NEW DELHI: This is the story of how the Delhi Police scuttled an agreed plan to peacefully dislodge the Shaheen Bagh protesters on the instructions of the Union Home Ministry so that it became an election ‘mudda’ for the BJP.
The story begins several weeks before Union home minister Amit Shah, at an election rally in Delhi on January 27, goaded his audience to “press the voting button so hard that the tremors are felt in Shaheen Bagh”.
The next day, junior finance minister Anurag Thakur followed up Shah’s instructions by inciting people to chant “goli maro gaddaraon ko”. This led 17-year-old Rambhakt Gopal to post “Shaheen Bagh, khel khatam” on his Facebook page before shooting at Jamia Millia Islamia’s anti-CAA protesters. Two more such shootings followed in the next few days.
Two people would have seen this chain of events coming: Sharjeel Imam and Aasif Mujtaba, the two IITians who led the protest at Shaheen Bagh. They would have been unnerved. They would have recalled the “exit plan” they had negotiated with the Delhi Police and were ready to implement after the New Year.
If they could, they would have discussed an ominous remark of the police officer on the freezing night of January 1.
“Tum ko peacefully uthane se mana kar diya hai,” the officer had said to them, disclosing the instructions received from the Union Home Ministry.
They would have liked to discuss it, except that Sharjeel was in police custody and Aasif remains besieged by the recurring shootings at Shaheen Bagh and Jamia Millia Islamia University.
Early portents
Even on December 15, when an anti-CAA protest at Shaheen Bagh began to turn into a sit-in, Sharjeel and Aasif had got a glimpse of how quickly and easily things could go wrong.
At around 4 pm, when a crowd in Jamia Nagar lifted Sharjeel on their shoulders and asked, “Hamein kya karna chahiye?”, his two-word response, “Chakka Jaam”. Barely an hour later, by around 5 pm, both sides of Road No. 13A, which links Mathura Road and Kalindi Kunj to Noida, had been blocked with cement slabs, stones and police barricades.
Sharjeel and Aasif, encircled by about 300 men, took turns to explain why it was important to protest. “All we can do is disrupt,” said Sharjeel. “That is the only way to be heard. Sitting at Jantar Mantar, even for years, will yield nothing.”
In conversations with me that began on January 16, he recalled, “We were talking of blocking both sides of the highway, of disrupting the water and milk supply to Delhi.”
The local AAP MLA, Amanatullah Khan, had not been so keen. He said let’s get up now and organise a peaceful march to Amit Shah’s house next Friday.
“I said, ‘Hamein baithna hai, hum baithenge. Jisko jana hai woh jayein’,” Sharjeel recalled to me.
“Women had come and gone. At around 8.30 pm, police came and asked us to vacate at least one side of the road. I agreed, though I was not very happy.”
As soon as the barricades were removed from one side of the road, one protester, carrying the Tricolour, started throwing stones at passing vehicles.
“It was like a scene from Mumbai locals. People rushed back to the street and many of them started pelting stones,” Sharjeel recalled to me.
He had a mike in his hand and kept shouting, “Stop the violence, don’t vandalise property.”
Aasif Mujtaba said, “You can’t win over a state by throwing stones,”.
Police fired rubber bullets and Sharjeel left after 10 pm to go to Aasif’s home in Shaheen Bagh. During that night, 10-15 young men blocked both sides of the road again. “I returned, at around 7 am the next day, and a crowd was sitting. I spoke for an hour about why we must not pick up stones,” Sharjeel told me.
