Jamia Students' Union: A Homecoming for Those of Us Who Fought for It
I left Jamia 12 years ago, but a part of me has continued to inhabit the university, writes Asad Ashraf.
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I was watching the celebrations unfold at Jamia Millia Islamia with goosebumps. I was there as a journalist, observing the scenes, recording the moment and doing what my profession demands of me. But somewhere between the slogans, the embraces, the raised fists, and the unrestrained joy of students who had finally won a long and exhausting battle, another impulse was taking over.
I wanted to put my notebook aside, leave my professional distance behind, and join the crowd. I wanted to stand among those students, raise my fist and celebrate a victory that, despite the passage of 12 years, felt as much mine as theirs.
There are moments when the distance between a journalist and the story he is covering becomes almost impossible to maintain. This was one of them.
After all, we had fought for this, too. Some 12-15 years ago, when we were students, we had demanded a Students' Union, organised, protested and faced the consequences of questioning an administration that had little patience for dissent. Some of us were suspended, others were threatened with disciplinary action, and many eventually graduated carrying the unfinished business of a struggle that had begun before them and continued long after us.
Why This Victory Feels Personal
There are places one leaves physically but never quite manages to leave emotionally. Jamia is one such place for me. Its corridors, its classrooms, the familiar turns, the arguments that spilled out of lecture halls, the friendships formed over endless cups of tea and the political conversations that often continued long after the university gates had closed remain part of my intellectual and emotional geography. I left Jamia 12 years ago and became a journalist, but a part of me has continued to inhabit the university.
Perhaps that is why this victory felt so personal.
There are places one leaves physically but never quite manages to leave emotionally. Jamia is one such place for me, writes Asad Ashraf.
(Photo Courtesy: Shariya Ahmed)
There could hardly have been a more meaningful moment for Jamia than the prospect of restoring its Students' Union after two decades. The suspension of student union elections in 2006 coincided with the year I entered the university as a first-year undergraduate student. An entire generation subsequently passed through Jamia without experiencing the institutional culture of an elected university-wide students' body.
The restoration of the union, therefore, is much more than an administrative concession. It is the return of a democratic right that students have had to fight for repeatedly.
Among those who carried this struggle forward were Ebn Basil of the National Students' Union of India (NSUI), Mantasha of the All India Students' Association (AISA), and Lubaib Basheer, Rehan Khan, and PK Nausheen of the Fraternity Movement. Their hunger strike, alongside the determination of other protesting students, brought an old demand back to the centre of university life. Their struggle deserves to be remembered, not merely as an episode of campus politics, but as part of Jamia's continuing history of resistance.
The announcement that the administration would implement the Students' Union constitution by 15 May 2027, and conduct elections in accordance with the Lyngdoh Committee guidelines, marks an important breakthrough. The students' 18-day hunger strike and sustained agitation have forced the university to acknowledge a democratic demand that had remained unresolved for 20 years.
For those of us who had fought for this in our own student days, the moment carried the feeling of a long-delayed homecoming.
An entire generation has passed through Jamia without experiencing the institutional culture of an elected university-wide students' body.
(Photo Courtesy: Shariya Ahmed)
The Dream That Was Never Abandoned
There is a line in Jamia's anthem that has always stayed with me:
Hue the aake yahin khaimazan wo deewane
Uthe the sunke jo awazein rahbaranein watan
The anthem evokes the dreamers who came to Jamia, carrying their aspirations, their convictions, and their faith in an idea larger than themselves.
I found myself thinking about those lines while watching the celebrations. The students who had spent days on hunger strike, who had endured disciplinary action, and who had stood their ground despite the hostility surrounding them were, in many ways, the inheritors of those very dreamers.
Otherwise, its anthem becomes little more than a ceremonial performance.
Perhaps the most beautiful thing about this victory is that it has brought together two generations of students: those who once fought for the union and could not see it restored, and those who have finally managed to bring it back. The former may have left the university, but their unfinished struggle has found its successors.
