One of the most striking visuals to emerge from protests against the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act at New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia campus and the Shaheen Bagh neighbourhood in 2019-2020 was the collective, performative reading of the Preamble of the Constitution of India. This was an entirely novel use of the Preamble. This tactic has become a powerful and widely resonant method of protest, and an assertion of rights by many marginalised groups across India.

Scholars have described this kind of protest tactic as an expression of constituent power. Constituent power is admittedly an abstract concept, but it essentially refers to a collective political will of the people when they assert that they have the capacity to take political decisions for themselves.

The Preamble is the declaration of this constituent power of Indians to become “a people”, a political unity who can determine their political future. The collective reading of the Constitution allowed participants to constitute themselves as “We, the People of India”.

It was particularly significant that this practice emerged from students who were not demanding any concessions or policy favouring them. By reading the Preamble in an assembly, they were actively constituting themselves as the people of India. This assertion carried added weight because Muslims have been denied a sense of belonging to the Indian nation, particularly since after the Partition.

The discourse of Indian nationhood has often been tied to specific texts and histories associated with “Indic” religions and identities, from which many minorities are implicitly excluded. By using the Constitution itself as their point of reference, these protestors were emphatically claiming that they, too, belong fully to the nation.

Devidas Jayant and Shakaib Akhtar, Dalit and a Muslim, read out the preamble at the #RepublicDay event organised by @ChalchitraAbhi & Naujawan Bharat Sabha at Kandhla town in Shamli district.
This area has been under massive police repression after the anti #NRC_CAA_NPR protests pic.twitter.com/mwv5ReHvKj

In the winter of 2019 and 2020, two streams of protest – the movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the student struggles against fee hikes – mingled and reinforced each other. These movements, though distinct, together underscored the persistence of authoritarian responses to democratic dissent.

Students from various campuses in Delhi, and later from numerous universities across India, including private universities, spoke in defence of a particular idea of India. This was an idea of the nation not tied to a narrow cultural claim of primordial belonging, but rather rooted in the Constitution itself. It was, in other words, an affirmation of a constitutional culture.

Yet, these........

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