Justice for Najeeb: Between Identity and Insaaf

Abstract

“Rahiye ab aisi jagah chal kar jahan koi na ho
 
 ham-sukhan koi na ho aur ham-zaban koi na ho”
 
 —Mirza Ghalib
 
 (Go and stay in a quarter where no one lives
 
 None to hear your speech, none to speak in your tongue)[1]
 
 This is a personal statement of facts about an event that occurred in Jawaharlal Nehru University last year. Since the disappearance of Najeeb Ahmad from JNU in October 2016, students especially Muslims have felt tremendous insecurity in campus. I have written many pamphlets and have posted many updates on social media, describing the protests for ‘Justice for Najeeb’, the dwindling number of protesters, the lack of justice and creation of further injustice. But there are other more narratives, about personal tribulations as influenced by political events, about coming to terms with one’s own vulnerability as a Muslim student in a campus where progressivism is now only a veneer, about the alienation of that progressive space itself. With the disappearance of Najeeb and the protests which followed after it, I became fully involved in student activism on JNU campus. But there are many lingering discontents, about the nature of politics itself. Where do Muslim students place themselves, in a campus where the traditional left has also descended into thinly disguised Islamophobia, where the ‘new left’ also has immense secular anxieties about Muslim organisations? Should we distinguish ourselves from ‘the left’ by subscribing to the mores of ‘identity politics’? Or should the term ‘identity politics’ be jettisoned completely, because of the sheer condescension and disparagement shown by the left when speaking of it? Should Muslim students evolve their own vocabulary of politics, as Ambedkarite student bodies have done very recently? Should they ally themselves with a re-invented notion of leftist progressive politics or give up any hope for the left’s reinvention, especially because the benchmarks of progressivism are always used as a measure for Muslims? The answers to these questions are not uncomplicated. But these questions, regarding the Muslim Self and its location in university politics, have emerged during protests. During protests demanding for justice, one’s own positionality and identity are reckoned. We may not have immediate responses to our own doubts and we have not proffered our own discourse. Nevertheless, our questions are substantial enough to provide us with a vantage point from which we can give critiques to the extant modes of student activism in JNU. And these critiques cannot be ignored, they demand a hearing. It is not easy to launch a critique of those who denounce criticism. It is not easy to confront alienation from these well-established actors bearing indubitable progressive credentials. But the enunciation of identity as the ‘personal confronting the political’ is very necessary in times of fascism, when minority identities face greater levels of victimisation. Therefore, how do we imagine insaaf? How we understand the lack of it? Najeeb’s Muslim identity seems to be the prerequisite for many cycles of injustice. This essay is an exploration of this. This essay lays down and reflects upon the facts of Najeeb’s disappearance. These facts have been twisted beyond credibility. An honest appraisal of the narratives about Najeeb’s disappearance is sorely needed.