On April 20, an X account which purports to document Jewish hate on campus shared a video of a woman chanting in back-and-forth style the ‘Azadi’ slogan in the Columbia University campus in the United States. Students were three days into the historic encampment – a form of protest calling for freedom for Palestine – where they occupied an open space, peacefully. Within seconds, the video made its way to Indian audiences. Some asked what about ‘we will take our freedom’ is particularly anti-Semitic. Many more wrote that it reminded them of Jawaharlal Nehru University. ‘Don’t return her to India,’ said one, ‘cancel her visa,’ wrote another. Attempts by commentators to explain that the slogan was not really hurtful – unless you are the person impinging on another’s freedom – and that the case of Kashmir found resonances in Palestine were almost drowned out by Indian rightwing participants who were flabbergasted at what clearly looked like an subcontinent-origin student choosing to vitiate hallowed US university space this way.
Protests in US campuses have since ballooned, spreading to Europe and Australia. They come just as the world appeared to have got used to the strikes on Palestine and now appear to signal a seismic shift in how we accustom ourselves to wars. Benjamin Netanyahu has called them “horrific”.
Students have called to divest from weapons manufacturers who benefit Israel and an overhaul of Joe Biden’s policies with Israel at a time when polls spell a lack of enthusiasm for the sitting president (and his opponent too). Meanwhile, university authorities have escalated pressure, invited law enforcement officials inside, prompted them to arrest students, ad hoc assured the US Congress that professors supporting them will be removed, and turned campus spaces against the very students they are supposed to hold. Videos of extraordinary violence by US police officers against students and teachers have flooded social media. As have those showing aged professors standing guard.
It is worth watching this CNN video from the moment Emory Econ Professor @CarolineFohlin came across the violent arrest of a protester on campus and asked the police, with shock, “What are you doing?” That’s all that prompted an officer to hurl her to the ground and handcuff her. https://t.co/QKNRqOoIiS pic.twitter.com/uYpXwKuc8D
— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) April 26, 2024
Then came April 25, when Achinthya Sivalingam and Hassan Sayed – two graduate students – were arrested from the Princeton University encampment site. At least one of them sustained injuries to their wrist because of zip ties that law enforcement used to secure their hands. Both were initially reported to have been evicted from campus – which is something the university has since denied.
Sivalingam is a second-year masters student at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Reports say she was born in Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. Sayed is a fifth-year economics PhD candidate. His publicly available CV says he speaks Urdu. It is perhaps not a stretch to assume that both students are from the Indian subcontinent, but Indian media outlets have largely focused on Sivalingam’s arrest.
Hassan Sayed, a fifth year PhD candidate in economics, and Achinthya Sivalingan, a SPIA MPA second year, have been arrested, evicted, and permanently banned from the @Princeton campus, thereby preventing them from finishing their degrees. pic.twitter.com/XG31jW8Sdm
Advertisement— Writers Against the War on Gaza (@wawog_now) April 25, 2024
“[A]nother Indian goes woke…Indians parents, have failed to instill culture, discipline and reality into their children! No amount of money, prestige, status helps when you children’s futures are ruined (sic)!” posts a popular account on X.
It is a strange and incalculable concept for much of India – a young person in a much-vaunted university in a country which is the dream for many, risking her future for a cause she believes in. JNU, populated by such figures, is bad enough. Must one think of such people outside of India too?
“One must remember that many students from the subcontinent who are in these protests are risking deportation. The minute university admin takes note of you, you could perhaps lose your place as a graduate student or a tenure-track professor, to which is tied your visa and once that goes, you will be sent home,” says Samyak Ghosh, who left the Columbia campus with a PhD in history last year and teaches in Bengaluru’s National Law School of India University now.
With the advent of ‘vishwaguru‘ Narendra Modi, the NRI or the Indian abroad has not set the best example in critical thinking and is often at the receiving end of flak for their devotion to a polarised India that they simply need not negotiate on a daily basis. Add to that the onus of being the model minority. And as if societal pressures were not enough, there is also the Indian parent, who is infamous for their expectation that their child remains on the straight path.
And yet, when Shayoni Mitra, a theatre professor at Barnard College of Columbia University, trained her phone on students performing dances from around the world at the protest site, she captured, among dabke, salsa, hip-hop, stepping and even Balkan line dancing – students performing an intricately choreographed dandiya routine. Dandiya originates from Gujarat. The vindication poetry writes itself.
Today’s time line cleanse – raas from the encampment. Dandiyas for solidarity! pic.twitter.com/5moabDUyKp
— Shayoni Mitra (@ShayoniMitra) April 20, 2024
For Mitra, south Asian students’ participation in campus protests is not new but it is certainly far more under the spotlight than ever before.
