GURMEHAR KAUR

  small acts of freedom

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Introduction

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  22

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  Epilogue

  Footnote

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  SMALL ACTS OF FREEDOM

  Gurmehar Kaur is an Indian student activist and the ambassador for Postcards for Peace, a charitable organization that works towards eliminating discrimination. She is also the co-founder of Citizens for Public Leadership, an independent and non-partisan movement focused on advocating progressive public policy in India. In October 2017, she was listed by TIME magazine as a global ‘Next Generation Leader’. Small Acts of Freedom is her first book.

  To the memory of my father,

  and to my mother for keeping his memories alive

  Introduction

  In February 2017, a few friends asked me if I wanted to join them for a protest at Ramjas College. I said no. I did not know what it was about. I wish I had known then what I know now—that they were protesting against campus violence, that all they wanted was the right to conduct a seminar on ‘Cultures of Protest’. Little did I know how important peace activism and protest culture would turn out to be for me in the months to come. At the time, as a student of Lady Shri Ram College, I had only heard bits and pieces here and there, read a few social media status updates and seen a few articles. I had attended a few events in the past in the Delhi University activism circuit, so it didn’t come as a surprise that they expected me to go. I had been very vocal in college, always engaging in political conversations and debate, but that day I had a lot on my mind.

  Earlier in February, I had had a falling-out with a few friends I deeply cared about and loved. I was still nursing the wounds and dealing with the emotional drama that came along with it. All of this was during the final month of the semester, when we were supposed to submit our assignments. I loved my course, so I buried myself under reading assignments and worked to avoid thinking about my personal dilemmas. Why am I telling you about my personal problems? It’s because I want you to know that I was living an ordinary life, a teenager’s life. My head was full of gossip and clothes and trends and books and other things you might expect me to be occupied with. I don’t feel like that girl any more. Today, I think about censorship and freedom of expression; I think about liberalism and online abuse; I think about the state of our nation far more frequently than I ever did in those days.

  With my exams coming up, the Ramjas College fest was the last thing on my mind. In fact, after a rough time at our own fest that year, I wanted to run away as far as I could from the word itself. I had my own problems. Ramjas can sort out its freedom of expression issue on its own, I thought, and left to get a coffee. My best friend joined me and we sat to do our work. Every so often, we’d chatter about college gossip—who was doing what, who was standing for which post on the students’ union, whom we should vote for and if the previous union was corrupt or not. Our phones were on airplane mode because both of us knew that there was no way we could finish our work if there were Instagram and Facebook notifications begging us to glance at our phones.

  That evening, when we got back to our rooms and turned off airplane mode, our phones started buzzing with WhatsApp messages. What was going on? Why was everyone panicking? My phone was flooded with harrowing pictures of violence. These were not pictures that were being circulated by the media—who tended to blow things out of proportion anyway—but those that were being sent to us, in real time, by our own friends who were there.

  It all happened in a blur. The students—who had been peacefully protesting to condemn the campus violence involving the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP)—were roughed up. There were long messages telling us what had happened and asking if any of us could shelter the injured girls. But as is the case with most college hostels, no one could enter our hostel after a certain hour. I was told that students were lathi-charged at the protest and herded into police vans like sheep. Then they were taken to a metro station and left there.1

  I felt anger, closely followed by overwhelming helplessness. What could I have done, sitting in my hostel, honouring a curfew of 8.30 p.m.? How could I help when I could not even go out, I kept wondering. This wasn’t just breaking news on TV, these were injustices happening to my own friends. It is so easy to dismiss the bad in the world when it is playing on your TV screens like a movie. You start to think it’s all fiction but it never is. It is happening somewhere in the world, to real people, and this time it was happening to people that I knew, people that I saw in my college every day, laughing and smiling.

  How does one ignore something like this?

  I took a piece of paper—one side of which, in fact, had notes from the previous semester—and two different coloured pens. Red and black. My friend wrote down the message we had just sat together and framed. I stood with my back to the white wooden door, holding up the sheet as my friend clicked a picture. It was uploaded with a caption on my Facebook profile page.

  This is what the placard said: ‘I am a student from Delhi University. I am not afraid of ABVP. I am not alone. Every student of India is with me. #StudentsAgainstABVP.’

  So what really happened at Ramjas? The truth is, after that picture was uploaded, no one cared to find out.

  All of a sudden, I became the focus of a conversation I had not even started in the first place. No one could have predicted the events that followed. I became coloured by the narratives people imposed on me: I was the girl with the placard, but I was also the anti-national, the martyr’s daughter, the student activist.

