Dear Students,
Its been five days, that we have been fighting against this fascist regime and the local district administration after they slapped false and fabricated sedition charges on 14 students of AMU including me.
I was not present in the campus the day when the media manufactured this controversy by sending its reporters in the university campus without taking the permission of PRO. Their reporters used derogatory remarks against our university and it’s students, and even went to the extent of calling AMU the “university of terrorists.” The resistance posed by AMU students culminated in the media taking help from the right-wing goons and local BJP workers, who later intruded in the university campus and fired arms. Thereby, disrupting the academic environment of the university.
On the morning of February 15, 2019, when I was returning from Delhi to Aligarh to attend the Friday prayer at the university campus and join the ongoing protest, the police detained me along with Fahad Ahmad (former GS – TISS) for about an hour. When we inquired about the reason for detention, the police replied by saying that they have received orders from their higher authorities to detain us without any reason.
A similar incident happened when AMUSU Vice-President Hamza Sufiyan was detained, while he was going to attend a press conference in Delhi. This shows the level which the present government can stoop down to, in order to curb the dissent of students in several universities.
We have seen in the past that Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) was dragged into a similar controversy. Now, this is the tried and tested formula of this government to use the universities as a political tool by branding them anti-national on the basis of fake videos, or even without any proof by collaborating with biased tv channels. The pattern remains the same every time, it’s just one university or the other.
The universities that they target are the ones in which they are not able to spew the venom of their extreme ideologies. Like last year, at the time of Karnataka election and Kairana bypolls, they fabricated a controversy out of the Jinnah portrait, which has been hanging in the university’s student union hall for the last 80 years, as part of historical facts.
This time their prime agenda is to launch the Lok Sabha election campaign by giving a communal color to the politics, and polarising the votes in their favor across India. AMU being the university of minorities, though not exclusively, fits best into their agenda of the Hindutva politics.
The slapping of sedition charges on the students without an iota of proof itself shows that the country is going through an Emergency like situation, where anyone can be detained anytime and branded as an anti-national for opposing fascist forces.
In this hour of crisis, we feel proud of our institution, whose alumni fought for India’s struggle for independence and served Mother India. AMU is considered as the embodiment of secularism in the whole wide world because of its unique history of being founded by a Muslim Scholar Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, whose first graduate student was a Hindu, whose foundation stone was laid by a Christian and whose first chancellor was a woman.
The majestic history of our beloved institution inspires us to fight with our every bit against every injustice and evil meted out by this authoritarian government. We should continue our struggle, and let our campus not be used as the launchpad for any political party’s election campaign.
I request my fellow students to keep the protest non-violent for which we are known, until the justice is delivered, by following the path of our beloved father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi. The right-wing groups affiliated to the ruling party, unfortunately not only celebrate his assassination on January 30 every year but also brazenly mock his ideologies.
Jai Hind!
“Jo abr yahan se uthega, woh saare jahan par barsega”
(The cloud that forms here, will shower across the world)
Thank you.
Masoor Ahmad Usmani
President, AMUSU 2017-18
Featured image source: Haris H Khan/Wikimedia Commons.
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