'When you become a refugee in your own country…'

The story of Afreen Fatima, a student leader and activist, is turned into a comic by Pulitzer Prize winning team of Fahmida Azim, Anthony Del Col, and Josh Adams

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: In 2022, Fahmida Azim, Anthony Del Col, and Josh Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting for their work on Insider's I Escaped a Chinese Internment Camp documenting the plight of Uyghurs in China. They are following up the award winning work by telling the story of Afreen Fatima, a student activist, whose house was demolished by the UP Government in 2022 following her father’s arrest.

The story begins on June 12th, the day her house was demolished with just a day’s notice, before going back to tell the story of her father Javed Mohammad, a businessman who become the representative of the Muslim community in Allahabad. Javed was often asked by police to negotiate with the community to keep the peace.

Not an alien to hardships, some of his petitions landed Javed in trouble with politicians which at times forced him to go underground. It then traces the story of Fatima as she moves to study at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and was present when the campus was attacked by rightwing goons in May 2018.

The female students were forbidden from protesting, but that didn’t stop them, says Afreen “We broke open the locks and joined the protests. We were enraged.” This incident spurned her into student politics and in December 2019 she contested the student union elections and was elected president.

“I started wearing the hijab to assert my presence as a Muslim woman. I spoke out against Yogi’s hatemongering and threats to Muslims all over India,” she said. Soon after the CAA was passed leading to a fresh spate of protests and violence where many students at her university were injured, one even losing an eye.

When she gave a speech in Allahabad against the violence, a BJP spokesperson tweeted it and it was picked up by the media who telecast the speech with sensational music for the next four days. “I had to take a late-night train journey and one of the passengers started playing one of the news videos of me very loudly. I was very scared and didn’t move from my seat for the rest of the journey,” Fatima recounts.

In July 2021, she was put up for auction with other Muslim women on the Sulli Deals website, targeting women who were vocal against the government on Twitter. When her father found out, he encouraged her to file a case against the creators of the site, yet no one was charged. Through all the trying times her father had been her pillar of strength but all that changed after Nupur Sharma of the BJP made derogatory comments about the Prophet.

Protests erupted across UP and despite assuring the police that he had no plans to protest, her father was framed as the mastermind of the protests and arrested on June 10. The next day their house was also demolished. Watching the demolition on YouTube, she says “It just scared so many of us. That’s exactly what the exercise was supposed to do, to instill the fear psychosis in you.”

Her father faced police brutality and was charged with the National Security Act (NSA) in July 2022 and was even denied medication for his blood pressure forcing him to spend four nights in the prison hospital. “If someone else had been going through this, I know that Abbu would have been there for that person. It’s our responsibility to voice our opinions and keep talking,” said Fatima.

“All our lives Abbu raised us in this way, that we cannot stay silent over any kind of atrocity. We’re not going to be cowed down and not going to present ourselves as victims. We’re fighters and will always be that”, said Fatima. The wonderfully illustrated story takes her plight to the world and hopefully will help her find justice eventually