Where Is Najeeb? Why Don't You Care?

The Wire

9 hours ago

Where is Najeeb Ahmed?
When a student goes missing; you don't care.
You don't set up a search party, you don't comment, you don't cry about it with your 56-inch wide chest and 5,600-word long speeches, you don't write a tweet, you don't discuss it in your big board rooms with people in power, you let people think that Najeeb Ahmed is a nobody; as if he never existed, as if he should never exist at all in the order of affairs.
You don't call out the students who think like you, who beat students who don't think like you – with sticks and bottles and everything blunt and sharp.
You don't say anything when a library is attacked. When book shelves fall on the heads of the students. When their head bleeds from the attacks on their minds which still await to be nourished and put to good use for the country; they might be preparing for their UPSC exams but now they cannot see clearly and have bruises all over their body and mind.
You don't care when your police hit the students with lathis leaving them paralysed, blind in one eye and prone to asthma and respiratory illnesses.
You don't care when they are dragged into police cars and shoved into buses as they can't breathe to save the trees which they are fighting for, to have a breathable future.
You don't care when they fire burning gas at young bodies, crippling them for weeks until they never walk again and get out of the house to protest, to sit on the doors of justice asking to release their fellow comrades.
You do this because you know you can do this; to weaken them; you do this to break their soul by breaking their bodies, one body at a time – one student at a time; one teacher at a time by raiding their houses, compromising their computers, by destroying their bookshelves and confiscating them as evidence. Evidence of their intellectual rigour, their passion, their love for humanity, their literature and their music. You take it all and use it against them.
You don't care when they shoot writers, journalists and arrest English teachers who die in your jail cells waiting to meet their mothers at their funerals.
We know you don't care and you never will.
But somebody has to care – so that it is not their student or friend who disappears one day. Or they themselves.
Where is Najeeb Ahmed?
Sarah Talat teaches English at Azim Premji University, Bangalore. The ideas in her writing only reflect her own and not those of the University.