Remnants of December 15, 2019, include broken furniture, blood-stained tissues, and bags of students who haven't come back for their belongings.
Angry graffiti has sprung up all across the Jamia Millia Islamia campus after police brutality on December 15, 2019.
At Shaheen Bagh, for instance, where men, women and children have been spending all day and nights to protest CAA for over five weeks, VICE spoke to several protesters who admitted to being overwhelmed on an unprecedented level. “I come here everyday, leaving my family and my regular life behind. Of course there’s trauma of some kind,” Rizwan Khalid, 50, one of the protesters, tells us. “I’ve sacrificed everything to be here. I have a sugar (diabetes) problem and need to be hospitalised every now and then. We get threatened, there are rumours everyday, and there’s always the fear of being attacked. And yet I come everyday with the only hope that we will wake up to a better tomorrow.”Because this isn’t the first time conflict has had a terrible impact on its people—it’s happened before too.
Rizwan Khalid, one of the protesters, on a weeknight at the protest site in Shaheen Bagh, Delhi.
Abdul Kalam Azad, Guwahati-based journalist and researcher, tells VICE that unlike “just another episode of violence”, the current unrest involves the state inflicting violence on certain groups of people in order to instil fear in them. The fear of being stateless, he adds, can induce trauma, which could be “trans-generational” in nature. “Research has found that when a social group experiences historical trauma, it continues for generations,” says Azad. “A paper published in the American Journal of Psychotherapy says, ‘The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors were overrepresented by 300 per cent among the referrals to a psychiatry clinic in comparison with the representation in the general population.’”So while the embattled sites of anti-CAA protests across India may not have reached a breaking point just yet, it’s imperative that we look beyond the conflict, and into the mental health of the people. After all, India has one of the highest rates of psychiatric disorders in the world, and studies have shown that any form of conflict and violence can expose people to mild-to-moderate forms of psychological distress such as PTSD, depression and anxiety.Trauma has a complex impact when an entire generation or social group is at the centre of violence.
Women, children and men spend all day and nights at protest sites, like these women in Shaheen Bagh. It's never too late to address the mental health aspect of the movement.
To answer this, Azad first reminds us of a recent news report that saw Dilip Ghosh, the BJP head of West Bengal, talk of the CAA protesters as ‘dogs’ which the cops were proud of shooting down.“Ghosh’s statement and what is happening in UP, Delhi and Assam gives an interesting psychosocial perspective,” says Azad. This is an example of one of the first things that happens in conflict: dehumanisation of the persecuted or targetted group.In fact, professor Thomas Homer-Dixon (University of Waterloo) called this condition of dehumanising “necessary” for a severe conflict. One can see it through recent news reports from anti-CAA protests—from protesters being killed with impunity to alleged rape of minor boys in police custody. “Our police forces are not trained to kill people or rape young children,” says Azad, whose research involves understanding the impact of conflict on the women and children of Assam. “But it seems they are being ‘appropriately organised’ to see certain groups of people as subordinate, less than human-like how even Amit Shah called certain groups of people as ‘termites’.”So what exactly happens to people when they’re caught in the middle of conflict?
The state police across India have come under the scanner for reportedly dehumanising and debasing protesters, something that can escalate a mental health crisis.
“This is when you feel like you’re being played like a toy,” Kala says. “That’s what happened in Kashmir. You’re reduced to an object—anybody can come around and pick you up, or ask you to step out of your homes. Your existence is abused in front of everybody’s eyes, your own eyes, and, worst, your own children’s. And this can happen inside your own home. This leads to humiliation and great insecurity.”One can connect the dots with what happened in Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh (UP) last month, when the police, along with members of Hindutva groups, entered houses in two Muslim neighbourhoods, attacked the residents, destroyed their belongings, and looted their money and jewellery. “These types of stresses cause long-term PTSD, because it triggers helplessness and the trauma from those who were supposed to protect you (the police),” says Kala.The fear of being attacked in what one previously considered a safe space is something students of Jamia Millia Islamia and Jawaharlal Nehru University are experiencing too. It led to solidarity protests by students across the country, yes, but VICE found that the violence has altered their way of functioning and thinking considerably—they all spoke about fear, paranoia, depression, anxiety and chronic helplessness and restlessness.This adds another layer to this process of debasement: Objectification.
Hundreds of students and former students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) gathered inside the campus on January 7, 2020, to condemn the violence on JNU students by a right-wing affiliated student group on January 5, 2020. The incident has shaken several students and professors, but their resolve to unite and fight all forms of fear is strong.
“One feels like this is how things are—being made to feel like a second-class citizen, not deserving of a safe space, denied citizenship or even some rights,” Shamsunder says. “Alienation would seem normal. If I don’t believe that a particular community or social life is possible for me, I will not reach out to opportunities to achieve a good life. And if I don’t believe that a safe environment is possible, I may think that violence is the only way the world works.”Of course, things get worse when children and youth are caught in this state of instability. Even the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights issued an order this week to the district magistrate of southeast Delhi, to identify children in Shaheen Bagh protests and send them for counselling because they “may suffer from mental trauma.”Another outcome of this scenario is also marginalisation, which is usually difficult to identify and acknowledge.
The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights has ordered the district magistrate of southeast Delhi to give counselling to the children on the protest site of Shaheen Bagh.
Many experts feel that protests have brought together people like never before, at least in our generation, and forged connections they find empowering. “That’s probably the only positive thing I see, that people are in solidarity with each other in large numbers. Empathy and solidarity are healing agents,” says Azad.But in all this darkness, there might just be a sliver of hope.
A lot of people have spoken about finding connections and feeling empowered after attending protests. For many, this has been the first time on the streets to show solidarity. Empathy and solidarity, researchers say, are big healing agents.
