Intergenerational Solidarities in Political Activism: The “Daadis” Protests in India

Older men have held institutional and State power in most societies traditionally. However there is a growing concern now about the youth’s apathy towards political participation in the ageing economies of the West. This pitting of the young against the old has created a polarised political discourse which presents them as enemies. Despite being a demographically young nation, Indian politics and its multigenerational family system remains gerontocratic, led by the elderly who fail to represent or serve the disaffected youth. Against this international and national context the proposed paper will read the political emergence of older women referred to as “daadis” (grandmothers) as leaders of a pan Indian protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 passed by the government. The agitation which started in a Delhi neighbourhood with the local Muslim women’s public sit-in, was replicated by neighbourhood mobilisations across India marked by the leadership of daadis. Uninitiated in politics, unfamiliar with the public sphere, weighed down by age related disabilities, the daadis took control of a national movement for the right to equal citizenship—because they felt the futures of their children were at stake. Bringing in a different language of protest and understanding of politics they radicalized ideas of power and agency by marshalling their vulnerability into an idiom of resistance. While they were dependant on the youth to help them walk, go to the toilets, give social media bytes, the youth looked to them for political direction. This created a collaborative, co-dependant intergenerational collectivizing—an “assembly of bodies” providing strength. This paper will use Vulnerability theory to read the daadis’ protest, looking at age not as a source of individualized masculinised gerontocratic power but as an aspect of bodily fragility deployed to underline the need for mutually caring solidarities.