“I have had a range of conversations with my students from the region. One said, ‘I cannot leave my dorm to go to the protest site because my parents track my location with my phone and will stop paying my fees if they see me spending time there.’ But at the same time, another student, from Pakistan, said that while she was keeping off the protest site out of concern over her student visa, the sound of the azaan – while she was walking past the encampment – drove her to tears. She said, ‘I knew then that I have nothing to be afraid of, because there, I found a bit of home’.”
Mitra says that there is support from all layers of academic life and that organisers are more than accommodating of immigrant students, professors and staff members who need to remain anonymous.
Tents at Harvard University. Photo: By arrangement.
Speaking of organisers, it is also incredible that these protests are led, sustained, reported on and popularised largely by undergraduate students who, with a few exceptions, have all paid significant money and perhaps all of their young lives to get where they are. With even the citadels of global journalism spewing brazen falsehoods around buzzwords like “anti-Semitism” (the largest anti-Zionist Jewish body has protested against the use of this ruse to quell protests), “terrorism”, “Jewish hatred” and so on, the onus has fallen on campus journalists to convey the truth.
When the Columbia administration made it difficult for journalists to make their way into the campus and to the encampment, the young team led by Esha Karam who at 21 is the managing editor of the Columbia Daily Spectator, took it upon themselves to report extensively on the scene.
On the day when Karam – whose parents are from Hyderabad – spoke to The Wire, she had returned home at 4 am from the encampment and was up and at work by noon. “We definitely have a unique role right now. What we’re seeing on campus is people of different backgrounds and cultures forge connections for a social movement,” says Karam.
The Spectator’s reports highlight an essential aspect ignored by most mainstream outlets – how peaceful the protests are. Students being led away by police seem to smile with a wisdom beyond their years. A tent at Harvard proclaims itself a ‘liberalized zone’. A water jug at Arizona State University, smartly placed by industrious students, prevents sprinklers from spraying protesters.
One of the ways protesters have stopped sprinklers from spraying themselves
They’re now chanting “water is life” pic.twitter.com/raDXkkJeiv
— Rachel Louise Just (@RLJnews) April 26, 2024
As Karam says, it is unique – positively epochal – how young people have come together for a cause beyond their immediate surroundings. For all the criticism of the TikTok generation, it is clear for all to see that they do not posture fruitlessly.
Many have recollected the protests of 1968, against the US’s Vietnam War, on that very campus. Students’ protests have shaped global politics – the Soweto uprising against apartheid in South Africa of the 1970s, the Tiananmen Square showdown in China of the late 1980s, the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in India in 2019. Each time, states, detractors and critics, though loud, have had to recognise their endurance.
Senior lecturer in history at Australian National University who works on South Asia, Aditya Balasubramanian, is an Indian American who has studied at Harvard and Cambridge, and is thus no stranger to the expectations from young people studying at elite universities. He says that the 18 to 35 age group now is definitely political and not averse to the political awakening that comes from the university space.
“Many from the Global South attending or teaching at these universities have long understood the oppression of Palestinians, and whatever it is they may have to lose – including deportation or suspension – they feel compelled to do what they can to express solidarity. It is not ideologically murky for them,” he says.
Indians’ and Indian origin students’ participation in the protests are in contrast to domestic support towards Israel and the vast amount of sympathy – financial and otherwise – that the US has towards the bombing of Gaza. It is a double repudiation of wrongs from people who have everything to lose.
The student union of Jawaharlal Nehru University, India (#JNU) stands with #ColumbiaUniversity students.
They stand against the invitation given to US Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti to speak at an SIS event on campus. pic.twitter.com/GBTiJqBp7d
— Saib Bilaval (@SaibBilaval) April 25, 2024
For Soumi, who arrived from Kolkata at the New York University campus for her media studies programme in 2014 “a week after the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests had begun after the killing of Michael Brown by police” – organising had been a part of daily life since.
“While I was nervous to join in protests in the early days, given the same doubts about repression and jeopardizing my immigration status, and not knowing the culture of dissent here, I soon joined in with my classmates because (a) it felt impossible to not stand up against the racist and police violence, and the criminal overpolicing and murder of Black people, and (b) I also found ways to be out in the streets with my professors and classmates, and we all kept each other safe,” she says.
This overwhelming ability to “keep each other safe” seems to sustain the incredible movement, which, despite the threat of careers ending, arrests and police violence – as a post on X put it – is at its heart “downright tranquil, impossibly sweet.”
