I will never forget the date, 12th December, 2019.
It was a usual December evening, I was in my hostel room preparing for the exam the next day. At around seven in the evening, somebody knocked at my door. I was seeing this girl for the first time, she introduced herself by saying she is from the same floor. She asked whether I knew anything about the rally that was going to take place against the CAB (now CAA), Citizenship Amendment Bill. Yes it was a Bill then.
With some reluctance, I said I will join you people in some time. I went back to study, but just couldn’t focus, so I decided to join the rally. The turnout was unexpectedly huge; we marched from the women’s hostel towards Gate No. 7 of Jamia. Soon enough, it started to rain heavily and students dispersed.
However, everyone was taken aback by the response. Such a huge turnout was not expected, that too from female students, and it was Friday the next day. The students collectively decided to give a call to a march towards Parliament Street against the unconstitutional Bill, and the time that was decided was 3pm.
After their Friday prayers, people gathered in large numbers. Before they could reach the venue, the police had already barricaded the area. Soon enough, the crowd started swelling. I stood there without making a noise, like a bystander trying to make sense of everything.
Coming from Aligarh Muslim University, I had my fair share of experiences of protests turning violent at times. But never in my life had I thought it would go this wrong. For many of my colleagues at Jamia, it was their first time in witnessing something like this. It didn’t take much time for things to get out of hand. Soon enough, the students started getting detained. This created chaos and within seconds, there was lathi charge and tear gas shelling everywhere. This was my first ever encounter with tear gas canisters being thrown.
The flame in which the whole country got engulfed started here. There was so much uncertainty and almost equal anger. Such an incident had never happened before, where the police had started throwing tear gas canisters inside the campus, and students were getting thrashed so brutally. But this was just the beginning of violence that was to follow in days to come.
Soon, it was Sunday, the 15th of December – a date that will go down in the history of India. We were yet to recover from the shock of what had happened day before yesterday, when we encountered another round of deadly violence on the campus. We were going to witness things that wouldn’t let us sleep for days. With our own eyes, we saw the police beating up students as if we were some criminals who needed to be taught a lesson.
It was not just an attack on bodies, but an attack on the students of a minority institute. It was an attack on an identity. It was an attack on an ideology, it was nothing less than an attack on the front that these students who study in Jamia are no less than terrorists. They are not one of us. They are traitors and traitors need to be taught a lesson well. I was not feeling safe in my own university. Not safe in a Muslim locality known for being a ghetto. I had nowhere to go.
Coming from Aligarh, my town was already burning. I couldn’t think of going back home either. Listening to stories from Aligarh made our hearts sink all the more. We were in the middle of nowhere. That was the state of helplessness. The whole fight for identity started making so much sense. I was feeling like a foreigner in my own country. Whom should I go for help? Whom do I call out to save me?
Whenever I recount that night, it gives me jitters. But at the same time, it gives me hope. Hope that despite such brutality and state repression, students have outlived. Hope that students dared to stand up for their rights without fearing the consequences and put everything at stake. They had nothing to lose and everything to lose. The students fearlessly braved everything, and the fight is still on.
Things have changed so much over the past few months that it will be difficult to go back to normal life. But this momentum is only necessary to prepare for the larger fight that lies ahead. Keeping the pandemic in view, we have resumed our fight for identity. The struggle has just changed its form, and is calling for larger unity and solidarity. Today, when we see all the graffiti in Jamia being destroyed, it made it clear that the establishment is scared – more of dissent than the epidemic. They want to remove every trace of dissent that bears the testimony to the brutality of this regime. But we will not back down. We will resume the fight once we survive this epidemic. We will not let our struggles and sacrifices go in vain.