It was a Friday in September 2008, deep in the holy month of Ramadan, when the sound of gunfire ripped through the heart of Jamia Nagar. I was an undergraduate student at Jamia Millia Islamia then, barely twenty, still clumsy in my ideas of politics, faith and responsibility. Until that day, my world was small and sheltered, revolving around the university canteen, hostel corridors, late-night walks in Zakir Nagar, and the buoyant sense that life would keep unfolding without disruption. Politics was something that happened at a distance, in television studios or in Parliament; religion was something that my family practised at home, while for me it was a private, almost background rhythm, not something I wore on my sleeve. That Friday, meant to be spent in prayer and fasting, changed all of it. The Batla House “encounter” unfolded not just as a police operation in a cramped lane, but as an incision that cut through our lives, our locality, and the very meaning of belonging in this country.
I remember the moment I first heard of it. Word spread on campus that there had been a shootout in L-18, a modest building just a short walk from where many of us lived and studied. Two young men, Atif Amin and Mohammad Sajid, were said to have been killed; another, Mohammad Saif, was arrested. The Delhi Police claimed they were members of the Indian Mujahideen, allegedly behind the Delhi serial blasts. Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma of the Special Cell had died in the operation, and the news channels carried images of his funeral draped in the tricolour, narrating the police version as if it were the only possible truth. But within Jamia, and across civil society, suspicion rose almost immediately. Students, teachers, activists, neighbours — we all felt the tremor of disbelief. The story as told by the police did not sit easily with us, and the questions multiplied faster than the answers could be contained.
What unsettled me first was the timing — a Friday in Ramadan. Many of us would have been at prayers, but that day I skipped, lingering instead in my hostel room, distracted by the lethargy of the fast and the aimlessness of youth. I sometimes wonder if that decision was pure coincidence or instinct, because what followed was a day that drained the innocence out of us. The irony has never left me: the sacred stillness of a Ramadan Friday overtaken by sirens, bullets, and an “encounter” that still sits unsettled in public memory. Even now, seventeen years later, when I step into a mosque on a Friday, a fragment of that day floats back — the knowledge that faith itself could be turned into a backdrop for violence.
Within hours of the shootout, our university turned restless. Jamia Millia Islamia, a stone’s throw away from L-18, suddenly found itself under siege in a way that went beyond the physical. Police vans patrolled the lanes, journalists swarmed the streets, and neighbours whispered in doorways. But the real siege was psychological: the abrupt realisation that our names, our faces, our very identities could be recast as suspicious by mere proximity to an event we had nothing to do with. Friends began carrying their ID cards at all times, as if a laminated piece of paper could shield them from arbitrary arrest. Parents called anxiously from small towns, begging their sons to keep a low profile. And everywhere, in canteens and tea stalls, one question persisted: what had really happened inside L-18?
Civil society groups quickly raised the alarm. The Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association (JTSA) documented glaring loopholes in the police version. Why were there no independent witnesses present during the raid, in violation of established guidelines? Why did the number of bullets fired, as mentioned in the police FIR, not tally with the forensic findings? How could the sequence of events described by the Special Cell contain such contradictions in timing? Even the very death of Inspector Sharma, hailed as martyrdom, raised questions — his injuries did not align with the trajectory the police suggested. Yet, when the National Human Rights Commission submitted its report in 2009, it cleared the police of any wrongdoing without even a proper on-site investigation. It was as if an official lid had been clamped down on the possibility of doubt, while on the ground the unease continued to spread.
One vignette that remains etched in my memory is the candlelight vigil that students organised near the university gate. Hundreds gathered, some holding placards demanding an independent judicial probe, others simply standing in silence. The flicker of candles cast long shadows on the faces around me, faces marked by both fear and defiance. I remember the words of a professor who, breaking his habitual reserve, told us that what had been lost was not just two young lives, or one police officer’s, but the very possibility of trust between citizens and the state. His voice cracked as he spoke, and I realised for the first time how political violence seeps into the personal, how it shakes even those who have built their lives around books and classrooms. That night, walking back through Zakir Nagar, the streets felt altered, every alley haunted by the echo of gunfire, every doorway hiding anxious eyes.
For Jamia students, the ”encounter” became a watershed. In the weeks that followed, several Muslim youths were picked up, questioned, or detained. Their families faced humiliation, their careers were derailed, their lives upended by the mere weight of suspicion. Some of them were fellow students. Overnight, they were transformed into “terror suspects” in the public imagination. The media played its part, splashing their names and faces across screens with barely concealed triumph, feeding into the stereotype that Muslim youth were predisposed to violence. I began noticing how, on buses and in markets, people looked at us differently once they got to know that we were from Jamia, their glances laced with doubt. It was as if the encounter had licensed an entire society to see us through the lens of fear.
