Students of Azim Premji University (APU) organized a candlelight vigil on Monday 11 October 2021, in support of a call given out by the Free Gulfisha Campaign to feminists, students and other democratic organizations all over the country to organize solidarity events to mark 18 months of her unjust incarceration under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) and demand her immediate release.
Gulfisha Fatima is a young Muslim woman, a political activist as well as a community educator and leader from Seelampur in Northeast Delhi, and a key organizer of the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the National Register of Citizens (NRC), the National Population Register (NPR). After the Delhi pogrom of February 2020, she was arrested and accused of being involved in planning the ‘riot’. Charged under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), she has been in prison since April 2019.
Students called for the release of all political prisoners incarcerated under UAPA, sedition and other repressive laws especially in the aftermath of the protests against the CAA-NRC-NPR. Around one hundred and fifty students attended the candlelight vigil, and it was followed by a protest meeting where students raised slogans, spoke in solidarity with Gulfisha and other political prisoners, and performed poetry and songs. A few faculty members also spoke in solidarity and demanded the immediate release of Gulfisha and all other political prisoners including Sharjeel Imam, Meeran Haider, Khalid Saifi, and Umar Khalid.
One faculty member recited Habib Jalib’s poem Dastoor and drew attention to the plight of the Bhima Koregaon prisoners alongside that of the anti-CAA-NRC protestors. A senior professor said that remaining silent is no longer an option. Emphasizing the unconstitutional nature of UAPA, he encouraged students to raise their voices against it. Akash Bhattacharya, who teaches at the School of Education, said that he stands with Gulfisha not from a position of sympathy but out of solidarity because he believes in the causes that Gulfisha has been fighting for rejection of CAA, NRC, and NPR, and now the repeal of UAPA and the release of all political prisoners. It is a fight to rebuild a secular and democratic India, he said and emphasized the importance of claiming universities, alongside other institutions, as spaces for this struggle.
The students, in their speeches, emphasized the power of students and their responsibility to speak up as they are the future of the nation. They condemned the targeted crackdown on Muslims and women activists in Delhi, who was at the forefront of the peaceful protests against the unconstitutional CAA-NRC-NPR. They demanded unconditional and immediate release of all political prisoners, withdrawal of false cases, end to harassment of political activists and the scrapping of draconian repressive laws which have been used by the ruling regime to undemocratically target voices of dissent.
The event marks a continuation of the consistent stand taken by a section of students and faculty of APU against the CAA-NRC-NPR, the Delhi pogrom and ensuing state repression in Delhi.
These students and faculty have, over the last two years, organized solidarity programs for the political prisoners of Delhi, and connected the developments in Delhi with the overall context of state repression on Muslims, Dalit Bahujan and Adivasis, and on all dissenting voices, by an ascendant Hindu nationalism led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The vigil at APU ended with the resolve to strongly preserve the culture of student dissent and to not allow the state repression on Jamia Milia Islamia, Aligarh Muslim University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and other public education institutions to destroy India’s rich tradition of democratic student politics.