A University Born Out of Rebellion Against Colonialism
To understand why the return of the Students' Union matters so deeply, one must return to the history of Jamia itself.
Jamia Millia Islamia was not born out of an administrative decision or an institutional expansion plan. It emerged from a political movement, an act of educational rebellion against colonial authority.
Its story begins in 1920, at a particularly consequential moment in India's freedom struggle. The Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movements had brought together different strands of political resistance against British rule. Mahatma Gandhi's call to boycott educational institutions supported or controlled by the colonial government found a particularly strong response among sections of the nationalist Muslim intelligentsia.
On 29 October 1920, the foundation stone of Jamia was laid at Aligarh by Mahmud Hasan, the celebrated Islamic scholar and freedom fighter. Ajmal Khan subsequently became its first chancellor, while Jauhar became its first vice-chancellor.
(Photo Courtesy: Shariya Ahmed)
On 29 October 1920, the foundation stone of Jamia was laid at Aligarh by Mahmud Hasan, the celebrated Islamic scholar and freedom fighter. Ajmal Khan subsequently became its first chancellor, while Jauhar became its first vice-chancellor.
The very name of the institution carried an aspiration. Jamia meant university, Millia meant national. It was an attempt to imagine an educational institution that would be independent of colonial control and rooted in an idea of national belonging.
This distinction is important. Jamia's founders were not simply seeking to create an institution where Muslim students could receive an education. They were attempting to create an alternative intellectual and educational imagination for a colonised society.
Its origins brought together anti-colonial Islamic activism, the nationalist aspirations of politically conscious Indian Muslims, and the broader movement for independence. The institution emerged from the conviction that political freedom would remain incomplete without intellectual freedom and educational self-determination.
The British colonial government imprisoned several of Jamia's teachers and students. The institution faced an existential crisis following the suspension of the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1922 and the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924. Its financial support dried up, prominent supporters began drifting away, and its survival became uncertain.
But Jamia refused to disappear.
In 1925, Ajmal Khan, Dr Ansari and Majeed Khwaja, with Gandhi's support, moved the institution from Aligarh to Karol Bagh in Delhi.
A few years later, another remarkable group of intellectuals, Dr Zakir Husain, Dr Abid Husain, and Mohammad Mujeeb, returned from Germany to devote themselves to the institution. They accepted salaries far below what their qualifications could have commanded, choosing instead to build an institution whose future was uncertain.
Jamia eventually moved to its present location in Okhla, with the foundation stone for its school building laid in 1935 and its institutions shifting to the new campus in 1936. This was an institution built through sacrifice, intellectual conviction, and a refusal to surrender to circumstances.
Its history also offers an important lesson about its political imagination. Jamia was never intended to be an isolated institution. Its founders imagined an educational project rooted in India's languages, cultures and plural national identity. It sought to resist colonialism without reproducing the narrowness of sectarian nationalism.
The university's own history records Gandhi's observation that during the communal violence following Partition, Jamia's campus remained an oasis of peace. That is an extraordinary inheritance for an institution whose founding was shaped by the struggle for freedom.
(Photo Courtesy: Shariya Ahmed)
This history should make every Jamia student proud. But pride in history must also bring responsibility.
An institution born out of resistance cannot be indifferent to the rights of those who inhabit it. A university founded by people who challenged colonial authority cannot regard the questioning of authority by its students as an administrative inconvenience.
The anti-colonial spirit of Jamia was never simply about changing the rulers. It was about changing the relationship between power and the people. It was about cultivating independent minds that would refuse to accept authority merely because it was authority.
A Students' Union is one of the most elementary expressions of that democratic inheritance.
When We Too Were Punished for Demanding Democracy
The demand for a Students' Union was never new. It accompanied generations of Jamia students, including my own.
