The anti-citizenship regime protest at Park Circus Maidan, led by women, completed 30 days on Wednesday. The organisers distributed red roses to protesters to mark the occasion.

Throughout Wednesday, visitors kept pouring in to congratulate the agitators for their “indomitable spirit”.

The vigil against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens had started on January 7 with only a few dozen women. The count has been increasing by the day since and Park Circus Maidan has emerged into Calcutta’s Shaheen Bagh, the Delhi pocket where women’s protest against CAA-NRC has been continuing since December 11.

“When we started the agitation, we did not think beyond a few days. Especially because almost none of us had stepped out of home to join a protest before the citizenship issue erupted,” said Noor Jahan Begum, a 50-year-old homemaker from Topsia, who has been at the protest venue since Day 1.

Most protesters were looking forward to January 22, the day the Supreme Court took up a batch of petitions challenging the amended citizenship act. But the court refused to grant any stay on the act and gave the Centre four weeks to respond to the petitioners’ contention.

“The court order changed the way we thought. We realised there is no short-cut to end this struggle. We are now ready for the long haul,” said Amrin, a 27-year-old homemaker sitting beside Noor Jahan.

(From left) Noor Jahan Begum, Shafiqa Hassan and Amrin Begum, who have been at the sit-in since Day 1

Amrin, also from Topsia, has two girls, aged five and eight. She gets up early, cooks and prepares her children for school before leaving for Park Circus Maidan.

When her children come back from school, Amrin’s mother-in-law takes care of them. After Amrin returns home at night, her mother-in-law goes to the ground to spend the night with fellow protesters. This has been the two women’s daily routine since January 7.

Every protester Metro spoke to said their movement would not have come this far without the support of non-Muslims, who keep flocking to the venue with food, water or just a message of solidarity.

One of them is Prabhati Pramanik from Dhakuria, where she runs a free tutorial centre for slum children. A regular at the venue, the 45-year-old wants her students to take part in a “cultural programme” at Park Circus Maidan and “sing songs and recite poems of equality and harmony”. On Wednesday evening, she was busy finalising the logistics with the organisers.

“The way women and students are leading the nation-wide protests is a lesson for everyone,” said Pramanik.

Her regular visits to Park Circus Maidan has made her friends with two other women — Shampa Sarkar, a 54-year-old schoolteacher, and Taniya Amin, a 28-year-old research scholar.

Anti-trafficking activist Ruchira Gupta addresses the protesters at Park Circus Maidan.

Though the three are from Dhakuria, they had never met before.

Many people addressed the gathering on Wednesday. Anti-trafficking activist Ruchira Gupta gave a speech in the evening.

A former journalist, Gupta talked about another time fraught with communal tension — the Babri Masjid demolition. Gupta had been reporting BJP leader L.K. Advani’s rallies that preceded the demolition of the mosque on December 6, 1992.

She managed to enter the mosque that fateful day. A piece of cloth covered her head and hundreds of kar sevaks — Sangh Parivar activists who brought down the mosque — gathered inside took her for a Muslim. “I was groped and nearly lynched by the saffron-clad men. Someone then said, ‘let’s kill her outside’. I was saved by a kar sevak from Bihar, who I had interviewed earlier and who told others I was a Hindu,” recounted Gupta, the founder of Apne Aap Women’s Worldwide.

After being spared, Gupta was taken to Advani. When she complained to him, she was offered sweets and allegedly told to “forget about what happened to her on a historic day”.

Gupta refused to be bogged down and testified before the Bahari Tribunal, Liberhan Commission of Inquiry and the Press Council of India, despite “repeated threats”.

“By refusing to bow before the communal forces, you are showing the same fighting spirit,” she told the audience, which broke into a thunderous applause.