Small Acts of Freedom

113 Pages·2018·0.51 MB·English

by  Gurmehar Kaur

GURMEHAR KAUR

small acts of freedom
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
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Epilogue
Footnote
Introduction
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
SMALL ACTS OF FREEDOM
Gurmehar Kaur is an Indian student activist and the ambassador for Postcards
for Peace, a charitable organization that works towards eliminating
discrimination. She is also the co-founder of Citizens for Public Leadership, an
independent and non-partisan movement focused on advocating progressive
public policy in India. In October 2017, she was listed by TIME magazine as a
global ‘Next Generation Leader’. Small Acts of Freedom is her first book.
To the memory of my father,
and to my mother for keeping his memories alive
Introduction
In February 2017, a few friends asked me if I wanted to join them for a protest at
Ramjas College. I said no. I did not know what it was about. I wish I had known
then what I know now—that they were protesting against campus violence, that
all they wanted was the right to conduct a seminar on ‘Cultures of Protest’. Little
did I know how important peace activism and protest culture would turn out to
be for me in the months to come. At the time, as a student of Lady Shri Ram
College, I had only heard bits and pieces here and there, read a few social media
status updates and seen a few articles. I had attended a few events in the past in
the Delhi University activism circuit, so it didn’t come as a surprise that they
expected me to go. I had been very vocal in college, always engaging in political
conversations and debate, but that day I had a lot on my mind.
Earlier in February, I had had a falling-out with a few friends I deeply cared
about and loved. I was still nursing the wounds and dealing with the emotional
drama that came along with it. All of this was during the final month of the
semester, when we were supposed to submit our assignments. I loved my course,
so I buried myself under reading assignments and worked to avoid thinking
about my personal dilemmas. Why am I telling you about my personal
problems? It’s because I want you to know that I was living an ordinary life, a
teenager’s life. My head was full of gossip and clothes and trends and books and
other things you might expect me to be occupied with. I don’t feel like that girl
any more. Today, I think about censorship and freedom of expression; I think
about liberalism and online abuse; I think about the state of our nation far more
frequently than I ever did in those days.
With my exams coming up, the Ramjas College fest was the last thing on my
mind. In fact, after a rough time at our own fest that year, I wanted to run away
as far as I could from the word itself. I had my own problems. Ramjas can sort
out its freedom of expression issue on its own, I thought, and left to get a coffee.
My best friend joined me and we sat to do our work. Every so often, we’d
chatter about college gossip—who was doing what, who was standing for which
post on the students’ union, whom we should vote for and if the previous union
post on the students’ union, whom we should vote for and if the previous union
was corrupt or not. Our phones were on airplane mode because both of us knew
that there was no way we could finish our work if there were Instagram and
Facebook notifications begging us to glance at our phones.
That evening, when we got back to our rooms and turned off airplane mode,
our phones started buzzing with WhatsApp messages. What was going on? Why
was everyone panicking? My phone was flooded with harrowing pictures of
violence. These were not pictures that were being circulated by the media—who
tended to blow things out of proportion anyway—but those that were being sent
to us, in real time, by our own friends who were there.
It all happened in a blur. The students—who had been peacefully protesting to
condemn the campus violence involving the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad
(ABVP)—were roughed up. There were long messages telling us what had
happened and asking if any of us could shelter the injured girls. But as is the
case with most college hostels, no one could enter our hostel after a certain hour.
I was told that students were lathi-charged at the protest and herded into police
vans like sheep. Then they were taken to a metro station and left there.1
I felt anger, closely followed by overwhelming helplessness. What could I
have done, sitting in my hostel, honouring a curfew of 8.30 p.m.? How could I
help when I could not even go out, I kept wondering. This wasn’t just breaking
news on TV, these were injustices happening to my own friends. It is so easy to
dismiss the bad in the world when it is playing on your TV screens like a movie.
You start to think it’s all fiction but it never is. It is happening somewhere in the
world, to real people, and this time it was happening to people that I knew,
people that I saw in my college every day, laughing and smiling.
How does one ignore something like this?
I took a piece of paper—one side of which, in fact, had notes from the
previous semester—and two different coloured pens. Red and black. My friend
wrote down the message we had just sat together and framed. I stood with my
back to the white wooden door, holding up the sheet as my friend clicked a
picture. It was uploaded with a caption on my Facebook profile page.
This is what the placard said: ‘I am a student from Delhi University. I am not
afraid of ABVP. I am not alone. Every student of India is with me.
#StudentsAgainstABVP.’
So what really happened at Ramjas? The truth is, after that picture was
So what really happened at Ramjas? The truth is, after that picture was
uploaded, no one cared to find out.
All of a sudden, I became the focus of a conversation I had not even started in
the first place. No one could have predicted the events that followed. I became
coloured by the narratives people imposed on me: I was the girl with the placard,
but I was also the anti-national, the martyr’s daughter, the student activist.
It was an easier conversation to have than the one that was actually at hand. It
was comfortable to overlook the tamasha of rape, death threats and nationalism
and focus on a college girl and her Facebook profile picture instead. They—the
people who suddenly became furious with me—didn’t care about what the
placard read, they cared about who held it. Students from one of the top colleges
in India were pelted with stones, hurt, manhandled; women were groped, teased
and sent anonymous threats; but I understand why the nation wasn’t having this
conversation. It was too difficult. We would rather shut our eyes than be
witnesses to this violence—it helps us sleep in peace.
I’m not someone who always speaks up about everything. I’m guilty of it too.
Even as I write this, there is so much going on in the world that I haven’t spoken
about that it seems futile sometimes, just talking, saying something just for the
sake of talking. But that day, after hearing about my friends being manhandled,
silence did not seem like an option. I could not have walked into my college and
looked my friends in the eye. I had lucked out when I said no to them that
afternoon, I had escaped the violence, and now guilt was creeping up on me.
What happened at Ramjas College? My friend, who was present there, told me
her story. She doesn’t want to be named, and understandably so. Who would
want to go through what I had to simply because I spoke up?
On 21 February 2017, a literary event organized by the English department
and the literary society of Ramjas College was disrupted by members of the
ABVP.2 It was meant to be a series of panel discussions on ‘Cultures of Protest’,
featuring speakers such as Umar Khalid and Shehla Rashid of Jawaharlal Nehru
University and other prominent speakers like Sanjay Kak and Dilip Simeon.3
According to my friend, all society members reached the Ramjas campus by
nine that morning. After setting up the registration desk and putting up the
posters, they went to the conference hall to attend the first panel discussion.