When I entered the university in 2006, the institution had already suspended student union elections. For many of us, the absence of an elected representative body was an obvious democratic deficit. We wanted an institution where students could organise, debate, disagree with the administration, raise questions about academic conditions and participate in decisions that shaped their university lives.
I remember the contradiction rather vividly. Here was an administration that could lecture students on democratic values while resorting to punitive measures against those demanding democratic representation.
Students were abruptly suspended and rusticated. Disciplinary action became a means of dealing with dissent. The administration seemed increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that students could question its decisions and organise themselves independently.
To my mind, Jung's tenure became emblematic of an authoritarian administrative culture that had little patience for student dissent. There is a particular irony in being taught the virtues of democracy by an institution that refuses to practise it within its own walls.
The struggle did not end with our departure. Other generations of students continued to raise the demand. There were protests, representations and hunger strikes. Students repeatedly put their academic lives and physical well-being at stake. Yet the demand remained unfulfilled.
An entire generation passed through Jamia without experiencing the institutional culture of a university-wide elected union. The present victory belongs to those who refused to let that democratic deficit become permanent.
The Shame of Turning a University into a Fortress
While the return of the union deserves celebration, the manner in which the administration dealt with the students' agitation deserves unequivocal condemnation.
The crackdown on protesting students was shameful. The sight of a university being barricaded, its gates restricted, its students struggling to enter their own campus, and security personnel deployed in overwhelming numbers was deeply disturbing.
The administration's response to a democratic demand was to create an atmosphere of intimidation. Students faced disciplinary proceedings, suspensions and rustication. Security personnel were deployed around the protest site, access to parts of the campus was restricted, and classes were shifted online.
The encounter profoundly altered the relationship between the university's surrounding neighbourhood and the police. The killings of Atif Amin and Mohammad Sajid were followed by an atmosphere of suspicion, anxiety, and fear among sections of the Muslim population.
Students, particularly young Muslim men from outside Delhi, had to negotiate a deeply unsettling environment. The presence of police, the scrutiny of young men, the anxiety surrounding one's identity and the feeling of being watched became part of everyday life for many.
I am not suggesting that the circumstances of the present agitation and those following the Batla House encounter are identical. They are not. But the psychological resemblance is difficult to ignore.
The barricades, the security deployment, the atmosphere of surveillance, and the restrictions on movement brought back memories of a time when students felt that the university and its surrounding neighbourhood were under an extraordinary gaze of suspicion.
A university should be a place where young people feel free to question, assemble, and express themselves. It should never become a space where students feel that their every movement is being monitored and their presence itself is treated as a potential security concern.
The administration's responsibility was to engage with the students, listen to their demands, and find a democratic resolution. Instead, the campus witnessed a confrontation that deepened mistrust.
A university cannot demand respect for its institutional authority while denying legitimacy to the democratic aspirations of those who study there.
The Politics of Keeping Jamia Silent
There is considerable discussion today about the saffronisation of educational institutions, the ideological transformation of universities, and the increasing pressure on spaces of dissent. These concerns are legitimate and deserve serious engagement.
But in discussing Jamia's future, we must also confront a longer history. The reluctance to allow an elected Students' Union persisted across different political dispensations and administrations. The university was deprived of this democratic institution under governments that were not necessarily ideologically similar, but which, in this respect, shared an unwillingness to see an organised student constituency emerge.
One cannot help but ask why.
Jamia has historically been an important intellectual and political centre for Indian Muslims. It has produced generations of scholars, academics, civil servants, journalists, lawyers, artists and political thinkers. Its students have often been at the forefront of conversations about citizenship, secularism, minority rights, constitutional freedoms, and the future of Indian democracy.
This is an interpretation of the political circumstances, rather than a claim about a single documented motive. But the larger question remains: why did successive administrations find it so difficult to accommodate a democratic institution that is considered an ordinary feature of university life elsewhere?
