Why is it so?

Because of the assurances the government gave. They are not honouring those. That is why I had to go to Patna. Comrades were arrested.

Q What did you see in Bihar?

First, we went to Beur jail, where the majority of arrested students were. We got to know that the students who were detained on July 24 were kept in police custody for 24 hours. They were not given food, not provided with washroom facilities for the longest time. That very night more people were brought to Beur jail. These students had been badly beaten up by Bihar police. In Siwan, there was a case of alleged AK-47 firing at protestors. In fact, they have now accepted that an AK-47 was fired. We met two of the students who were shot at. One of them can't move his hand or flex his fingers even. The other one had a bullet go through his leg. He is not able to walk. He needs to have two more surgeries before he can walk again. We met the DGP. He showed us some orders given to the police under which some 600 students had been arrested from all over Bihar.

Q Your protest speeches became viral. Powerful political speeches, exhortations are rare things.

I think it has probably something to do with the fact that I used to do theatre. I am still a theatre student. And of course, we are Left activists. So there are resources, based on which you become an activist and then convince people of what you say, what you speak. You meet new people with the same questions. You learn to hear what the people are actually asking, what the questions behind those questions are.

Q Can you elaborate on that?

Almost everybody is asking whether the protests got over too early. But what they are actually asking is whether the students who have been arrested across different states will be abandoned or not. It's true that Muslim students are specifically being targeted. All of these questions are not attacks on us. They're just enquiries. There are just people who want to hear from you that all lives are important. The release of all students is important.

Q You are part of a movement that is possibly not going to go down in history as a Leftist political movement. But you and your comrades were a big part of it.

I don't think our party principles were against our participation in the CJP movement. There was very strong encouragement that we participate in this protest. AISA was one of the first student organisations to realise that perhaps the call of the CJP was not just something happening on social media. We realised there are vibrations on ground, from where it's going to become something more. The numbers were disproportionately bigger than what we were expecting, yes. But none of us was surprised that so many people were angry, so many people were disillusioned by the same modus operandi that the government is using. It is the fact that the government has nothing to say to young protestors except to call them terrorists and viruses.

Q What does it mean to be young and protesting in these times, with so much surveillance?

If extreme surveillance is what we have, if extreme repression is what we have, if notifications from offices and universities asking people not to be a part of these protests is what we have, then one has to brave all these and still be a part of these protests, right? Marx has said, man makes revolution, but not always in the conditions of his choosing.

Q But how does one fight that?

I am from JNU, which put out a circular. Many of the student protestors were from DU and DU too put out a circular. But the choice is ours. We, students, looked at those circulars and we were appalled that our universities were trying to be so controlling towards adults. When there is a generation which you have beaten to pulp, a generation on which you have fired pellet guns, and have done everything in your power to break their spirit, one notification from a university will hardly be the last straw after which they'll return home. If we don't fight for our future now, there won't be any future.

Q Why couldn't India come together for Umar Khalid like this?

Many people did come together. But when Umar Khalid was being labelled anti-national, when television trials were happening against him and other students, people clapped. Even Opposition parties and sections of civil society who should have come forward didn't. They thought of that issue as untouchable. They let such issues become untouchable. Calling somebody anti-national has been normalised. It becomes normal to call Umar Khalid a terrorist, and it becomes normal for him to be in jail, and then it becomes abnormal to ask for his release. It becomes, in fact, anti-national to ask for his release. So it is good that these protests made calling protesters
anti-national or Pakistani unfashionable. It made the government unpopular for calling them that.