  It was an easier conversation to have than the one that was actually at hand. It was comfortable to overlook the tamasha of rape, death threats and nationalism and focus on a college girl and her Facebook profile picture instead. They—the people who suddenly became furious with me—didn’t care about what the placard read, they cared about who held it. Students from one of the top colleges in India were pelted with stones, hurt, manhandled; women were groped, teased and sent anonymous threats; but I understand why the nation wasn’t having this conversation. It was too difficult. We would rather shut our eyes than be witnesses to this violence—it helps us sleep in peace.

  I’m not someone who always speaks up about everything. I’m guilty of it too. Even as I write this, there is so much going on in the world that I haven’t spoken about that it seems futile sometimes, just talking, saying something just for the sake of talking. But that day, after hearing about my friends being manhandled, silence did not seem like an option. I could not have walked into my college and looked my friends in the eye. I had lucked out when I said no to them that afternoon, I had escaped the violence, and now guilt was creeping up on me.

  What happened at Ramjas College? My friend, who was present there, told me her story. She doesn’t want to be named, and understandably so. Who would want to go through what I had to simply because I spoke up?

  On 21 February 2017, a literary event organized by the English department and the literary society of Ramjas College was disrupted by members of the ABVP.2 It was meant to be a series of panel discussions on ‘Cultures of Protest’, featuring speakers such as Umar Khalid and Shehla Rashid of Jawaharlal Nehru University and other prominent speakers like Sanjay Kak and Dilip Simeon.3 According to my friend, all society members reached the Ramjas campus by nine that morning. After setting up the registration desk and putting up the posters, they went to the conference hall to attend the first panel discussion. After the discussion, around 11.30 a.m., they heard from someone that ABVP members and supporters were outside the main gate and that one of them had already threatened a boy from the society. Around 12.15 p.m., almost an hour before Umar Khalid’s talk, the society members were notified that the principal had cancelled his invitation and a few professors were already in his office. This was odd since the society members had been told that the principal was okay with Khalid coming to the college for the festival. The itinerary had been out for four or five days. There had been no prior objections. Khalid was meant to speak about the Adivasis in Bastar, and several students from various colleges had come for this discussion. When the society members spoke to the college president and the ABVP intellectual cell head, they were told that as the police wouldn’t be able to offer security on campus, Umar Khalid and Shehla Rashid’s invitations had been cancelled.4

  As soon as the announcement was made, some of the visitors on the campus started hooting and sloganeering, ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai!’5 By the time all this commotion was over, the second panel discussion had ended. The organizers went to the conference room. They addressed the crowd and explained why the invitations of the two JNU students had been cancelled. Those attending the seminar decided to conduct a protest walk against the ABVP, the students’ union members and the Delhi Police. Over a hundred people started walking from the conference hall to the principal’s office, to the libra ry lawns and back to the conference hall. When they reached the canteen, they were confronted by ABVP men who began to abuse them and push them aggressively. The Delhi Police had created a wall between the disruptors and the students.6

  The police were successful in taking a few people into the conference room, but they locked them inside. The others couldn’t go inside because the conference room was now locked and they couldn’t go downstairs because the ABVP supporters had become very violent.7 Everyone was scared. The students locked inside had to break open the lock so that those who were left behind could enter.

  Once everyone was inside, they decided to resume their third panel discussion without Umar Khalid. Soon, the ABVP men downstairs started playing music and dancing at the amphitheatre. The organizers closed all the windows and continued the seminar.

  According to S. Santhoshkumar Singh, a student of Ramjas College:

  They were determined to hurt us in every possible way. They attacked us, even girls and professors, as if we were their enemies in a critical battlefield. I saw one of them charging towards us, with a half-cut log in hand, committed to hit anyone standing against them. They tore shirts and dragged and whacked anyone within their reach.

  But then, a glass window shattered.8 The mob started pelting stones at the students.9 In another five minutes, the electricity went out and they were trapped in the conference room for thirty to forty minutes. The students were told by their professors to evacuate the conference room as the police had advised them to do so, keeping their safety in mind. It wasn’t safe to stay there any more. They were escorted by the police to the back gate of the college.

  The following day, a march was organized by the All India Students’ Association (AISA) in solidarity with the Ramjas College students. A mob had blocked the main gate. The students of the college weren’t allowed to leave their own campus.10 The mob surrounded them, with only a human chain of police separating them from the mob. They were all so scared that someone suggested that the girls take off their earrings, just in case they were attacked.11

  The students decided to sit down and sing songs of love and friendship instead. Aman Bhardwaj, a student who was present and agreed to be quoted in this book, said:

  Even when we encountered violence and police apathy, we did not respond with violence. This was in part due to our fear of backlash and a further round of violence which could potentially spiral into a riot, and partly due to our own non-violent ethos. Instead we sang songs using our creativity and imagination. For example, slogans like ‘Desh ke gaddaron ko, joote maaro saalon ko’ were countered by songs meant to caricature their seriousness, like ‘Tareef karun kya uski, jisne tumhe banaya’.