The fear of student politics has often been justified through the language of discipline, law and order, academic disruption, and campus violence. These concerns cannot simply be dismissed. Student politics can become factional, violent and opportunistic. But the answer to the failures of student politics cannot be the permanent absence of student democracy.
Democracy is not the absence of disagreement. It is the institutionalisation of disagreement. And Jamia, of all institutions, should understand this.
A Minority University Must Belong to Everyone
There is another question that the new Students' Union must confront with intellectual honesty.
Jamia is a minority educational institution with a distinctive history and constitutional character. Its Muslim identity is an important part of its institutional inheritance. It is reflected in its history, its intellectual traditions, and the circumstances of its founding.
But this must never become a reason for any student to feel excluded.
A minority university must not become a university for one community alone. Its doors, its intellectual life and its democratic institutions must remain open to everyone who studies and works there. Students must feel that they belong to Jamia irrespective of their religion, caste, gender, region, language, class or political beliefs.
The founders did not establish Jamia as an institution of isolation. They imagined it as a participant in the making of a free and plural India.
The new union must carry that vision forward.
It must protect the rights of Muslim students while remaining equally attentive to the experiences of students from other religious and social backgrounds. It must stand against discrimination, whether directed at a Muslim student, a Dalit student, a woman, a student from the Northeast, or someone who holds an unpopular political opinion.
Jamia's minority character must be a source of constitutional confidence, cultural richness and intellectual diversity, rather than a boundary that divides its own students.
Jamia should be a place where difference is accommodated and disagreement is welcomed.
What Kind of Union Should Jamia Have?
Now that the administration has agreed to restore the union constitution and establish a timeline for elections, the more difficult question begins.
What kind of Students' Union should Jamia have?
The Jamia baradari must recognise that the restoration of the union is only the first victory. The larger responsibility is to ensure that this democratic space does not become another arena for patronage, personality cults, local power networks and electoral manipulation.
There is a genuine danger that student politics could be reduced to the influence of local builders, contractors, political intermediaries, and those who see the university primarily as a space for cultivating influence.
Such interests have little to do with the intellectual and political traditions that Jamia represents.
A Students' Union cannot become a vehicle for personal ambition or local patronage. It must be rooted in an ideology, a larger understanding of student rights and a commitment to public life.
This does not mean that the union should belong to one political organisation or ideological formation. It must accommodate competing political ideas and allow students to disagree with one another. Its strength should come from the diversity of its constituents, not from the dominance of any single faction.
It must also resist the temptation to reduce Jamia's politics to the narrow question of Muslim identity. The university's history is inseparable from the history of Indian Muslims, but its intellectual inheritance is much larger.
A meaningful union must speak about the rights of workers, the condition of public education, unemployment, privatisation, discrimination, gender justice, freedom of expression, constitutional rights and the everyday struggles of students.
It must be able to engage with national politics without becoming an appendage of national political parties.
And above all, it must remain answerable to the students it represents.
Women Must Not be an Afterthought
One of the most important responsibilities of the new union will be to ensure meaningful participation of women.
Jamia has a large and vibrant community of women students who have repeatedly demonstrated their capacity for political organisation, intellectual leadership and public engagement. Their participation in the recent struggles for democratic rights at the university has once again demonstrated that they cannot be treated as peripheral actors in campus politics.
The union must ensure that women are represented not merely as voters, supporters or participants in demonstrations, but as elected leaders, decision-makers and political voices.
Their participation must also extend beyond electoral arithmetic. The union must take up issues of campus safety, hostel facilities, transport, access to academic spaces, gender discrimination and the everyday inequalities that shape women's experiences at the university.
Women must have an equal say in deciding the political direction of the union. They must be able to contest elections, lead organisations, occupy key positions and disagree with their male colleagues without being marginalised.
The idea of a democratic Jamia cannot be realised without women occupying an equal place in its political life.
Jamia Must Produce Leaders
I would also like to see Jamia's Students' Union develop a larger political imagination.
