Meet the brave women of Jamia who rescued a fellow student from the clutches of Delhi police
On Sunday evening, as protests against the newly amended Citizenship Act erupted across India, a video surfaced showing five women in Delhi gathering around a man slumped on a pavement to protect him as he was viciously being beaten by policemen.
In the video, policemen were seen asking the man to come out of the compound of a bungalow. The women shouted at them and drove them away.
As the man turned to nudge the women to move further back into the compound, the policemen grabbed him, dragged him out onto the pavement and began to beat him mercilessly with batons. But the five women dashed out to form a protective ring around their friend.
Faced with the belligerent women and surrounded by press photographers, the policemen backed off.
The video has since gone viral, with the women earning widespread praise for standing up to the police officials. “We were challenging the state and the authority,” Akhtarista Ansari, one of the five women told Scroll.in.
“I feel very proud of myself for doing this,” said the 19-year-old student, who is studying sociology at the Jamia Millia Islamia University. “And the protests will continue because this is not a two-day fight.”
From Jharkhand to Kerala
The five women in the group are from different states.
Ansari came to Delhi from Deogarh in Jharkhand in 2014, to study in Class 11 at Jamia Millia Islamia. Chanda Yadav, 20, hails from Chandoli, Uttar Pradesh, and came to Delhi in 2017 to study Hindi literature.
Ladeeda Farzana, a 22-year-old student of Islamic studies, moved to Delhi from the coastal city of Kannur in Kerala last year. Also from Kerala were Ayesha Renna, a masters’ student at the university and Tasneem.
Ansari and Yadav were among of the few women to lead the first protests at Jamia against the Citizenship Act in the campus on the evening of December 12. “It was just a women’s march against the Act from the old girls hostel to the new one,” said Ansari.
In an image from that evening that has already turned iconic, Yadav, Renna and Farzana were photographed striking a defiant pose against the police.