Ishrat Jahan was; captured in Delhi riots following protests during 2020 by Modi’s government against a contentious citizenship law passed.
When Ishrat Jahan stepped out of a prison, after more than two years of imprisonment, she was hugged by her sister; and in the Indian capital last week, they burst into tears as families gathered around to welcome her rear home.
After her discharge from jail, she stated that “I shirked my family a lot. This split was very difficult for me”.
Jahan, who is a 31-year-old activist, in February 2020 was arrested along with dozens of other Muslims against a controversial citizenship law passed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government during mass protests in December 2019.
The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) to secure Indian citizenship allowed non-Muslim migrants and before December 2014 refugees from India’s neighboring countries if they arrived in India. Many feared the CAA-NRC plans, read together with a proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), were targeted at disenfranchising the Muslim juvenility.
Critics stated that the CAA, while United Nations’ violated India’s secular constitution experts called the law “fundamentally discriminatory”.
The passage of the CAA; and NRC triggered a wave of peaceful demonstrations fears over a potential across India, with Muslim women leading the sit-ins in southeast Delhi, including at Shaheen Bagh, a working-class Muslim-dominated neighborhood at various places, which turned into the epicenter of the protests.
Jahan, who is a lawyer, and in East Delhi’s Khureji area former municipal councilor elected one such female-led protest from her locality organized.
Some leaders and ministers belonging to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Irked by the protests, encouraged their supporters to stifle the sit-ins and even “shoot” the protesters to Modi’s right-wing. More details
