My Story

I was born and grew up in a Muslim family in a predominantly Hindu India. Growing up, I felt proud of my identity as an Indian Muslim. My friends came from different religions, and we all cheered for the same cricket team, feeling united under the Indian flag. But things began to change when the right-wing BJP government came into power. 

In 2019, the Indian government passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which would grant citizenship to minority communities from neighboring countries who had entered India—except if they were Muslim. In short, the law was discriminatory and unconstitutional, introduced to further marginalize and oppress the Muslim community. It was “couched in the language of refuge and seemingly directed at foreigners, but its main purpose was the delegitimization of Muslims' citizenship" (BBC News, 2024).

(Siddiqui, 2020)

(Shailjas & Shailjas, 2020)

The exclusive nature of the law was a direct attack on my community and questioned our place in the country. The bill’s introduction had a significant impact on my life as it forced me to choose between being Indian and being Muslim. I felt like my Muslim identity did not belong to the concept of India. 

All the Muslims in my community and responsible citizens of other faiths joined hands to protest against the law in a non-violent manner. Initially, the protests started with demonstrations and rallies, but soon we took to social media, especially Twitter, using hashtags like #IndiaDoesNotSupportCAA to amplify our voices and spread awareness about the injustice.

(Vertical Hanging Swivel Crossbar Banner Flag: India, n.d.)

This is a picture of one of the protests joined by my family and friends in our city. It consists of people from different walks of life and different religions, all united to oppose the law that was threatening the inclusive fabric of our country.

(Newsclick, 2020)

The Negative Impact of Twitter Hashtags in my Life

Compared to traditional media, social media is playing a pivotal role in shaping public opinion, as we saw in the 2019 Federal Election in Canada (Lizée, 2019), with the country's top leaders sharing their views and creating public opinion in their favor.

In India, Twitter has been the primary social media platform for citizens and political leaders to make political comments and statements. Its daily active usage in India grew by 74% year-on-year from October to December 2020 (Hariharan, 2021).

(Foley, 2023)

Just as the #IndiaDoesNotSupportCAA hashtag came into the limelight, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted multiple times to bring public opinion in favor of the CAA law, manipulating the citizens into thinking that CAA would not affect Indian Muslims.

(Zhang, 2021)

(Zhang, 2021)

The Indian government even suspended more than 100 accounts on Twitter to stop the online activities of users protesting against the CAA and curb the engagement on hashtags against the CAA (Krishnan, 2021).

Furthermore, the government and its supporters pushed back against anti-CAA Twitter hashtags with hashtags like #IndiaSupportCAA for political propaganda and to mobilize rallies in support of CAA.

As if this was not enough, the ruling BJP government, wanting to show people’s support for CAA, used fake 'Lonely Woman' accounts on Twitter to show support for pro-CAA hashtags (Chatterji, 2020).

(Chatterji, 2020)

Using all these tactics, the government tried to suppress our voices in the Twitter hashtag trends, and they found a lot of success because people believed in the lies and misinformation online without verifying the accuracy of the information. This led to pro-CAA marches across the country. 

It shows how people who solely rely on social media for news are less knowledgeable about the politics of the country, similar to the trends seen in Americans who mainly got their news from social media in a study done by the Pew Research Center (Nadeem & Nadeem, 2024).

(Pti & India, 2019)

The Positive Impact of Twitter Hashtags in my Life

Despite the negative influence of pro-CAA Twitter hashtags on public opinion in India, anti-CAA hashtags helped fuel our political movement and activism at all levels. 

According to Jane Hu (Hu, 2020), “the early mobilization of social media set the stage for the protests at Gezi Park, in Istanbul, the Occupy action, in New York City, and the Black Lives Matter movement, in Ferguson.” 

Similarly, Twitter hashtags helped us mobilize people from all around the city and allowed our protest leaders to share protest guides with instructions to organize similar protests in other cities. This led to increased awareness about the issue among all communities in our city.

10 Most-Used Hashtags for Pro-CAA Groups, June to July 2020 (Zhang, 2021)

According to one Time.com article, it was found that “online social networks have the power to change voting behavior” (Scherer, 2012). I saw similar trends in our campaign, with hashtags influencing people’s behavior. As awareness increased, people from other states took action and started joining the movement until protests spread across all parts of the country. Just as #YesToAllWomen exploded on Twitter (Grinberg, 2014), #IndiaDoesNotSupportCAA took over Twitter and became one of the top trending hashtags worldwide, with 444,000 tweets during the time of the protests. (Indo Asian News Service, 2019)

(Times of India, 2020)

Our voice was heard by people not only in India but outside India too. People in different parts of the world saw the injustice of the CAA law and the oppressive crackdown on peaceful protesters, which motivated them to come out in support of the anti-CAA protesters. 

On India’s Republic Day, thousands of people in 30 American cities held demonstrations demanding the repeal of CAA (Ali, 2020).

(Ali, 2020)