It was the year 2000. A freshly arrived Bihari student in South Delhi, studying at Jamia Millia Islamia, was often teased for his accent. The teasing was always presented as harmless fun, the way it usually is, subtle enough to be dismissed as “just a joke.”
I took it personally. I worked hard to overcome the language barrier. I had studied in a Hindi-medium Bihar Board school, and the NCERT textbooks written in English felt like a mountain to climb for a student who had only recently completed matriculation.
I still remember those long nights of relentless memorisation. Long before Bollywood popularised the phrase, “Jab tak todenge nahi, tab tak chhodenge nahi,” I was living it. Persistence became my only strategy.
That year, the effort paid off. I topped my class and became the school topper in Class 11. What I did not know was that I was about to witness a completely different reality.
The year 2000 began with renewed confidence and fresh commitments. Class 12 was going to be crucial. My parents were happy with my performance, and after some convincing, my father agreed to send me money for a bicycle so that I could travel to school more easily.
In a small way, I was enjoying the limelight. Being a topper came with a certain status, and I was proud of what I had achieved.
That was the backdrop of my life at the time. I vividly remember riding my new bicycle to school one morning when I saw mounted policemen moving aggressively towards the university area. There was shouting, chaos, and a sense of panic near the school gate. Frightened, I hurried through the gates and entered the campus.
Students were running in every direction. Oddly enough, my greatest concern at that moment was my bicycle. It had cost ₹1,200, a considerable amount for my family. I knew how difficult it had been for my parents to arrange that money. Fearing it might be damaged or stolen, I hid it in the bushes, hoping nobody would notice it.
Then I followed the crowd. Like many others, I left the school through the back exit, moving towards Azeem Dairy and eventually making my way into Zakir Nagar.
As I learned later, the unrest had begun on 9 April 2000 when police arrived at the university library to detain two students. Their actions sparked immediate outrage, and students responded by blocking the road in protest. As tensions escalated, the police called in reinforcements and launched a lathi-charge against the demonstrators.
At one point, the provost intervened and succeeded in calming the situation, persuading the students to return to their hostels. What followed, however, was far more disturbing.
According to eyewitness accounts, once the students had returned to their hostels, the police allegedly entered the premises and unleashed what many described as a campaign of force carried out with vengeance.
The violence did not stop there. Even school students preparing for their examinations in the Central Library found themselves caught up in the crackdown, becoming unintended victims of a day that would leave a lasting mark on the university community.
At the time, all of this was entirely new to me. What I did not realise was that I would see similar patterns emerge again in the years to come.
When I look back at the events of 2000 and compare them with later incidents, including the events surrounding the CAA protests in 2019-20, I cannot help but notice recurring themes. I remember seeing injured students, hearing stories of broken limbs, deep wounds, and one student who reportedly lost an eye.
A question stayed with me: how could law enforcement officers be so brutal towards students?
I searched for answers but rarely found meaningful accountability. Whenever incidents involved a particular community or institution, the narrative often seemed to follow a familiar script. Students were portrayed as troublemakers, events were framed in ways that made them appear complicit, and the broader public was encouraged to view certain universities with suspicion.
The pattern felt familiar. Years earlier, I had been reduced to a stereotype because of where I came from and how I spoke. Now I saw entire groups of students being similarly reduced to labels and caricatures. The scale was different, but the mechanism felt strikingly similar.
For a brief period, I participated in dharnas and protests. As the years passed, I found little evidence that public attitudes had fundamentally changed. Many people continued to support leaders based more on identity, cultural appeals, or manufactured fears than on competence and governance. The labels evolved, but the underlying dynamics seemed unchanged.
Later, terms such as “Urban Naxal” became part of the public vocabulary. Similar confrontations unfolded at other universities. Television debates featured commentators lecturing students about remaining apolitical and focusing exclusively on academics, as though civic engagement and education were mutually exclusive.
Meanwhile, deeper issues often went unaddressed.
It became easier to blame population pressures, religious differences, cultural conflicts, or global circumstances than to confront failures of governance, policy, and leadership. Fear proved to be a powerful political tool. So did nostalgia for a glorified past.
The events surrounding the CAA protests were, in my view, another manifestation of the same underlying problem.
At its core, the issue is not merely about a specific law, protest, community, or university. It is about what happens when identity consistently takes precedence over merit, competence, and accountability. As long as societies continue to excuse poor leadership because it aligns with deeply held fears, sentiments, prejudices, or aspirations, injustice will continue to surface in different forms.
The labels may change. The targets may change. The slogans may change. But the pattern remains recognisably the same.
My hope is that the next generation will look beyond the noise, beyond the labels, and beyond the manufactured divisions. Perhaps they will recognise the underlying problem more clearly than we did and have the courage to address it at its roots.
The students of today will inherit the India of tomorrow. Maybe one day, they will build a country where disagreement is not treated as disloyalty, where education is not feared, and where questioning power is recognised as a democratic duty rather than a crime.
And perhaps that is the responsibility of every generation: not to forget, not to surrender to cynicism, and not to stop believing that a more just and compassionate society is possible. Because history does not change when people look away. It changes when ordinary people decide that silence is no longer an option.
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