The Agonistic Struggle between Trinamool Congress and a Non-partisan Protest Alliance: West Bengal and Its Anti-CAA/NRC Movement

This article offers an ethnography of the citizenship protest movement in West Bengal from mid-2018 to mid-2020. In particular, it retraces the ways in which a comparatively marginal alliance of non-parliamentary left groups and Muslim organizations managed to impose its agenda on the state of West Bengal even though the movement was hijacked by the state government. It chronicles the year-long agitation before the passing of the CAA that altered the political landscape in the state. A multilayered analysis of the dynamics, composition, and symbolism of the Park Circus protest from January 2020, which were Kolkata’s response to Delhi’s sit-in at Shaheen Bagh, offers insights into the ways in which the state government under Trinamool Congress seized leadership over this movement. This in turn rendered the government subject to the movement’s agenda, which continued to be defined by the non-partisan alliance. The article concludes with the effects of the COVID lockdown on the movement and the possible transformation of dissident politics in its wake.