There is no reason why its responsibility should end at the university gates. Jamia has historically been a space where national questions have been debated with considerable intellectual seriousness. Its students have participated in movements concerning citizenship, constitutionalism, communal violence, minority rights and the preservation of democratic institutions.
The union must reclaim this tradition.
It should establish a culture of reading, discussion and intellectual engagement. It should encourage students to understand the Constitution, political theory, history, economics and the changing realities of Indian society.
The union should also build bridges with other universities, student movements, and democratic organisations across the country. Jamia must not become an isolated island of political expression. Its students must be able to engage with their counterparts at Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Aligarh Muslim University, and universities across India.
A university union should produce leaders, but leadership must mean something more than the ability to mobilise a crowd or win an election. It must mean the capacity to think independently, articulate a political position, engage with opposing arguments and defend democratic values even when doing so becomes inconvenient.
The union should nurture future journalists, lawyers, academics, public intellectuals, parliamentarians, civil servants and political leaders. It should create a generation capable of articulating the concerns of marginalised communities while understanding the complexities of the larger republic.
Jamia has the potential to become an important centre of political thought and democratic mobilisation. Its union should aspire to be a national voice, particularly at a time when universities across the country are struggling to preserve spaces for independent thinking.
But it must earn that position through intellectual rigour, political consistency and an unwavering commitment to democratic principles.
The Unfinished Business of our Generation
For those of us who were students 12-15 years ago, the restoration of the union carries a peculiar emotional weight.
We remember the university as it was, the friendships, the disagreements, the political meetings, the long conversations, the excitement of discovering new ideas and the occasional fear of being hauled up by the administration for saying something that someone in authority did not want to hear.
We also remember the disappointments. Some of us were suspended. Some were rusticated. Others simply graduated and moved on, carrying with them the feeling that something fundamental had been denied to us.
I often wonder what our student lives might have looked like had there been a functioning Students' Union.
There is no point romanticising our own student years. We made mistakes, too. We were often impatient, sometimes factional, and occasionally unable to distinguish between political conviction and personal ego. But we had the courage to imagine that the university could be different.
The present generation has inherited that unfinished dream and, through its struggle, has brought it closer to reality.
I am reminded of Allama Iqbal's famous lines:
Sitaron se aage jahan aur bhi hain,
Abhi ishq ke imtihan aur bhi hain.
There are worlds beyond the stars, and there are further tests of conviction yet to come.
The restoration of the Students' Union is one such moment. The real test will begin when the elections are held, when the first representatives take their seats, and when the first difficult questions are put to the administration.
Will the union speak for the ordinary student? Will it defend the rights of those who disagree with its leadership? Will it accommodate women as equal political participants? Will it challenge injustice even when the perpetrators belong to its own political camp? Will it resist the lure of patronage and personal power?
These are the questions that will determine its character.
And perhaps this is where Jamia's anthem must be heard again, not merely as a ceremonial song played on occasions, but as a reminder of the ideals that brought generations of dreamers to this institution.
A university that was built by those who challenged colonial authority must not be afraid of students who question authority today.
A university that was sustained by sacrifice must recognise the sacrifices of those who fought to restore its democratic institutions.
A university that celebrates its minority character must ensure that no student, from any community, feels like an outsider.
And a university that once imagined a different India must continue to produce young people capable of imagining one.
For now, I want to congratulate the students who refused to give up. I want to congratulate the hunger strikers, the organisers and everyone who stood behind this demand, including those whose names may never find their way into newspaper headlines.
As I watched the celebrations that day, I was a journalist standing outside the moment, but my heart was somewhere inside that crowd. Perhaps that is the privilege and the burden of having once belonged to a place that continues to shape you long after you have left it.
We may have left Jamia 12 years ago, but perhaps a part of us was still waiting for this day.
The dreamers have returned. Now let them build a university worthy of the dreams that brought its founders together more than a century ago.
(Asad Ashraf is an independent journalist and former student of Jamia Millia Islamia. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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