From Jamia to MIT

by Manal Zia


“The university is like a mini-corporate-government, where there has been a huge amount of training in how not to deal with relevant issues. But a good education should make manifest the organic, living links between abstract principles and individual and group behavior. So when you talk of democracy, you practice it. When you talk of freedom, you live it. Because the function of good intellectual work is to apprehend reality, in order to change it.”                                                               – Eqbal Ahmad, “Revolution in the Third World”                                 

In December 2019, the streets of Delhi trembled under the weight of student dissent. I remember the air being thick with the smell of burning rubber and tear gas, the shouts of protesters blending with the sharp sounds of police batons against flesh. Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI), my alma mater, became the epicenter of resistance against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), laws that threatened the very existence of Muslims in India.¹ The protests were met with an iron fist: police brutality, tear gas, arbitrary detentions, and an armed invasion of our library. The violence against students, whose only weapons were books and placards, echoed a broader history of state repression against minorities. As I write this from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where I now study, I cannot ignore the eerie similarities between the suppression of dissent at Jamia and the brutal response to the pro-Palestine protests and encampment at MIT.

At both institutions one in a postcolonial nation grappling with the legacy of Partition, the other in the belly of the empire students stood up against injustice. In Delhi, we marched against the subversion of citizenship laws; in Cambridge, students demand an end to the university's complicity in Israeli apartheid. At Jamia, the police stormed the campus, thrashing students and dragging them out of libraries and dormitories. At MIT, while the response has been subtler, students face administrative crackdowns, suspensions, and relentless surveillance for merely advocating for Palestinian liberation. 
The contrast in methods of violence versus bureaucratic suppression reveals how state and institutional power shapeshifts, donning different masks in different contexts.
 It wears the face of democracy in India, the face of liberal academia in the U.S But the essence remains the same: control, discipline, and the erasure of resistance. 

To draw parallels between India and Israel is not an intellectual exercise but a lived experience. India’s deepening alliance with Israel militarily, technologically, and ideologically has been central to its evolving methods of suppressing dissent. The shared expertise in surveillance, crowd control, and counterinsurgency has allowed the Indian state to refine its tactics against Muslims, Dalits, Kashmiris, and leftist activists. Israeli spyware, drones, and security strategies are used in Kashmir; in turn, India has voted in favor of Israel at the UN, betraying its historical solidarity with Palestine.

 

The repression at Jamia and MIT, then, is not isolated but part of a transnational network of suppression. The tear gas canisters fired at Jamia students bore the same markings as those used against Palestinians in the West Bank. The rhetoric used against dissenters—'anti-national,' 'terrorist,' 'foreign agents' is a global script, repeated from Delhi to Jerusalem to Washington. Surveillance technologies developed for occupation in Palestine find their way into Indian police departments. It is no surprise that Hindu nationalist groups in India and Zionist organizations in the U.S. employ strikingly similar strategies to discredit activists, painting any critique of the state as treasonous.

Figures like Umar Khalid, a former JNU student leader imprisoned under draconian anti-terror laws, embody the cost of speaking truth to power in India². His case mirrors the targeting of Palestinian intellectuals and activists, whose words are often deemed more dangerous than weapons. 
The erasure of dissenting voices is not just about incarceration but about historical amnesia and a deliberate attempt to write resistance out of the national narrative.

As a Muslim woman in India, I grew up with the awareness that my visibility was precarious. 
We were visible when the state needed a scapegoat, invisible when we demanded rights. 
At MIT, I saw this pattern replicated with Palestine. The movement was hyper-visible when it could be vilified, erased when it demanded justice. One must turn to Eqbal Ahmad, a towering figure whose intellectual legacy remains profoundly relevant today. Born in British India in 1933, Ahmad’s early years were shaped by the trauma of colonial rule and the Partition of 1947, which violently fractured South Asia. Ahmad had an uncanny ability to recognize patterns in oppression, linking struggles in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa long before such solidarities were widely acknowledged. He was one of the earliest critics of U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam, a fierce opponent of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine, and an advocate for self determination in Algeria and Kashmir. Reading Ahmad today, I find echoes of his insights in the struggles I have witnessed firsthand. He wrote about the "time of monsters", a world where old certainties collapse, where fascism emerges in new forms, and where state violence is normalized.³ He insisted that the role of intellectuals and activists was not just to critique but to build alternatives. He saw Palestine not just as a site of struggle but as a lens through which to understand the broader politics of imperialism and resistance. His writings remind us that the struggles of Jamia and MIT, of India and Palestine, are interconnected if not the same.


In a world increasingly marked by manufactured divisions, moments of solidarity emerge in the most unexpected places. The echoes of 'Azaadi', a rallying cry in Kashmir were heard in the chants of Jamia protesters. The Palestinian keffiyeh, a symbol of resistance, is worn with pride by student activists in India. The alliances that form in these struggles are often invisible, hidden beneath layers of state propaganda and historical revisionism. Yet they persist, resilient and unbroken. As I stand between these two worlds, Jamia and MIT, I see not just a contrast but a continuum. 
The disguises of power, the shapeshifting nature of oppression, and the shared tools of resistance all point to a singular truth: that the fight for justice is global. 
Whether in the alleyways of South East Delhi or the halls of Cambridge, the question remains the same—who gets to speak, who is silenced, and who writes the history that follows? The answer, as always, lies in the streets, in the encampments, in the whispers of those who refuse to be erased. 

1. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/12/why-is-indias-citizenship-amendment-act-so-controversial
2. https://caravanmagazine.in/law/the-case-against-umar-khalid-and-the-state-strategy-against-dissent
3. https://www.jamhoor.org/read/eqbal-ahmad-for-a-time-of-monsters