When Ishrat Jahan walked out of a prison in the Indian capital last week, she was hugged by her sister and they burst into tears as relatives gathered around to welcome her back home after more than two years of imprisonment.
“I missed my family a lot. This separation was very difficult for me,” she told Al Jazeera a week after her release from jail.
Jahan, a 31-year-old activist, was arrested along with dozens of other Muslims in February 2020 during mass protests against a controversial citizenship law passed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government in December 2019.
The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) allowed non-Muslim migrants and refugees from India’s neighbouring countries to secure Indian citizenship if they arrived in India before December 2014. Read together with a proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), many feared the CAA-NRC plans were aimed at disenfranchising the Muslim minority.
Critics said the CAA violated India’s secular constitution while United Nations’ experts called the law “fundamentally discriminatory”.
The passage of the CAA and fears over a potential NRC triggered a wave of peaceful demonstrations across India, with Muslim women leading the sit-ins at various places, including at Shaheen Bagh, a working-class Muslim-dominated neighbourhood in southeast Delhi, which turned into the epicentre of the protests.
Jahan, a lawyer and former municipal councillor elected from her locality, organised one such female-led protest in East Delhi’s Khureji area.Irked by the protests, some leaders and ministers belonging to Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) encouraged their supporters to suppress the sit-ins and even “shoot” the protesters.
The hate speeches led to an outbreak of religious riots in eastern parts of Delhi in the last week of February in 2020, killing more than 50 people, most of them Muslims, while dozens of houses and mosques were torched.
The police, accused by victims and witnesses of colluding with Hindu mobs during the violence, made a series of arrests of anti-CAA activists, charging them under a stringent “terror” law, called the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).
Most of those arrested under the UAPA and other laws continue to languish behind bars while legal cases and investigations proceed at a snail’s pace.
Jahan was arrested on February 26, 2020, two days after the Delhi riots erupted, with police first charging her with rioting and unlawful assembly and later accusing her of being part of an alleged conspiracy to foment religious riots in the capital.
