Mainstream WeeklyRecent state violence on the CJP activists/supporters in New Delhi is fresh in our memory. However, the violence unleashed by the Indian State on the student activists in different universities in recent years has faded out in public memory. It is ironical that a student activist, Nehal Ahmed, published a monograph titled – Nothing Will be Forgotten: From Jamia to Shaheen Bagh (LeftWord Books, 2022), documenting incidents of State violence in and around the Jamia Millia Islamia University campus. In the present context of student activism, we feel the ethical urge of recalling what happened in the minority-run institution and its neighbourhood, inhabited by members of the minority community.
Nehal Ahmed summed up his experience of state violence at the very beginning of the monograph:
“15th December 2019 was the darkest day of my life. On this day, the Delhi police entered our campus and beat us like animals. From that moment on, from students, we became terrorists. A few months later, North East Delhi witnessed a pogrom, and we were again branded as rioters who posed a threat to law and order…Print media has played a prominent role in constructing and furthering this narrative, demonizing us at every step. This distorted truth and incorrect portrayal of my identity as a Jamia student made me want to put out my version of the truth. I wrote because that seemed the only way – to document truth as I experienced it.”
Nehal has situated his experience of state violence in the context of what triggered student protests in the university – “On 11 December, the Indian Parliament passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, purportedly to provide a pathway for persecuted religious minorities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan to get Indian citizenship. These three countries are Muslim majority states, which means that only non-Muslims are granted direct access to citizenship in India. For the first time, religion has overtly been used as a criterion for granting citizenship. This makes the CAA incompatible with the nation’s secular fabric, a direct attack on the Indian Constitution of 1950…Jamia played a vital role in the anti-CAA campaign that followed. On the day the CAA came to parliament, Jamia students began to protest the communal nature of the bill.” We come to know from the author’s narrative that the girl students of the university played the role of a catalyst in the emerging student movement in the campus: “On 12 December, girls from Jamia organized a protest march from the Girls’ Hostel to the university’s main campus. Their small gathering became a considerably huge crowd; more than a thousand students joined in by the time the procession arrived at its destination. That remarkable evening shook multiple stereotypes and gave a massive push to the students to get involved in the emerging struggle.”
The author witnessed incidents of state violence on the very next day. To put it in his own words: “On 13 December, the teachers’ organisation called for a protest meeting inside the campus. The same day, Jamia’s Students Organisation requested permission to march from Jamia to the parliament. Just outside the university, the police installed heavy barricades, blocking the road completely…The atmosphere was light, with slogans and revolutionary songs. The police, though, launched a lathi charge and beat the students…This crackdown was new for us – with the lathi charge and the use of tear gas. Nobody expected such brutal action from the police. Students ran back into campus, our eyes smarting from the tear gas, hoping that we would get away, but the toxic air suffocated us even in Jamia.”
The following are some episodes of police violence witnessed by the narrator in the university campus in December, 2019:
“We were cornered near the library and were unable to move. One student began to shout, saying that the police had entered from the hostel gate and were beating a few students who had come from the hostel…The library was closed, so we could not hide within it…The police were standing on the stairs and ramps at the gate of the library. I ran as far as possible, but two policemen came and started to beat me as I stepped down from the ramp…The police went to another section of the library, including the girls’ section and beat up more students. Some students hid in the washroom, but there was no safe place that day; they were beaten and thrown on the floor…”
Nehal Ahmed wrote the following words in characterizing police violence in the campus of the Jamia Millia Islamia University: “The police targeted the students with violence. They came onto the campus to beat us, not to disperse us…But why beat students in the library? The police turned the entire library into a warzone. It seems like they were dealing not with students but with hardened criminals.”
The violence unleashed by the Indian State on the students of a premier minority-run central university gives us a broad idea of the vulnerability/precarity of the Muslim minority community in contemporary India.