In the past few months, Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit has seen a number of protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, by the faculty and the students. Now, the members of the university's All India Students' Federation (AISF) unit has taken it a step ahead by publishing a four-page-long newsletter, against the act.
Titled 'Shaheen Bagh', as a tribute to the women protesters of Delhi, the magazine has articles by the students of CUSAT and MES College, Ponnani, apart from SSUS. "Usually, we see women, especially Muslim women take a backseat during protests. However, that wasn't the case in the anti-NRC-CAA protests. The women were in the forefront. This is our tribute to them," says Sahad A A, the magazine's editor, who is also a post-graduate student of the university. "We're trying to uphold the spirit of secularism through this initiative," he adds.
Apart from the Shaheen Bagh protests, the attack on the JNU students by a group of masked attackers was also an inspiration to bring out this newsletter, says Sahad. "We have been planning this since the day the attacks happened in JNU. The initial idea was to distribute it only to the students of our university, but we later thought of involving students from other colleges too, so that it gets a greater reach," he says. The editorial has printed 2,500 copies of 'Shaheen Bagh' until now. "The students worked really hard towards bringing this out. The magazine's editor-n-chief Sadique N even travelled to Thiruvananthapuram to interview the State Secretary of CPI," adds Sahad.
The students are also planning to get the articles translated to Hindi. "We want the most number of people to read it. Anas Karim, the publisher is now translating all the articles and we will soon upload them online," says Sahad. The newsletter was released on Wednesday, by Dr K M Sheeba, a faculty in the university's history department.
