Women and children of Jamia Nagar have been holding a sit-in demonstration against the citizenship law in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh for over 15 days now. We visited the protest site on December 30, one of the coldest days in Delhi, to ask the protesters what worried them about the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens. Three things are clear from what we heard from them:

1. People don’t trust the intentions of the BJP government. Contradictory statements from the prime minister, the home minister and the law minister have not helped.
2. People are worried about the mess the NRC generated in Assam and think there are other issues such as unemployment that should take precedence.
3. There is a very real fear of being unable to produce documents and be at the mercy of the Indian bureaucracy for something as basic as the right to be called an Indian citizen.