A few weeks later, I travelled to Azamgarh with friends, a journey that has never left me. The town had by then been christened “Atankgarh” by a propaganda media, reducing an entire district to a byword for terror. We went to meet the families of those arrested or killed in the name of the Indian Mujahideen. I remember sitting in a modest home, its walls peeling, its courtyard shaded by a neem tree, listening to a mother speak of her son who had left for Delhi to study but never returned. Her words were broken, but her eyes carried a clarity that no official report could erase — a mixture of grief and disbelief, as though the very ground beneath her had betrayed her. That visit made me realise the cruelty of collective stigmatisation: how entire communities could be branded arbitrarily, how grief itself could be criminalised.
Meanwhile, the Congress government of the day chose expedience over justice. Manmohan Singh, addressing the National Integration Council, admitted that Muslims lived under fear after every “terror attack,” for the needle of suspicion always turned towards them. Yet those words, welcome as they sounded, were never translated into action. No independent judicial inquiry was ordered into Batla House; no attempt was made to address the glaring contradictions. For a party that claimed secular credentials, this silence was damning. It was communal politics by another name — the politics of appeasing a majoritarian narrative while paying lip service to minority concerns. For many of us, it marked the beginning of disillusionment, a recognition that secular promises in Indian politics often came hollow.
The encounter also altered my own trajectory. Until then, I had remained detached from politics, more invested in friendships and fleeting pleasures than in ideology. But in the aftermath, I found myself drawn towards the Left, captivated by its rhetoric of resistance, its language of solidarity, its insistence that state power must always be questioned. I marched in protests, joined discussions, immersed myself in pamphlets and speeches. The Left gave me a vocabulary to articulate my anger, a community to channel my alienation. Yet, as years passed, my politics too evolved, sometimes hardened, sometimes softened, often bruised by reality. Seventeen years down the line, I no longer carry the same certainties. The Left itself has fragmented, its relevance diminished, and my own beliefs have been forced to accommodate disillusionment. But the seed was planted that Ramadan Friday in 2008, when the world I knew cracked open.
Not all the memories are political; some are deeply personal, marked by the quiet onset of despair. In the months after the encounter, I began experiencing what I only later recognised as bouts of depression. Sleep eluded me, food lost its taste, the company of friends felt strained. Every time I passed by Batla House, a heaviness pressed upon me. The sense of being constantly watched, of being always one step away from suspicion, gnawed at my confidence. Conversations with my parents grew clipped, as I could not bring myself to describe the atmosphere of dread that had engulfed our lives. In the silences of my hostel room, I felt an inexplicable emptiness, as though the world outside had intruded too far into my inner self. Looking back, I know that the encounter was not the sole cause, but it was certainly the trigger — the moment when fear settled into the marrow of my being.
The years that followed saw the pattern repeat in different forms across the country. Draconian laws like AFSPA in the North-East and Jammu & Kashmir had long normalised the logic of impunity, where ”encounters” were routine, accountability absent. Batla House, in a sense, brought that distant reality into our neighbourhood, into the capital city, into our very university’s backyard. It taught us what others had known for decades: that the state could script violence and then sanctify it as law. The protests we staged, the petitions we signed, the speeches we made — they were attempts to reclaim dignity in the face of erasure, to assert that our lives could not be reduced to footnotes in a police file. But they were also acts tinged with futility, for the government’s ears remained deaf, and the mainstream public seemed all too willing to accept the official story.
Seventeen years later, I find myself revisiting that Friday not as a student but as someone who has lived through cycles of disillusionment. The young man who once believed that protest could bend the arc of justice now knows how easily truth can be buried under layers of bureaucracy and political expedience. Yet the memory of that day refuses to fade. I can still see the faces lit by candlelight, still hear the whispered fears in hostel corridors, still recall the desolate eyes of a mother in Azamgarh. And I can still feel the irony of that Ramadan Friday, when faith was supposed to anchor us, but fear drove me away from prayer. In some ways, I have never stopped living that day.
The Batla House “encounter” was not just an event; it was an atmosphere, a rupture, a turning point. It made us confront the fragility of citizenship, the precariousness of identity, the duplicity of politics. It reshaped my friendships, redirected my politics, and deepened my struggles with mental health. Above all, it left me with a burden of memory that no official report or political speech can erase.
For those who insist on treating it as a closed chapter, a settled matter, I can only say: some wounds do not close. They continue to throb, seventeen years later, every Friday, every Ramadan, every time the word “encounter” flashes on a news screen. And perhaps that is the truest legacy of that day — not the police version, not the NHRC’s closure, not the Congress government’s silence, but the indelible mark it left on ordinary lives like mine, where memory and fear have fused into one.
