By Joanna Slater Feb. 16, 2020 Washington Post
ALIGARH, India — Inside Room 46 of the Morison Court dormitory, the university students huddled in the dark, too afraid to speak.
Police in riot gear pounded on the door. The next sound was glass shattering, then came the thunk and hiss of tear gas. Something exploded once, then twice, with a deafening noise. The smoke grew suffocating.
Shahid Hussein, a graduate student in history at Aligarh Muslim University, opened the door. The first blow hit him on the left shoulder. The police kept hitting him as they dragged him toward a tree outside, he said. There, two officers held his arms behind his back around the trunk, while others beat his legs with a wooden stick.
“It was not simply stopping protests,” said Hussein, 24. “They were taking revenge.”
The violence that unfolded in December at a predominantly Muslim university in northern India, little documented until now, was a key turning point in the most significant unrest to grip the country in years. It signaled the start of a broad crackdown by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in response to protests over a new citizenship law that critics say is discriminatory and unconstitutional.AD
In places where Modi’s party holds sway, authorities imposed temporary bans on public gatherings, shut off Internet service and arrested thousands. Police have even questioned schoolchildren who performed a play critical of the citizenship law.
In December, nearly 20 people were killed in India’s largest state during protests over the law, nearly all of them Muslims. Police detained minors, ransacked houses and beat unarmed people in their homes.
The response to the protests has deepened fears that under Modi, Muslims are becoming second-class citizens in the world’s largest democracy.
At Aligarh Muslim University, a century-old institution that is a four-hour drive from Delhi, hundreds of police entered the sprawling campus, firing tear gas canisters, rubber bullets and stun grenades, according to police documents and witnesses. Dozens of students were injured and several hospitalized: A doctoral candidate had most of his right hand blown off.AD
Such incidents are rare in India. “I don’t remember in my time — in British or free India — the police ever having entered the way they are entering now on campuses,” said Irfan Habib, 88, a distinguished historian who has spent most of his life teaching at AMU. The message is that “civil liberty is not yours,” Habib said, and that police “will decide who can protest and who can’t.”
The Post spoke to more than a dozen witnesses, as well as doctors, university officials and lawyers, and reviewed police documents, photos, videos and footage from closed-circuit cameras of the incident.
A senior police official in Aligarh said that inquiries are underway into allegations of excessive use of force but that the response by law enforcement was appropriate. Students broke part of the university’s main gate and threw stones at police, he said.AD
They “got excessively motivated and wanted to create a ruckus,” said Preetinder Singh, the deputy inspector general of police for the Aligarh region. “We had to control the situation, and we controlled the situation.”
A campus in ferment
Inside the arched main gate of AMU, the clamor of the surrounding city fades. There are long avenues framed by trees and 19th-century red-stone quadrangles, one anchored by a graceful mosque with three white domes.
The institution now known as AMU traces its roots back to 1877. It was founded to educate India’s Muslims, who make up about 14 percent of the country’s more than 1.3 billion people. By virtue of its history, AMU occupies a unique place in the debate over India’s identity.
Aligarh’s students “will determine the place of Muslims in India’s national life,” one of its leaders, Zakir Hussain, once told alumni. What’s more, he continued, “the way India conducts itself toward Aligarh will determine largely . . . the form which our national life will acquire.”AD
In the days surrounding the passage of the citizenship law on Dec. 11, AMU was a campus in ferment. Students alternated between preparing for exams and holding demonstrations; on Dec. 13, thousands of students marched against the legislation.
To opponents of the law, the measure is a sign that Modi is moving the country away from its secular roots and toward the creation of a Hindu nation. The law established a fast-track to citizenship for certain migrants who belong to six religions, excluding Islam.
Amit Shah, the powerful home affairs minister, has said the next step will be to require all residents to prove their citizenship as a way to weed out “infiltrators.” (The government recently told Parliament that “till now” it has not made a decision on carrying out the exercise, known as the National Register of Citizens.)AD
On the morning of Dec. 15, Tazeem Khan, 22, a slight third-year student with spiky hair, woke up early to prepare for a literature exam. After lunch, he met with fellow editors of a campus magazine. Khan didn’t know that within hours, he would be pleading for his life. ‘We’re going to die’: Listen to Tazeem Khan’s WhatsApp voice recordings On Dec. 15, 2019, Tazeem Khan, a student at Alighar Muslim University, sent a series of WhatsApp voice recordings to his brother while hiding from police. (Ayush Tiwari/Newslaundry)
Late in the afternoon, disturbing news began to spread around campus: Police had entered Jamia Millia Islamia, a university in Delhi, where they beat unarmed students and fired tear gas into a library.
