On January 5, during Home Minister Amit Shah’s door-to-door campaign in Delhi, a video went viral on social media, of two women shouting slogans against the citizenship law from the balcony of their apartment in Lajpat Nagar. After Shah left the area, a mob landed at the women’s flat.
Yesterday, multiple reports emerged that the women, Surya Rajappan and her flatmate, had been evicted from their flat. However, Rajappan told Newslaundry that while her landlord had indeed asked her to leave while she was sloganeering, the police later told her the landlord was willing to let her stay. She and her roommate were “too scared” to crosscheck with the landlord, and chose to leave of their own volition.
Rajappan, 28, is a lawyer who practises at the Delhi High Court. This was her first time sloganeering, she says. “I never attended any protests during school or college,” she adds. “I did go to several of the recent protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, but it was the first time in my life that I initiated a slogan on my own.”
Rajappan was born and brought up in Delhi. She graduated with a degree in economics from Delhi University in 2010, and then studied law at Delhi University.
On the night of January 4, she heard about Shah’s door-to-door campaign, intended to drum up support for the citizenship law. She didn’t think it would happen but the next morning, she saw the streets of her colony being cleaned and cars towed.
So, Rajappan says, she found a white bedsheet and spray-painted anti-CAA slogans on it. She hung it from the balcony railing of her third-floor flat. When Shah arrived in her neighbourhood, she shouted, “We reject CAA.” Everyone, except Shah, looked up.
Rajappan says the immediate backlash came from a neighbour, who said, “Naak kata di, kya batameez ladki hai (She shamed us, what an insolent girl).”
Then her landlord, who was also present, began to shout at her, saying she would be evicted. Five minutes after she sloganeered, she claimed, her landlord, his son, and a few other men, including two police constables, started banging on her door. Meanwhile, a large group of people had gathered on the road below.
Rajappan “triple-locked” her door, she says. Scared, she called lawyer friends, her father, and telephoned some contacts she has in the police. Within 30 minutes, 15 lawyers arrived at her house and the group banging on her door began heckling them. The police were polite, she says, but did nothing.
The police locked the main door to the ground floor of the building, so no one could enter or leave. It was only three hours later that they allowed Rajappan’s father to go upstairs with a police constable and meet her. Rajappan says she and her roommate filed a police complaint.
According to Rajappan, the police told her that when they informed the landlord about the police complaint, he said Rajappan could stay on in the flat. But Rajappan says she knew the mob outside her door comprised her own neighbours, and she was “too scared” to crosscheck with the landlord directly. So, both women decided to leave.
What does Rajappan think about students protesting against the citizenship law across campuses in India? “I think it’s great,” she says. “Protests are important and need to happen. It’s just that I think they don’t have the power to make any real change. Though I do acknowledge it as a means to register one’s voice, but it can’t culminate in anything because the judiciary and lawmakers do not care about public opinion. The judiciary will take into account that something is happening.”
She cites the Nirbhaya gangrape protests in 2012. “People protested and the law was changed only because the law was flawed. If it hadn’t been, the judiciary would have set up an enquiry but would not have changed the law.”
Rajappan is very critical of the Bharatiya Janata Party government, saying she thinks it’s doing exactly what “the Britishers did to us, which is divide and rule”. Unhappy with the current political environment, she says she has even considered leaving the country. Rajappan says this isn’t the India she grew up in. “When I graduated, this isn’t the 2020 India I imagined it to be.” She says she was “patriotic” as a child, even waking up to watch the Republic Day parade on January 26 though she isn’t a “morning person”.
It was only when she went for a protest at Jantar Mantar that she was filled with hope. “It just made me feel so good that there are people like this in this country who think the same way,” she says. She subsequently attended several protests, including the ongoing one at Shaheen Bagh.
How did she muster the courage to protest directly against Amit Shah? Rajappan says it was “more foolishness than courage”. “Had it been just courage, then I would have thought about the downside as well,” she says. “I’m a very opinionated person, and my mind always works on logic.”
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