Piyasree Dasgupta - Jailed for waving a black flag at Adityanath
LUCKNOW, Uttar Pradesh
— A few hours before Prime Minister Narendra
Modi addressed
a forum of investors in the city last month, police constables surrounded Pooja
Shukla as she stepped out of her friend's house in Ismailganj. Shukla, a
23-year-old student activist with the Samajwadi Party (SP), said the policemen
and women dragged her to a waiting jeep, snatched her phone, drove her around
the city for five hours and only let her go when she pretended to be ill.
Another group from the police, she said, raided her house in Sarojini Nagar,
where she lives with her parents.
"They abused me
for hours inside the car," Shukla said. "They narrated how encounters
are done by the police. Then they said that I have been creating problems for
them and I might get into big trouble." This wasn't Shukla's first brush
with the law: images of her sparring with the police have been widely shared
among university students in the city. Last year, she spent 26 days in prison after she was arrested for
waving a black flag at Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath when he
visited Lucknow University.
Shukla, a slight young
woman with an outsized presence, is one of a cohort of student activists who
have been drawn into politics by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's)
crackdown on universities. The student upsurge began in January 2016, when the
suicide of Hyderabad University student Rohith Vemula triggered protests on
campuses across the country. A few months later, the arrest of Jawaharlal Nehru
University students Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya - and
the widespread media coverage that followed - marked the first real signs of
dissent against the Modi government. Now, as the country is
preparing to go to the polls again next year, students such as Shukla are a
visible part of the opposition to the BJP. "She is aggressive and not
easily intimidated," said Rahul Singh, national president of the student
wing of the Samajwadi Party, explaining why the party signed her up. "She
won't shut up easily and is young and idealistic."
In June 2017, when Adityanath
was scheduled to visit Lucknow University to unveil a statue of Shivaji erected
inside the campus, Shukla (who was not affiliated with any political party at
the time) and a group of fellow students stood by the gates—reading, chatting
in pairs and pretending like they were simply waiting for class. They had
stuffed black cloth flags inside their books and lunch boxes, which they
whipped out the moment Adityanath's convoy rolled up. The police quickly
rounded up and thrashed the protestors. Eleven of them - nine men and two
women, including Shukla - were thrown into jail the next day after a court
order. Shukla was charged with rioting, obstructing a public servant from
performing his duty and intimidation of a public servant - offences punishable
with imprisonment of up to five years. She spent 26 days in jail, the longest
among all the detainees, and upon her release, joined the SP which had helped
bail her out… read more:
