A Night of Horror

A usual Sunday on the lush campus of O.P. Jindal Global University is an amalgamation of laziness, music, and sports and if any, assignments, but 21^st of February was different. Though the mornings were usual at 11 am followed by soft music being played at the hostel room, the evening had different plans for the students.

Our university has a helipad and thus, had been commandeered by the government to air drop military troops to control situation in Haryana .As the clock struck almost 2 in the afternoon, we heard helicopters approaching ground, so we ran outside and found The Rapid Action Force being air dropped in the fields. The Jat protest in Haryana had reached a stage where it was not in the strength of the local police to bring the mob under control, the state had already suffered loss of public as well as private property worth 20,000 crore rupees. The jats had gone insane blocking national highways, destroying cars, buses, trucks, houses, factories, railway stations, police stations etc. This crazy community demanding a position in OBC blocked all the major roads bringing people in the state of Haryana. At around 6 in the evening, out came the orders for evacuating the boys hostel for our safety. Nearly 1200 guys were rushed out of hostel blocks and sent to the academic building, there was chaos all around, people rushing out of their rooms with blankets, water bottles, laptops, pillows, bags and what not. Girls were asked to stay shut in their rooms and to not to switch on any lights in the corridor. What made us more unease was that we were not informed about the situation outside our campus; WE WERE SCARED AS HELL! The paths on which we roamed freely around 10 hours ago now had the footsteps of Army personnel in blue uniforms armed with weapons; these people as well as the local police forces armed the main gate of the university; the boys hostel was now dark like a fort that had been abandoned due to an epidemic or something like that. For the first time the plates at the mess were outnumbered, guys sleeping on the floor of classrooms; Girls brought us blankets, pillows and shawls to keep warm; I myself made a bed by attaching to small single sofas. After about 10 hours of complete lockdown, we were allowed to enter our hostel at 4:30 am. All tired up students tottered their way down the paths from the academic building to the hostel in low temperatures, carrying back blankets and all the stuff they had brought. The gates of the hostel seemed like international borders, and us, the survivors of a crisis. Finally, the night ended and we were back in our rooms, on our beds, back in blankets, sleeping.

A similar incident had taken place not long back, just in October at my homeland in Ahmedabad, there, the Patel community had demanded reservation in the OBC section. They had also burnt property worth crores but the difference was, there was no loss of life, the supply of basic necessities to the city was not disrupted and the property destroyed was government owned. To be precise, there, the people had kept the conflict between them and the government, maintaining harmony with the rest of the citizens but here, the property owned by anyone except the Jats was burnt down to ashes; the civilians of Delhi are deprived of water because the Jats have blocked the Munak canal, more than 150 people are already injured and around 20 dead. Army is still deployed in some of the major cities of Haryana to control the psych of the mob.

What I am unable to understand is, why is a community proving itself so incompetent, why is it demanding a reservation as a backward caste when it is educated and economically rich? These things hinder the national growth of our country and so, they have to be stopped and treated with top most priority.

-Siddharth Rai

20153010