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CITIZENSHIP
“My parents are fearful of my future now. We are not
even safe inside the walls of a central university, how
will we feel secure outside the campus,” says another
student of JMI.
One important point to note here is that the stu-
dents caught in the crackdown were not in the central
library to protest but to prepare for their upcoming
examinations. The students are left with no means to
prove their innocence as the university has alleged
that the CCTV footages available with them have been
destroyed by Delhi police and CRPF.
“The police started chasing the protesters and force- chance that visibility of his right eye will improve.
fully entered into the campus which is around 1.5 kms
distance from the main road. The police broke the
door and windows of central library, washrooms and
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barged into the hostels of men and women in search
of the students. They were beaten mercilessly, pulled
out by their hair, one student was even hit on his eye.
He was lying unconscious in the bathroom,” recalls a
second year engineering student.
One of the viral videos from the Jamia incident is of
a student lying unconscious while bleeding from his
head in the hostel bathroom. The student is Minahjud-
din (26), a final year LLM student, who was hit in the
right eye by the police force. The doctors at Rajendra
Prasad Eye Institute has said that there is a very less
INVESTIGATION SO FAR
Activist Harsh Mander and advocate Choudhary
Ali Zia Kabir meet the students detained at Kalkaji
police station on the same night. In a statement
released by them, Mander and Ali quoted students
as saying, “Students reported that the campus was
“storned” by the CRPF, it was not the case that they
were protesting on the roads outside the campus.
They repeatedly impressed upon us that the entire
CCTV footage of the whole campus including library
be seized as evidence of their innocence.”
In a shocking revelation, reports of sexual assault
has also come to the fore but the matter is being
investigated. In the same statement, the duo has quot-
ed students of revealing details on sexual abuses by
the police force on women students.
“Some of them stated that female students were
beaten up and even sexually harassed by the male
police officers. To save themselves, they tried locking
themselves into female washrooms but in vain,” reads
the statement.
It further says, “Another tactic employed by the
forces was to switch off the lights before they started
assaulting students and sexually abusing girl students.
Wherever lights were switched off sexual abuse was
shocking. Lights were switched off to prevent any
recording in the CCTV cameras, but we are confident
that some cameras would still have recorded sexual
abuse.”
Tehelka spoke with a member of fact-finding team
from Jamia who is also looking into the matter of
sexual assaults by Delhi police. “We are trying to verify
the matter of sexual assaults and what happened that
night when police raided the women hostel. Since
many CCTV cameras have been damaged by the police
force, we, the students of Jamia, have formed a data
collecting team to gather every evidence and informa-
tion related to the violence occurred on 15 December.
Vani Xaxa, a PhD student along with two former
students of Jamia Millia Islamia — Syed Mujtaba
Akhtar and M. Mobashshir Sarwar — has filed a plea
seeking independent judicial inquiry by a retired