NEW DELHI: “He is innocent and hasn’t done any wrong. He was only against the wrongs happening around him,” said Farzana Yasmeen of her brother, Meeran Haider, a PhD scholar of Jamia Millia Islamia who is in jail for involvement in the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens.
Speaking at an event to mark two years of the violence at Jamia, Yasmeen, however, was optimistic her brother would get “justice”.
At the event at Press Club of India on Wednesday, organised by ‘concerned citizens and students of Delhi’, activists recalled the night of December 15, 2019, when police entered the Jamia campus to quell a student protest against CAA and NRC. In the violence, several students were injured. Even as riots broke out in northeast Delhi, the protest continued, only to be called off with the Covid outbreak. Many of the student activists were arrested. Some are out on bail, some still in jail, Haider among the latter.
Haider was charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. His sister said, “It is part of the constitutional right to fight wrong or injustice. My brother was doing just that.”
With Yasmeen was Saima Khan, daughter of Salim Khan, another person charged under UAPA in a rioting case. Khan said, “During the three months of the lockdown, we didn’t know where my father was. He is not a terrorist, just a simple man running a shop.”
Akhtarista Ansari, a student activist involved in the CAA protest, recalled the night when the police ran riot in a masjid, reading rooms and libraries at Jamia. “That was the day when students were treated as criminals. But it was the cops who behaved like terrorists. Today, it is important to remember all our friends who are still in jail. Our fight will not stop until they are freed,” said Ansari.
Anugya Jha, 4th year law student, said, “That day, I realised what it means to be a student of a minority institution. That day is not just for us to remember, but for everybody, never to be forgotten.”
Writer Arundhati Roy, the chief guest, hit out at the government. “The state wants to decide whether you can be called a citizen. It was in Hitler’s Nazi regime in 1925 that a similar thing was done,” Roy said. “The poor people, Dalits, Adivasis and women don’t often have documents, so, CAA/NRC is a move by a fascist government to cut the ground from under the feet of citizens.”
Some members of Jamia’s fact-finding committee questioned why till date no case had been registered against the cops and paramilitary personnel.
