Commuters brave hardships as sit-in goes strong
NEWDELHI: A blockade started by Muslim women in south-east Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh, which has grown into the Capital’s biggest demonstration against the new citizenship law and inspired identical protests in other cities, but also created a traffic nightmare for thousands of commuters, completed a month on Wednesday.
To mark the occasion on Wednesday, a congregation from Punjab joined the protesters, whose numbers swell each night and especially on holidays as artists, students, activists and civil society members join local women and men under a tent to shout slogans against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, or CAA, and for rights enshrined in the Constitution.
A group of around 15 women occupied a small stretch of the carriageway of Road 13A from Sarita Vihar to Noida on the night of December 15 in protest against violent police action at neighbouring Jamia Millia Islamia and the CAA. Since then, the protest has grown manifold.
Led primarily by local Muslim women, many of them in their 60s and 70s, it has spawned similar protests in Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.
But the protest has extracted a heavy cost from daily commuters, whose travel time and cost of commute between Delhi and Noida has tripled. With the arterial road closed, people are being forced to take a longer route via the DND Flyway and then get stuck near the Ashram Chowk.
Santosh Kumar, a resident of Madanpur Khadar in south-east Delhi, said before the road closure, it took him 20 minutes to reach Noida. But now, commuters take at least an hour and a half to cover the distance.
Traffic snarls usually spill over to south Delhi neighbourhoods as far as Greater Kailash and Lajpat Nagar.
The jams on Mathura road and in Okhla have also inconvenienced patients and staff coming to hospitals such as Fortis Escorts and Indraprastha Apollo. Those from Noida have to go around to the DND flyway and get stuck at Ashram Chowk.
Virendra Tiwari said he took his car to meet a senior colleague from his company admitted at Indraprastha Apollo, and the two-hour drive caused him pain in the legs. “Protest for a day or two, it’s fine. But how can you block the road for over a month?” Delhi Police have reached out to protesters to persuade them to relocate, after the Delhi high court authorised the force to decide how it wanted to handle the agitation. But no agreement has been reached.
Despite the increasing pressure, the women say they are not daunted. “I have a burning sensation in my eyes due to lack of sleep. The government thinks that we are weak. But if we were, would we be able to go through all this?” asked Rizwana Bano, a protester.
At the protest, which has captured the imagination of the nation, across the divider from the main tent, artists have erected a replica of the India Gate with names of the protesters dead in anti-caa demonstrations and other installations. Photos of Mahatma Gandhi and BR Ambedkar line the protest site, and copies of Preamble of the Constitution are distributed every night. For every visitor walking into Shaheen Bagh, there is food – often biryani packed neatly into boxes and handed out by an army of volunteers. At least 100 litres of milk is used for tea, 15,000 boxes of biryani is distributed along with scores of cartons full of fruits, biscuits, chocolates and juice boxes. Everything is contributed and crowd-sourced, the organisers and volunteers say.
“Our stand is clear. If they don’t move back by repealing the law, we too won’t. We will continue our peaceful protest,” said Bilkis, 82, who has been attending the protest since the first day.