Mukul Kesavan - In solidarity: Jamia and the fight for India’s soul
And yet this same police force managed to trash a Central university’s library to the tune of Rs 2.5 crore according to the university authorities. Nothing was spared by these violent vandals, not even a glazed display case featuring a large book about the prime minister with his face on its cover. That too was wantonly smashed. And it wasn’t just the physical violence; what the students remembered even more vividly was the verbal abuse, the obscenities, the communal rage that animated those uniformed men.
There’s a video that’s gone viral of a knot of sketchily uniformed policemen pulling a male student out of a driveway where he was sheltering with his friends.... the policemen knock him down on the road and then cane him with abandoned violence till his fellow students, all of them girls, stop them by using their bodies as shields. One of them is a student of mine, a quiet, studious girl, who was brave enough to meet the violence of swearing, insensate men with nothing but implacable courage. Gandhi would have been proud of Ayesha Renna. There is no bravery to swinging a lathi or throwing a stone but to do what those girls did is the hallmark of satyagraha, non-violent resistance that shames and de-legitimizes the violence of the State.
Jamia Millia Islamia,
where I teach history, will be a hundred years old next year. It was born of
the Non-Cooperation-Khilafat campaign, the first nationalist mass movement to
challenge colonial rule. Throughout its long history, Jamia was an ideologically
nationalist Muslim institution. It was close to Gandhi’s heart; he raised money
for it in its precarious early years and visited it in the aftermath of
Partition in September 1947 because he was concerned about the safety of its
students and teachers.
Zakir Hussain, who
framed Gandhi’s plan for basic national education, the Wardha Scheme, was one
of Jamia’s longest serving vice-chancellors and arguably the republic’s most
distinguished president. His mausoleum sits in the centre of Jamia’s campus,
close to the university library named after him. Last Sunday, as students
worked in the large reading room on its ground floor, the Delhi police, in its
untiring attempt to keep Delhi’s citizens safe, stormed Jamia’s central
library.
I walked through the
library the next morning. The glazed french windows that open into its foyer
had been smashed by policemen in their coordinated assault on a library’s
reading room. The students who had been trapped inside testified that the
police’s next move was to systematically destroy the CCTV cameras installed
there and then to turn off the lights. Shawls, dupattas and
backpacks lay abandoned on and in between overturned chairs and tables, mute
witnesses to the violence that followed.In a flanking move, the grille protecting a narrow window on one side of the reading room had been torn off and the glass broken, the better to lob a tear gas grenade into that closed space where students sat reading. It was still there the next morning, broken into three pieces. During the assault, some students took shelter on the roof of the building from where they tried to film the mayhem below as policemen surrounded the library and then attacked and evicted university students who had provoked them by studying indoors. In the neigh-bouring old library block, the Ibn Sina wing, named after the great medieval physician known to the West as Avicenna, two dozen policemen conducted an indoor lathi charge and beat the students there so severely that one of them, a law student from Samastipur, was blinded in one eye.
Afterwards, once the
studying students had been properly subdued, they were evicted. They filed out
on to the main road outside where policemen made them walk away from the campus
with their hands in the air like a vanquished population after a siege. Except
that this wasn’t some medieval citadel, it was a university in modern India,
and these weren’t just students, they were rights-bearing citizens of a
democratic republic.
I can’t think of the
last time that the police liberated a library from... it’s not clear what. The
vice-chancellor made it clear that she had not asked the police to intervene.
The police spokesperson blandly claimed that they had followed ‘miscreants’ off
the main road that bisects Jamia into the campus buildings to maintain order
and suppress violence. But there was no violence on the main road abutting the
university. The burnt bus that was flagged as a symbol of violent protest lay
kilometres away. The police made it clear that no Jamia student had been
arrested for either arson or violence.
And yet this same
police force managed to trash a Central university’s library to the tune of Rs
2.5 crore according to the university authorities. Nothing was spared by these
violent vandals, not even a glazed display case featuring a large book about
the prime minister with his face on its cover. That too was wantonly smashed.
And it wasn’t just the physical violence; what the students remembered even
more vividly was the verbal abuse, the obscenities, the communal rage that animated
those uniformed men.
There’s a video that’s
gone viral of a knot of sketchily uniformed policemen pulling a male student
out of a driveway where he was sheltering with his friends. Bravehearts that
they are, the policemen knock him down on the road and then cane him with
abandoned violence till his fellow students, all of them girls, stop them by
using their bodies as shields. One of them is a student of mine, a quiet,
studious girl, who was brave enough to meet the violence of swearing, insensate
men with nothing but implacable courage. Gandhi would have been proud of Ayesha
Renna. There is no bravery to swinging a lathi or throwing a
stone but to do what those girls did is the hallmark of satyagraha,
non-violent resistance that shames and de-legitimizes the violence of the
State.
The difference in the
way in which this government treats ‘Muslim’ and ‘non-Muslim’ protest,
specifically the difference in the use of police violence, is instructive. The
stand-off between Narendra Modi’s dispensation and its academic agents on the
one hand and the bulk of the students and teachers of Jawaharlal Nehru
University on the other has been in place for years, for so long that Kanhaiya
Kumar now seems like a name from some Puranic battle. This has been a bitter struggle,
bitterly fought, but never once has the Modi government attempted to resolve it
through indiscriminate violence.
In Jamia, it took
exactly five minutes on that fateful Friday, just over a week ago, for the
Delhi Police to reach for its lathis and its tear gas
grenades. Students and teachers had assembled for a march inside one of the
university’s gates. The police, determined to snuff out the march before it
started, had barricaded the main road right next to the gate. The moment
students began to push and shove at the barricades — something that has
happened in every demonstration since the dawn of republican protest — the
police resorted to extreme violence. A student had his hand mangled (and later
amputated) fending off a tear gas shell.
The lesson this
difference teaches is stark. Like JNU, Jamia Millia Islamia is a Central
university, but unlike JNU, it is, historically, a Muslim foundation, not
entitled to the normal respect, consideration or leeway that a ‘mainstream’
university enjoys. The police violence visited on the Aligarh Muslim University
and its students over the past few days has been, if anything, even more
massive. This government’s calculation was that the police could make an
example of a ‘Muslim’ university like Jamia without political consequences.
It was wrong. Since
communalists are constitutionally incapable of empathy, they don’t allow for
fellow feeling. The solidarity, in words and action, that Jamia and its
students were shown by JNU and Delhi University, by lawyers and civil society
activists, by ordinary citizens who had nothing to do with university life, was
both moving and effective. The thousands who gathered at the police station at
ITO to push the police to release students taken into custody, succeeded in
their object.
More importantly, the
furious condemnation that crackled like electricity through Indian
universities, from rich private schools like Ashoka to professional institutes
like IIM Ahmedabad and IIT Delhi, to state and Central universities all over
the subcontinent, lit a fuse against the furtive bigotry of the Citizenship
Amendment Act, 2019, that’s still burning. As India stirs in unison against
this latest bid to sneak in a Hindu rashtra through a
legislative back door, this government might yet regret the day it tried to
bludgeon into submission a university birthed by a real nationalist movement.
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/in-solidarity/cid/1729220?fbclid=IwAR13978-d5CffxVA_OKwXzrKG4PaUFlhfgr8F6SZzeEy3eRxO3Nb5h_QuHQsee also
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