The wide stairs leading to my classroom sing melodies, sweeter than livelier dawn choruses. Years after leaving the campus, they come to life for me whenever I visit my alma mater and echo with songs of thrushes and tits as they used to do when boys and girls sitting on the steps filled the air with their musical chirrups. Many ‘full beautiful—a faery’s child’ on the stairs made some boys unmindfully shout “Was this the face” and some others to sigh ‘la belle dame sans merci.’ Some boys forlornly sitting under the canopies of apple trees, with packs of Charminar cigarettes and matchboxes in front sang songs of Majaz and someone else squatting under the scorching sun in front of the Hindi Department voiced melancholic Bollywood numbers. Lot many burdened with a history of the land, and freedom talked campus politics.
Indeed, campus days are fabulous having their romance that hardly vanishes with time. The old albums of B and W pictures of picnics and parties with edges eaten by moths are as refreshing as an ode of Keats or a ghazal of Mirza Ghalib. Old books, a Shakespearean drama, a Dicken’s novel, and an anthology of poems with pale dustcovers on shelves with notes penciled on the margins by lovely “friends” are precious souvenirs tell stories that at ripe age reenergize the lethargic nerves.
Some days back, a classmate, Mohammad Maqbool Bhat sent me a newspaper cutting that he has preserved as a precious possession for past forty-four years. It took me on a trek to our student activism days, when Kashmir University had made to headlines for wrong reasons. Thanks to what I had once called as “carbon copy journalism and reporting,” all New Delhi newspapers had described our genuine demand for conducting examinations on time as the handiwork of the Plebiscite Front- then words like ‘secessionist and separatists’ were not part of the ‘dominant discourse.’ The then stringers reporting for Delhi newspapers from sat in the room, one typed a story with a sufficient number of carbon copies. And same were filled at the telegraph office.
In October 1972, students of our batch had got admission in various departments. Those days semester system had not been introduced, and the post-graduation course was for two years, the first year named as ‘previous’ and second year as ‘final.’ Till April 1974, almost for two years even examinations for the ‘previous’ were not conducted. It was part of the devious policy of the government for reducing the number of unemployed postgraduates on the streets- a couple of earlier batches had already taken to streets. For conducting examinations more than once, student representatives called on the Vice Chancellor, Mr. R.H. Chishti, a bureaucrat. Meetings with him were of no avail. In protest against not holding the examinations on time, all the students sat outside the Vice Chancellor’s office. To compensate the time lost students demanded to hold an examination of previous and final together. To articulate their demand, they raised slogan, ‘we want D.P’ (direct promotion). At about 4 P.M. the Vice-Chancellor called a meeting of the heads of all department and administration. One of the boys informed them, ‘we will not let you go till you’ concede to our demand’ and locked the door of the committee. At about 6 P.M. the BSF and the CRP cordoned the University. The girls sitting on the protest were told to go to their homes. A couple of student representatives talked to Chief Minister, Mir Qasim on the telephone from the Vice Chancellors room but talks failed. At 8 P.M. police swooped on students, some students escaped the dragnet, and about fifty were arrested and lodged in different police stations. Those detained included A. R. Wani, Meraj-u-Din Qureshi, Syed Arshad Hussain, Mustafa Sheikh, Surinder Raina, Girdhari Lal Jogi, Harilal Razdan, Zahoor Ahmed Hashmi, Altaf Hussain Wani, Fayaz Ahmad, Mohammad Maqbool Bhat, Amin Wani, Iftikhar Banday, Zahid Ghulam Mohammad, Abdul Hamid Bhat, Khurshid Ahmad Tarzan, Sheikh Rafiq, Shiban Dhar, Gupkari, Jeelani Ashai, Zeeshan Fazil and Ishtiaq Ahmad. Some of the boys were released next day, and some were shifted to the Central Jail, Srinagar and released unconditionally after a couple of days. After few days the conceded the demand of students, and introduced semester and carry on the system.