Newspapers have been screaming headlines about India’s countrywide protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which was recently passed by parliament, and the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC). Both seek to make India’s approximately 200 million Muslim people – 14% of India’s population – second-class citizens.

But for me the protests were up close and personal. My 32-year-old son and daughter-in-law were roughed up by a handful of police while filming a huge protest rally in Bengaluru.

I was proud of my three children, who all turned up to protest, but my stomach churned when I heard that my youngest son’s shoulder had been dislocated. It’s a sign of the times we live in. My husband and I, with our older son, marched in solidarity in our small mountain town near Ooty in Tamil Nadu.

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There is nothing exceptional about protests in India. People quite readily take to the streets to make their voices heard. But the protests over the last few days have been something else. I was part of a women’s group that documented the pogrom in Gujarat in 2002 when Prime Minister Modi was the chief minister of the state. The scale of the killings and rapes was horrific. At the time, it was being called the “final solution” experiment. Almost two decades on, the guilty have all been exonerated. They walked scot-free. Genocide was perpetrated with impunity.

I have sometimes bemoaned the apathy of the younger generation in India. They appeared more caught up with careers and being upwardly mobile than the plight of Muslims, dalits and adivasis (tribal people). Gay rights and campaigning against the climate crisis were acceptable causes but the alarming rightwing politics of the country seemed too far beyond their interest range.

But when the government passed the CAA, and police entered the Jamia University in Delhi, a site of one of the early protests, and attacked innocent students, then brutally beat up students at the Aligarh Muslim University, in Uttar Pradesh, it was as if a light switch had been flicked. Thousands of people, especially young people, were galvanised to take to the streets and protest, including my children. This December has brought hope where I, personally, have felt despair about the future of India. As the independent Indian news website, The Wire said: “There comes a time in a nation’s history when silence is no longer an option. When neutrality, equivocation, discretion are acts of cravenness. Where standing up, and even protesting, becomes a moral duty, because much more than the personal, or even the principle, is involved — this is an inflection point where the very soul and existence of India are at stake.”

An incredible cross section of India is not prepared to be craven. “Spaghetti straps mingled with sherwanis”, is how one report described a mixed group of modern, westernised young women rubbing shoulders with older, traditional-looking men. The posters cried: “We are not Hindus, Christians or Muslims. We are Indians”, “No silence, no violence” and “All I want for Christmas is a new government”. A young lad, who stood defiantly before a police water cannon in Delhi, said: “There is more water in my eyes than their water cannon as I cry for my country”.

Mumbai is a city in a hurry. Most people do an exhausting daily grind, commuting a couple of hours each way in jam-packed suburban trains. Yet they appeared in their thousands to stand beside the people being targeted by the CAA and NRC. Not to be outdone, Bengalureans also took to the streets in their thousands, as did people all over India. From the nation’s most elite campuses, the Indian Institutes of Management and major science universities and medical colleges – generally known to be apolitical institutions – the protests moved to myriad small town colleges

What galvanised people from such different backgrounds to rally together is the attacks on Muslims. Uttar Pradesh’s Muslim-hating chief minister has already confiscated and auctioned the properties of Muslims he claims took part in protest in what is being described as an “Indian Kristallnacht in the making”. And reports claim at least 18 people, including an eight-year-old boy, have been killed. After initially denying the killings, UP police finally stated that they had fired in self-defence.

Harsh Mander, a leading activist says: “India is witnessing the rise of young people in defence of a country being divided by its rulers with hate. Young people are picking up the mantle of the very battle for which Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. He was killed for the idea of India as a humane and inclusive republic in which Muslims would be equal citizens in every way.”

CAA and NRC will be part of the nation’s alphabet soup for some time to come. The first refers to an amendment to the 1955 Citizenship Act, which allows Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Christians and Buddhists who have illegally entered India from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh to be fast-tracked for Indian citizenship on the ostensible grounds that they are fleeing persecution. The singling out of these religions and the obvious omission of Muslims and non-Muslim countries such as Sri Lanka and Myanmar are what have evoked such a strong response.

The NRC is the official record of legal Indian citizens. It was first prepared after the 1951 census in India and has not been updated until recently, when the process was initiated in the north-eastern state of Assam. But 1.9 million people have been excluded from its register as a result – many of them Muslims. When the home minister Amit Shah declared in parliament that the NRC would be rolled out across the country, and parliament passed the CAA, people began to feel that this was a strategic move to isolate Muslims and render them stateless.

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But the protests are an indication of how important secularism is to Indians. The CAA – implemented by the Hindu nationalist ruling BJP party – is seen to hit at the heart of secular India.

December is universally recognised as the month of “good cheer”. To all those who wish me a happy new year, I find it hard to respond. It’s a sad season this year. And 2020 doesn’t hold out much promise. But the protests are a sign of hope. Young people all over India, including my adult children, have marched in protest. They’ve become politicised and aware that complacency has no place in a democracy. I hope their voices make an impact in the corridors of power.

• Mari Marcel Thekaekara is a human rights activist and writer based in Gudalur, Tamil Nadu