By Mohammed Wajihuddin
Jo baat kehte darte hain sab, tu woh baat likh
Itni andheri thhi na kabhi pehle raat, likh
(To speak of that which everyone is fearful, of that you write
The night was never so dark ever before, write!)
–Javed Akhtar
That lazy afternoon Sunday I returned from a funeral and was readying to go for a wedding reception of a close friend’s daughter when the viral videos of baton-wielding, helmeted cops chasing a group of youngsters at New Delhi’s Jamia Nagar hit me. More pictures and videos from the “battlefield” in the heart of India’s capital on that cold December evening unnerved me, just as they must have disturbed many others. The braves, yes they were braves who broke the door of Jamia Millia Islamia’s library, smashed glass windows and brutally beat up students, not sparing even those who were not part of the anti-draconian Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protest earlier in the day, didn’t even realize that it was a library, a temple of education, a sacred space, to many more sacred than any place of worship. It was an assault not just on Jamia. It was an assault on India’s culture of education and scholarship, the Idea of India.
Though I attended the wedding reception that evening willy-nilly, I found the mood at the function a bit sombre and sullen. The salad and multi-course cuisine tasted bland and bitter also because reports that evening said that cops had also entered the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) campus. Before the internet in Aligarh was ordered shut, some photographs of the injured students being carried to the varsity’s Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College sent shivers down the spine. Worries multiplied and an unseen fear playing on my mind, I ate little though the food was fabulous.
Brutal beatings
Even if some anti-social elements had pelted stones at the cops, as both the police and university administration at AMU claimed, the students didn’t deserve such brutal beatings–at Jamia or AMU. I couldn’t agree more with former cricketer and Congress leader Kirti Azad that everyone who believed in justice, fairness and the democratic rights of students to protest couldn’t approve this type of wanton brutalities. While the AMU’s VC did call the cops and asked them to use appropriate force, the Jamia VC had never permitted entry of police inside the campus. This brazen use of force and misuse of power raises many questions.
Jamia came out of the womb of the nationalist movement of freedom fighters like Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Mahmoodul Hasan, Maulana Mohammed Ali Jauhar and many others in the 1920s. Since a faction of students and teachers at AMU had allied with Muslim League and supported its diabolical Two-Nation Theory, these nationalist leaders established Jamia Millia Islamia at Aligarh itself. Later JMI was moved to Delhi, to keep it away from Muslim League’s dangerous influence and allow it to flourish and nurture nationalist-minded and patriotic minds. JMI has fairly done well to live up to the expectations of its illustrious founding fathers. In its 100 years of existence, Jamia has produced an army of professionals and scholars who brought laurels for the country. Its proud alumni community, like AMU’s, is spread across the globe.
AMU, JMIU
Together, AMU and JMIU have helped the post-partition besieged Muslims to stand on their feet. If there is a semblance of empowered Muslims within the community despite innumerable lacunae and shortcoming it suffers from, major credits must go to these two great seats of learning. Both were set up by selfless souls in trying times—AMU by Sir Syed in the aftermath of the holocaust of 1857 while Jamia in the stormy days of the 1920s by some of our nationalist leaders.
These seminaries were created to produce leaders, men and women of foresight and courage, not pygmies and narrow-minded fundamentalists. Admittedly, there must have grown some bad apples amidst good ones here, but that happens everywhere. But the benevolent role of these two institutions in lifting a section of Muslims out of poverty and ignorance cannot be denied.
Which also explain why these institutions have routinely faced attacks, malice, insinuations, demonization and humiliating tag of “factories of fundamentalists.” Some of the comments of the troll army on social media networks immediately after the cops began action on the two campuses are too demeaning and provocative to reproduce here. They hate these institutions because they hate Muslims. Perhaps they would have been happy had the entire Muslim population, especially in North India, remained uneducated or had not entered the portals of these seminaries.
Many years ago I remember a fellow employee of The Indian Express, the newspaper I then worked with, asking me with a smirk on her face: “But Muslims don’t study. How did you become a journalist of an English newspaper?” The question appeared more lethal than a live bullet from a gun. In her warped idea and the universe that she inhabited or perhaps still inhabits, a Muslim must be a butcher, barber, mechanic, plumber or at best a low grade clerk struggling to eke out a living. An educationally empowered and financially well off Muslim is an anachronism, an oddity that must not be made visible or publicly acknowledged.
It was perhaps this feeling of being “otherised” or not acknowledged properly in the society that he had grown in that propelled my late father, a high school teacher, to spend all his resources to educate his children. I remember days when my father would go completely broke. That fortunately didn’t break his resolve to give education to his children. I know some individuals to whom my father would reach out to borrow so that he could send it to me in time through money orders (bank transfers were unknown then) on my hostel address at AMU. This is not a unique story. But it only illustrates how many middleclass Muslim families, despite limited resources, make extra efforts to send their wards to central universities like AMU and JMIU.
Feeling of hatred
The brutalities perpetrated on students at these universities on that cold December night also stem from the same incurable disease called hatred for the “other”. This feeling of hatred was also at the back of the mind of the cops who caned JNU students protesting fee hike, again on the streets of Delhi, a few weeks ago. JNU faces “infamy” like hub of “tukde-tukde gang” for a different reason. And the reason is that JNU’s predominant left-leaning student community doesn’t subscribe to the malignant, divisive agenda of a section in India.
But no amount of coercion will break the resolve of the truth-seeking, democracy and secularism upholding student community today. Force failed to cow down those who fought discrimination and inequality in the past. It will fail in the present too.
Iss bagh mein jo dekhni hai tujh ko phir bahaar
Tu daal-daal de sada, tu paat-paat likh
(If you wish to see spring return to this garden
Call out from every branch and on every leaf, write!)
The writer is a senior journalist associated with Times of India. The article is his blog.