By the time the boys reached Jamia by train late on the afternoon of December 15, 2019, they noticed that the road outside the university was nearly deserted. The police had removed the barricades outside. Something had occurred there, one of them thought, noticing debris on the street, the smoke in various places, and the injuries on the homeless man who usually slept below the metro station. He walked on with his friends, and at some point, he saw armed forces in a crouch. “Do you know the movie 300? It was like that,” he said. He remembered the way they clustered around each other in a defensive position. Further on, he saw the students. He thought there were eight or nine thousand students marching down the long road outside the university. They kept walking and chanting until they encountered new barricades and riot police, who appeared behind them. It was there, where the road had narrowed, that the police let them have it from two sides.
Those at the front of the protest received a beating and turned back. The rear continued to press forward, unaware of the barricades and the assault. The footage from the protest was shaky. Broken and fragmented calls for help were posted on every platform. The ferocity of the violence surprised the students. “I don’t know what changed,” a student told me, trying to understand the police reaction. “Nothing about the protests had changed.”
A soft-spoken student named Minhajuddin was in the section for postgraduates in the Ibn Sina block, an old library in Jamia, that evening. He had heard about the violence outside but kept working. It had nothing to do with him. He did not do politics. The room was usually full, but there was plenty of room due to the protests. At around six-thirty in the evening, he heard a commotion downstairs from inside the building. Windows were being shattered, and students were screaming. The students told each other that the police had entered the building. They bolted the library door and hid in corners, covering their faces. “Fifteen or twenty” police in riot gear broke in anyway, he said. He couldn’t tell who they were, except that they wore “army colours, helmets, pads, and carried plastic sticks”. None of them wore a badge. “They began to beat the students. The rest you have seen on that viral clip – how they entered, and how they started beating us.”
Everybody saw it. The police lined them up against a wall, and the women were made to leave the room. Then they crowded the men and went at them with batons and rods. Beatings happened at the back, at the front, in the middle. A dazed student wandered about holding his head, and received another blow to the skull. Under attack, the students shielded their heads and left. One of the men noticed the camera, and hit it a few times. Shortly after, the video ended.
When I mentioned the clip to Minhajuddin, he told me the clip I had seen was less violent. On the first floor where he was, students were not allowed to leave the room.
Squeezed in the crowd, Minhajuddin made for the exit. One by one, as the students left, the police struck them on their hands and legs with their weapons. As Minhajuddin went by, he felt a whip and a burning pain across his left cheek that almost made him faint. Although he did not know it then, his eye was rendered useless by the attack. It may have been his beard, he said later, that got the police’s attention. He wore it long then. He staggered to a toilet and slumped there, dabbing his face with a white kerchief, unaware of the damage, while around him more students took shelter beside the commodes and between the urinals. College guards in blue uniforms joined them there, equally frightened. But the police were everywhere, and they soon arrived in the bathroom to beat them all, whether they were on the floor or in the stalls. Minhajuddin remembered seeing the face of a policeman who entered the toilet with the mind to beat anyone he found. The man saw his eye and left the toilet.
That night Minhajuddin travelled across Delhi looking first for an ambulance and then for a hospital with an eye surgeon. He eventually reached the country’s largest hospital, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, which ran a series of tests for hours before telling him that nothing could be done about his sight. He walked over to a police outpost to file a complaint. They transferred him to a nearby station, and asked him to wait on a wooden bench. The station was filling up with other students. “They wanted to frame the injured students by calling them protestors and detaining them. They wanted to put me in the same category and frame me too, but they couldn’t. I had called them on my own.” The police let him go eventually after writing down his complaint, but they refused to write a First Information Report, an official acknowledgement of a witness account. Without an FIR, there would be nothing to investigate. He took the police to court, but found them armed with a doctor’s opinion that his eye had been struck by a stone. The doctor’s opinion was based on documents submitted by the police. “It always happens that the police get favourable reports. The doctors are theirs. Influence works.” When his father arrived from Bihar, he begged Minhajuddin to return. “What are you going to do here now?” he said, wanting nothing more than safety. “Leave it all and come home.”
“They wanted to teach us a lesson,” Minhajuddin said to me nearly two years after the incident. He was still a postgrad, but had left the student residence and now lived with his sister on the third floor of a cramped apartment block for university staff. When I met him there and asked about his injury, he put on slippers and took me downstairs to a small park. We sat on a scuffed bench below a street lamp. His sister, who was at home, became anxious when reporters asked questions, he said. “They just kept beating us so that we would never protest again.” He could no longer cross the road without help. His beard was now cut close to his skin, more a statement of style than faith. He was unsure if anything would come of his complaint. “The police has to investigate itself. How will this happen?” he wondered, rocking on the wooden bench, staring into the darkness.
Excerpted with permission from The Identity Project: The Unmaking of a Democracy, Rahul Bhatia, Westland/Context.
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