One of the most striking visuals to emerge from protests against the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act at New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia campus and the Shaheen Bagh neighbourhood in 2019-2020 was the collective, performative reading of the Preamble of the Constitution of India. This was an entirely novel use of the Preamble. This tactic has become a powerful and widely resonant method of protest, and an assertion of rights by many marginalised groups across India.

Scholars have described this kind of protest tactic as an expression of constituent power. Constituent power is admittedly an abstract concept, but it essentially refers to a collective political will of the people when they assert that they have the capacity to take political decisions for themselves.

The Preamble is

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