  Around 1.20 p.m., the police escorted them towards the back gate. At this point, the crowd managed to push through the police protection and attack the students.12

  While some of the students were trying to speak to the policemen in the front, the attacks continued at the back.13 According to my friend:

  A student was hit. One of them was continuously targeted. He was dragged from the side and severely beaten. At the back, another student was attacked. When I saw him, his nose was bleeding and his hands were covered in his own blood. All of these attacks were happening simultaneously—in the presence of the police. Students were crying. I don’t remember feeling so unsafe and threatened in my life.

  Some of the girls stood up and made a human wall around the students to protect them from the mob. Another student was threatened because she was taking a video of the mob misbehaving with the professors. Around 4.30 p.m., the police escorted the students to the police buses and dropped them off at the Civil Lines metro station. My friend and other protesters received several threats later in the evening, stating they were going to be witch-hunted. They all had to leave the campus and stay with friends for a few days.

  This was the information I had. This was what was told to me. This was what was not being talked about on prime-time TV shows. Those shows spoke about ideologies and nationalism and everything other than the injured students. These were eighteen-year-old first-year undergraduate students who had come to college for an education, to find themselves and their ideologies. All their lives they had studied hard to get here. Who knows how many battles they had to fight? Some may have had economic problems, some may have had to fight their families to be in Delhi. Everyone who had come to that college had waged their own tiny battles and this is what happened to them. How is it correct? How can we justify this in the name of nationalism, or hell, in the name of anything? What is nationalism? Beating eighteen-year-old students of a top college to pulp because they didn’t adhere to the ideology you wanted to impose on them?

  Later, I asked Shehla Rashid about this incident and she wrote to me:

  When the Ramjas incident first started to unfold, all of us thought of it as yet another incident of hooliganism by the ABVP, a routine occurrence in DU and in many other campuses. The ABVP, which lacks any academic or intellectual acumen, is an organization known for routine vandalism. They have not spared even aged professors, such as Prof. Chaman Lal, or female activists, such as Kawalpreet Kaur, who have been subjected to violence simply for holding discussion programmes in DU. So, Ramjas, in that sense, was nothing new. However, what really made it a huge issue was the brave resistance put up by DU students, at the cost of their lives and careers. The ABVP had earlier brutally attacked the smaller march against the cancellation of the conference in which we were supposed to participate. However, on the day that the massive march across DU took place, they were around but did not dare attack. The takeaway from the incident, therefore, is that we should not be afraid of these cowardly tactics, and stand together instead. This is the model of resistance that we need to replicate across the country in order to save India from the fascist regime.

  She went on to say, in the same email:

  The Ramjas incident was not one about slogans, let’s get that straight. There were no slogans raised. The issue was one of ABVP violence. They are known to attack public programmes, discussions and debates. Now, after six months, newspapers seem to vindicate us by saying that no slogans were raised. But we already know that; that was never the issue. The issue was one of ABVP violence. Mahamedha Nagar’s name was allowed to slip out of the police report despite numerous testimonies and video evidence of her violence. This is because she had to contest the DUSU elections. It is a shame that such a violent vandal who nearly lynched many of us that day, along with her group of fanatics, is holding office in DUSU today. I was with her on an India Today Conclave show where she stood exposed for having zero knowledge of any student issues. Such hooligans who are ABVP leaders cannot tell the CSAT issue apart from the non-NET fellowship, but they are found standing on the frontlines when violence has to be unleashed. A similar violent vigilante in college was ABVP leader Pragya Thakur (Sadhvi Pragya) who is a terror accused undertrial today for her alleged role in blast cases! This mindless fanaticism of the ABVP breeds can have, or has had, disastrous consequences for the country. The way I was dragged and was about to be lynched that day, I thought I would be killed. All this happened in full presence of the Delhi Police. They silently watched as journalists, students and bystanders were dragged by their hair, attacked with bricks and stones. Some women students had their earrings pulled, were punched in the face and abused by male and female activists of the ABVP. It was like doomsday. That day, we witnessed what the structure of a riot is, replicated in New Delhi! If only the police were to act, the ABVP mobs could have been controlled. This is precisely what happens in a riot.

  I have often wondered ever since if I could go back and do it all over again. Knowing the consequences, would I? And every time, in about a heartbeat, I say yes. All my life I wanted to be strong and just like my father I wanted to serve the country—the people of the country—and what I did was a part of that. It was my duty as a citizen, as a student and as a friend to resist.

 

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