of migrant digital identities relate to the power relations embedded within the material, affective and algorithmic configurations of online media as politically charged spaces. Perhaps the rectification of error “370” (recalling both the Citizenship Amendment Bill No. 370 and the revocation of Article 370 of the Indian constitution) requires a form of human synergy that collaborates beyond geopolitical borders so that the domicile rights of marginalised and/or migrant Muslim communities can be restated; the “systematic” constitutional breakdown can be repaired. The foundation of the world’s largest democracy can be restored.
Acknowledgment: This research has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [Grant Agreement Number 714285].
Jayana Jain is a postdoctoral researcher in the Project ONLINERPOL at the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich. She completed her Ph.D. in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Münster. She is currently working towards the publication of her first monograph which examines the aesthetic complexities of narrating the experiences of migration, nation and home in contemporary South Asian novels and films.