Soon there was what sounded like worse news: At least one student at Jamia had died, it was said. The rumor, which later turned out to be false, ricocheted around the AMU campus. Outraged students poured out of dorms and moved toward the main gate after 8 p.m.
The gate was locked by an iron fence, and students swung it wildly back and forth until a portion broke, allowing them to walk through. About 100 yards down the road was a police barricade.AD
Almost immediately, three witnesses said, police began firing tear gas canisters. Some students responded by hurling pieces of brickin the direction of the police. Within half an hour, hundreds of officers, including members of a statewide riot control unit, had arrived.
As police entered the campus, firing tear gas and stun grenades, Khan ran into a large university guesthouse. He hid in a bathroom with several other students. He heard officers beating students beyond the door. “Send help,” he said in a call to a friend at 9:41 p.m., according to an audio recording. “We’re all trapped here and we’re going to die.”
Police later broke down the door and began beating students with sticks and rifle butts, Khan said. He was thrown into a police van. Two fingers on his right hand were broken and his left arm was fractured. He said officers taunted him, calling him “anti-national,” and asking, “Why don’t you go to Pakistan?”AD
Mohammed Rehan, a 22-year-old education major, was walking toward the library between 10 and 11 p.m. when he saw riot-control officers firing tear gas at students. Rehan said one officer pinned him down while others beat him with sticks and rifle butts.
He was dragged to a van where another student was being detained. Rehan said they were repeatedly beaten, called traitors and terrorists and forced to recite Hindu nationalist slogans. The officers hit him so hard his head began bleeding, Rehan said, and also burned his right hand. “I was extremely scared that night,” he said. “I thought I would be killed.”
Mohammed Tariq, a doctoral student in physical chemistry, was on his way to the Morison Court dorm when he saw students running in the opposite direction. The last thing he remembers is slipping and falling to the ground.AD
He woke up in the hospital, his right hand nearly blown off, possibly by an exploding stun grenade. He has been keeping his wound hidden under a thick red blanket and hasn’t told his widowed mother about the extent of his injury.
Official expresses regret
The detained students were released the following day. A police report later accused several injured students of crimes, including intent to murder. It blamed their injuries on “stone pelting by their fellows.”
The day after the incident, the university ordered all 28,000 students to go home, starting a chaotic exodus. Tariq Mansoor, AMU’s embattled vice chancellor, said the administration had asked the police to restore “public order” but expressed regret about the injured students. “We never anticipated they would enter [dormitories] and use excessive force,” Mansoor said.
Police say more than a dozen security personnel were also injured. Only nonlethal weapons were used to quell the unrest, said Singh, the senior police official in Aligarh, adding that outsiders had mingled with the students and police worried that university property would be vandalized.
The crackdowns at AMU and Jamia galvanized protests across the nation. Demonstrations spread across Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, home to 200 million people. A group of women in Delhi occupied a large road in protest and have remained there. Hundreds of thousands of people took part in peaceful marches in Hyderabad, Mumbai and Chennai.
On a recent afternoon in Aligarh, students sat outside at metal tables drinking tea at a canteen behind the library. Hussein, the master’s degree student, was preparing for an exam that had been postponed because of the violence. His opposition to the citizenship measure was undimmed.
“Being a student of history,” he said, “you can smell the consequences.”
Tania Dutta contributed to this report.
‘Why do I fear to go out in my own country?’ In Modi’s India, rising unease among Muslims
Protests erupt across India over new citizenship law after police storm university campus
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news323 CommentsHomeShare323Joanna SlaterJoanna Slater is the India bureau chief for The Washington Post. Prior to joining The Post, she was a foreign correspondent for the Globe & Mail in the United States and Europe and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Her previous postings include assignments in Mumbai, Hong Kong and Berlin. Follow
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