And a father’s flower: Gulfisha

Gulfisha Fatima was at the forefront of the anti-CAA protest by women in Jaffrabad, , a congested Muslim locality of Northeast Delhi. Pic/Twitter

Tasneef Hussain breaks down during our conversation, much to my discomfort. In a doleful voice, he says he has been crying ever since his daughter was arrested in April 2020. Over the past two years, his depression, predating the arrest, has deepened, his sugar level often goes haywire, his fainting spells have become more frequent than before, and he has lost 13 kg. On many nights even tranquilisers fail to numb his mind. In his restlessness he listens to nocturnal sounds chime: "You cannot sleep on a bed of ice or thorns."

Agony is as inseparable from Tasneef as his shadow. It has followed him even on his sojourn to his ancestral house in Bijnor, Uttar Pradesh, where he had gone to take a break from Delhi. It cannot be otherwise, for his daughter is his "Kohinoor - his heartbeat, his breath, his third son," his critic of the Urdu couplets he writes. She would earlier come to him in dreams, smiling. But now she does not. And Eid and Bakrid feel as insipid to him as food without salt.

His daughter is Gulfisha Fatima, popularly known as Gul, who became a veritable lodestar to women peacefully protesting against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act on a service lane in Jaffrabad, a congested Muslim locality of Northeast Delhi. Their protest was to no avail, largely because, as American Black leader Stokely Carmichael once said, "In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience."

Driven to desperation by the Modi government's indifference, they responded to a Bharat Bandh call - and shifted their site of protest to Jaffrabad Metro station on the evening of February 22, leading to its closure and the main thoroughfare. On February 23, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kapil Mishra, flanked by a police officer, ominously threatened, in a speech dripping with venom, to evict the protestors from Jaffrabad Metro station.

Soon, Northeast Delhi was burning.

A Muslim faction in Jaffrabad blamed the rioting on Gulfisha, saying had she not led the protestors to the Metro station, there would have been no provocation - and, therefore, no violence. This is an illogical, even facetious, argument, for armed groups cannot be allowed to usurp the state's police powers, disrupt a sit-in and evict protestors - typically a defining trait of fascism.

Gulfisha was arrested.

She has been granted bail in three cases, but she remains confined to Tihar Jail as she has also been booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) for conspiring to foment the riots. It is inordinately difficult to get bail under the UAPA, even though activists Natasha Narwal and Devangana Kalita, facing the same charges as Gulfisha, are out of jail. Perhaps the legal remedy Gulfisha's previous defence team sought for her was misguided.

On the day Gulfisha called from Tihar Jail, which had discontinued physical meetings with inmates because of the COVID-induced lockdown, she said, "Abbu, I am in deep distress." And Tasneef wept, as he does at this point in our conversation. Regaining his composure, he recalls, with bitterness, how Jaffrabad's residents would praise his daughter's lucid, fiery speeches, her steely resolve in standing up for the community - and then, after the outbreak of violence, how they blamed his daughter for the riots. Close relatives severed ties with him. "Her supporters slipped into their holes," he says. His compensation is that not a day or two pass without a stranger solicitously inquiring after Gulfisha.

Tasneef no longer goes to jail to meet Gulfisha, for to talk to her seated behind a glass wall did not match the solace he would experience seeing her in his dreams. He was also haunted by the fear of getting a fainting fit there. She would be unable to come to his assistance. That would break her, wouldn't it? Instead, he goes to the court on the date of her appearance, sits next to her, and holds her hand or runs his hand over her head, in an overflow of love, to bless her. During their meeting on August 20, he showed her the dairy in which he writes couplets. She laughed and said, "You have written this? It is so beautiful."

Tasneef is, in many ways, an exception in Jaffrabad. A grocery store owner, 58 years old now, he gave his daughter the freedom few girls enjoy there. He did not insist she marry as soon as she completed her BA in Urdu, let her do an MBA, and endorsed her decision to try for a PhD degree at 28, before the arrest aborted her quest. He was only heeding the "Prophet's emphasis on education." And no, he never discouraged Gulfisha from joining the anti-CAA protest, only telling her not to dishonour the family and the country. "All my father's brothers left for Pakistan. He did not," he rationalises his love for the nation.
When they meet in court, Gulfisha tells him, "Abbu, take care of yourself. If anything happens to you, I will die." And so, he lives with tranquilisers, amid nocturnal sounds, enduring the painful pricks of memory on sleepless nights, even though aware, as he says, he is an oil lamp without light.

The writer is a senior journalist

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