Remembering 15th December: The attack on Jamia Millia Islamia
Winter evenings on the campus are bliss. You could see professors, staff and students from across the globe sitting back in the central canteen, sipping chai and conversing life stories to international politics. December 15 was one such evening. Apart from the large gathering right in front of gate 7, Bab-e-Maulana Abul Kalam Azad against the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Bill (then) and proposed National Register of Citizens, everything seemed normal. The police crackdown on the parliament march on 13th December has pulled more students, locals including women and children, for the protest today despite the ongoing semester exams and chilling weather. A banner by the Jamia Teachers’ Association rejecting CAA and NRC hung down from the top of the gate. Around ten security guards stood in line and verified IDs of students entering the campus. I along with a friend walked into the campus towards the canteen from the protest. Sipping chai, we were scrolling through WhatsApp, and there appeared visuals of Jamia students being thrashed by police and uniform-less people from the neighborhood. There was confusion. And chaos. I don’t remember if we finished the chai or not, we headed towards gate 7. The police were approaching the campus from Sarai Julena. There was a huge crowd right outside gate 7 and the guards weren’t letting anyone, except students, to enter the campus. Inside the campus were us, a smaller crowd of students and staff. The sounds of firing were approaching. People outside the gate were in panic. Nobody wanted to be exposed to the expired tear gas or lose a limb for that matter. The office staff were walking around with packets of salt and advising the students to apply it near the eyes to avoid the irritation of being exposed to tear gas. I don’t know if that works. I didn’t apply it, because I was hoping that they wouldn’t fire it into the campus as they did on 13th December. But I had a handful of salt, just in case!
Tear gases started landing everywhere. Outside the gate, in the roads, into the crowd, into the campus, libraries and buildings. We all moved inwards from nearby the gate. Some towards the reading halls which were already packed with students preparing for the ongoing exams. Some towards the central canteen, university polytechnic and wherever they felt would be a tear-gas free space.
Gate 7 hosts the important departments and faculties and is one of the busiest spaces on the campus. It has two gates with tight security apart from the main entrance from the road. One opens towards the Jamia Masjid and the other goes towards the hostel and health centre.
Tear gases made it difficult to breathe. Some fell down gasping for breath. Some others stopped to help. People were suggesting the girls move to the library or the reading hall as it would be safer. Little did they know that the worst atrocities are to happen there. Some girls went but some were not even able to make a move as they couldn’t even open their eyes. Some of us knocked on the doors of the Centre for Nanotechnology for help. Never had we seen that centre open. But we knocked. And everyone asked the girls to stay inside the centre if it opened and guys were to find a way out after moving girls to a safer space. The police broke into the campus through the smaller gate that hostellers use, by breaking the locks and thrashing the guards. We kept knocking at the door non-stop. We had less than a minute to move girls in and leave for our safety as the police were rushing towards us. Some didn’t wait for the door to open and ran away. I don’t remember who appeared first; the group of armed men shouting curse words or the lab worker from inside the centre. He asked all of us to get in and we got in. He closed and locked the gates of the building, turned the lights off and rushed us all to the topmost floor. It was difficult to make sense of what was happening.
Some of our friends couldn’t make it into the building. We could hear the police yelling and lathis swing into action outside. We thought they would break in and thrash us all any moment from now. Thoughts came to a halt. There was no light except for our mobile screens. Not a drop of water to quench thirst. The sounds of tear gas firing never stopped. We had no idea of what was happening outside. WhatsApp forwarded visuals were brutal. The images of bloody students were making rounds in the groups. Our friends were brutally beaten up in the libraries and reading rooms. The police lined up the students, making them keep their bags on their heads and made them walk with hands raised. They used students as human shields to enter the neighboring localities! News of a student death on campus, which later turned out to be fake, shattered us. Concerns of police breaking into hostels including the J&K girls hostel spread. Hate speech and cries for help flooded our inboxes and walls. Metro trains didn’t stop in Jamia and the nearby stations. Reports of another police crackdown at Aligarh Muslim University was concerning. Amongst these, solidarity marches, messages and posts from across the country and the globe was giving us hope. Hope that a small step we, the students, took would make an impact. We sat in the barely lit veranda for more than three hours. We replied ‘Safe’ to the texts of friends not knowing what more to say. Around forty of us were safe from the police brutality. But the trauma and toll it had on ours and the students’ mental health isn’t accounted for. A friend was recalling the night saying, ‘Some events are so traumatic that memories of it make you relive the horror’.
They might have been able to torture us physically and mentally but we didn’t lose our self-esteem and courage. The students who went back to their homes, went carrying the flame Jamia had lit in them. They helped spread the message and gathered people in large numbers against the unconstitutional act. The ones who stayed back led the protests on the campus, despite getting no support from the admin. Giving up was never an option for us because our and the nation’s very own existence was at stake.
The protests that the university students began gained support globally and grew into a mass movement. When looking back, I’m glad that Jamia resisted this fascist regime’s atrocities, withholding the morales our founding leaders, the freedom fighters set 101 years back. I’m surprised at the coincidence of NAAC accrediting JMI with an A++ grade the day before the second anniversary of a state-backed police crackdown. What a sweet revenge to those who call it an ‘anti-national university’! I remember the late Prof. Mushirul Hasan addressing Jamia fraternity defending students in the Batla House fake encounter case in 2008, “You are as patriotic as anyone else. You don’t need to prove your patriotism to ANYONE else.”
All the unjust regimes will come down to dust. But their atrocities won’t be forgiven and our stories of resistance won’t be forgotten.
