For Dearest Hany, To Unbeloved NIA-A DU Student's Letter on Hany's birthday

Being wonted to the hunt for subaltern Muslim bodies, now you finally reached out to our University Professor Hany Babu. While arresting more than a dozen people, when you go for Dr. Hany, who had nothing to do with the Bhima Koregaon-Eligar Parishad incident in 2017 and was aware of it only through reading materials, you are in fact hoisting with your own petard. This post is to gladly inform you that whatsoever slavery you are doing for the government is but, at the end of the day, is destined to ruin yourself and the government.

I can explain, but you may find it a bit boring as this is based on facts.

Behind your confidence, that the stories of Maoist stamping and data retrieval hidden in electronic materials will be worthwhile, is not only the conviction that there are people waiting to swallow whatever they feel under the guise of national security, but is also the public consciousness about 'certain groups' framed on Indian soil only with mysteries.

But this time round, the work went awry. Better work on your cock and bull stories as these not only are unbelievable but reprehensible. Render advanced ideas!

There were huge protests in 2019 when your team raided without any prior warrant the house of Hany Babu and his partner Jenny Rovina, a professor at Delhi University itself, who are 'Mallus' (Malayalis) and Delhi residents who had nothing to do with an incident that took place in Maharashtra.. You seized his laptop, phone and books the same day.

If Hany's house was raided citing his membership in the committee formed on humanitarian basis to help G N Saibaba, a 90% paralysed professor accused in this case, today Hany himself is another one accused.

In July 2020, you called him in as a witness and questioned him for hours and then you yourself find the hidden data from his laptop, which has been in your custody for over a year now; one can only saywow! He had shared it with his wife that his folders had been changed from the Life-Law-Linguistics order. When he argued that he didn't know about the file, you asked him to name someone else and of course he refused. Then you arrested him.

To make it worse, you also bring out the 'Maoist' connection of Hany who clearly disagrees with and abstains from the radical left's views. Interestingly, Hany Babu was one who opposed your attacks as much as the left appropriations.

Hope against hope, this has given the public spheres a better understanding of the rules than just the carriers you are. You are enabling citizens to boldly declare in public the folly of seeking a solution within the very rules of discrimination, and the realization that we need a total overhaul.

Today, the common man understands not only the ridicule of nationalizing those who 'just' killed Gandhi, but also the fact that the nation-state being summed up as synonymous with the ruling dispensation is being widely reconsidered.

Especially while the politics of pandemic is being discussed globally by Agamben and Zizek, the people here are able to read the epidemic as an undeclared emergency that does not apply to the construction of the Ram temple but used to target and hunt down dissenting voices. Let it sadden you that when a teacher, who had theoretically taken on the Chathurvarnya system of language in the academic space, is being arrested just days before implementing the New Education Policy, his articles written in 2017 are the ones re-read!

'Dear' NIA, you hae paved the way for even the 'progressives' to remember and acknowledge Sharjeel Imam who said that if you are a scholar, your education is to protest in the streets at this time! Your own deeds provide an opportunity to assert and accept the identity created by the post Mandal-Babari discourse.

The only disappointment for us, his students, is that we are not in the prisons that our dear Hany Sir is taken to.

It has got out of your hands so much that discussions are taking place at the spaces of central universities to the realization that if the pursuit of harm does not reach us, it is then due to our political fault and privilege.

You are doomed to fail as long as the sense of justice prevails which were passed down to us by Hany and Jenny, the spokepersons of alternative politics, who stood by us in the classroom and later in the streets of protests, even in the middle of the night, saying that we should not just act complementarily, but be at the core to oppose to the utmost.

Like Hany, we will laugh at all this and shall point the finger like Jenny!

(Raniya Zulaikha is an UG student in Ramjas College, Delhi University. Views are personal)