Anxieties of Being Indian, Tamil and Muslim: Politics of Secularism in the anti-CAA protests

In this paper, I look at how Muslims in Tamil Nadu asserted both Indian and Tamil identity in their struggle against a discriminatory law called Citizenship Amendment Act, which was passed in Indian parliament in 2022. By engaging in a discourse analysis of a political oratory in a protest in Chennai, this paper explicates the way in which these identities are asserted and arrayed against the law, suffused with the anxieties and hopes of Muslim minorities. This paper also analyzes why do Muslims disavow from asserting their Muslimness as a political identity even when they are continued to be oppressed because of that identity. By analyzing it, this paper argues that Hindu nationalism nourishes itself by what I call as Cannibalization of Muslim visibility, a phenomenon which animates not only the Hindu majoritarianism of Right, but also the secular - liberal discourses of the center and the left.