CITIZENSHIP AMENDMENT ACT: DIGITAL ACTIVISM ON TWITTER; A CORPUS-BASED TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF TWEETS ON CAA

Abstract

This article is an attempt to understand how digital activism was used to express dissent towards the CAA 2019 that proposed citizenship based on religious identity. The study analyses the trending tweets on CAA through the corpus method. The data analysis showed that how Twitter is used both by the citizens and political parties to promote their views. The majority of Twitterati expressed its discomfort towards the Act that was passed hurriedly by stressing heavily on its “unconstitutionality” & “non-secularity”. The pertinent questions of secularism, citizenship, immigration were found to be poorly dissipated and hateful hashtag movements ruled the discourse. The whole discourse was found to be extremely rigid over the issue of nationality and citizenship status of Muslims and NRC. The statistically significant scores of tests like collocate, N-grams, word clusters, and concordances too showed similar results with an inclination towards negative sentiments for the Act.