A thick film of dust sits on every bench facing the stage at Students’ Union Hall, Aligarh Muslim University. In 2018, the hall, the venue of nearly a century of impassioned student union campaign speeches on nationalism and identity, fell silent. The chandeliers gathered cobwebs, the bulbs went off, the crowds that gathered on the lawns below dispersed, and the room was put under lock and key.Eight years later, with AMU set for its first student union election since 2018, the grand, ornate hall, once the heart of its student activities, has been reopened. On a Thursday afternoon, days ahead of the November 5 election, a group of workers is busy at work, replacing and testing the bulbs in the three-tiered chandeliers that sparkle in the sunlight that beams in through the hall’s open windows. On the stage are a table and three carved wooden chairs. Outside, the silver paint on the Persianate lattice-work of the railing is still wet.Hours later, around 130 km away, at a university in Delhi, scenes of jubilation erupted. After a 19-day student-led agitation, the administration of Jamia Millia Islamia had agreed to hold its first union elections since 2005. Heavy security around Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi during the student protests demanding the restoration of the Jamia Millia Islamia Students’ Union (JMISU) (Express Photo by Gajendra Yadav)For over 40 days, AMU and Jamia — arguably the most storied Muslim higher education institutes in the country, both tied inextricably to the freedom movement, one born of the other — were roiled by agitation. Students on both campuses had made, and won, the same demand: the revival of elected student representation.The birth of JamiaFormer Rajya Sabha MP Mohammed Adeeb, who was president of the AMU Students’ Union (AMUSU) in 1967-68, has a unique hobby: reading minutes of old union meetings. ⠀On October 12, 1920, the Students’ Union Hall, then called Siddons Union Hall, was roaring, he says, looking back at the minutes of what was a particularly raucous meeting of the student body that was split in the middle.One camp wanted to remain under British patronage, which the institute, then the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College, received at the time. The other was not willing to study under the Union Jack. Under the larger shadow of the anti-colonial Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movements, Gandhi had come to persuade the first group to boycott English patronage and join the national movement.Story continues below this adHe was met with hooting, recalls Adeeb. Also present were the influential Ali brothers, Shaukat and Mohammed, who were leaders of the Khilafat Movement and alumni of the college, and Zakir Hussain, then a popular student leader who would go on to be President of independent India.“When they saw Gandhi humiliated, tears began to roll down their (Ali brothers’) faces,” Adeeb tells The Indian Express.Zakir Hussain, his face reddened and tear-streaked, then took a call. “Twenty-two students walked out of Siddons Hall that day, with Zakir Hussain leading them,” he says. The Jamia Millia Islamia Students’ Union (JMISU) was officially dissolved on March 31, 2006, following a major confrontation involving students, university administration, and heavy police deployment (Express archive)Merely 17 days later, this group of nationalists from MAO and some of their teachers founded Jamia Millia Islamia at Krishna Kothi, in Lal Diggi, Aligarh. The university would eventually move to Delhi. Back in Aligarh, the departure of the nationalists would accelerate the transformation of the British-backed MAO to AMU, a university with a distinct identity-based nationalism.The story of the two universities, one born of the other, gets recounted on both campuses every time the discussion veers to the revival of student politics.Story continues below this ad“The establishment of Jamia itself was led by students. So whenever I see student protests in Jamia, be it the 2019 protests against CAA-NRC, or the recent ones for students’ union, I am reminded of the students who strived to establish Jamia,” says Sabiha Zaidi, former Director of Jamia’s Premchand Archives and Literary Centre.Mohibul Haque, who teaches political science at AMU, believes the rebellion of 1920 was an inevitable outcome of AMU’s founding vision to nurture Muslim leaders.“Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (MAO founder) has often been invoked to delegitimise political activism on the campus, by saying that he did not want the campus to be politicised. But, Mohammad Ali Jauhar (the younger of the Ali brothers of the Khilafat Movement) had completely rejected this idea. I believe the Khilafat Movement is AMU’s greatest contribution,” says Prof Haque.Those associated with AMU point to the Students’ Union Hall as a testament to the university’s political nature. The Siddon’s Club, set up in 1884 and named after MAO’s founding principal Henry George Impey Siddons, was housed in this building.Story continues below this adInspired by debating clubs in British universities, the club was a platform for students to debate contemporary issues of the time.Haque goes on to quote a rousing Iqbal couplet that Ali Jauhar is said to have recited in memory of MAO founder Sir Khan in 1919-1920. “Tumhi ne qaum ko sikhaya tha ye shor o shar sara, jo iski inteha ham hain to iski ibteda tum the (You were the one who taught the nation this noise and turmoil; if we are its climax/end, then you were its beginning).” Security detail ramped up around Jamia campus amid student protests (Express photo by Gajendra Yadav)The search for leadershipAs candidates for AMU’s student elections head into the last leg of campaigning, a kusum tree by the central library canteen is where most of the activity is. Candidate after candidate arrives here to mingle with the students, holding conversations over samosas and chai. Many of these candidates have never experienced campus politics, leave alone a union election.Amina Irshad, a PhD student in economics who is standing for AMUSU president, is among the few who can claim some “experience”. An undergraduate student at Jamia, she came to AMU as a Master’s student, and considers both campuses her own.Story continues below this ad“When I was in Jamia, I didn’t even know there was something called a union. It was when I came to Aligarh that I found out that there is such a thing, a place where we can put forth our problems. That sense of belonging, that space exclusively for students, gave me a great sense of hope,” says Amina.For many students on the two campuses, the 2019 anti-CAA protests and the state crackdown have shaped their idea of politics and student mobilisation. Jawaharlal Nehru (front row, second from left) on the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) campus with students’ union members“I was a student in AMU then, but I had gone to Jamia to extend support to those protesting there. That’s when I realised how, in the absence of a union, the administration in Jamia was doing whatever it liked. The campus that was supposed to be a safe space for students saw police entering and beating them up,” she says, referring to the crackdown on Jamia on December 15 that year, when forces entered the campus, and lobbed tear gas shells in the library and elsewhere, leaving many of the students injured.Many hope the revival of student politics on the two campuses will eventually fill a critical gap: the lack of leadership in the Muslim community.Story continues below this adThey cite instances of how former student leaders from AMU and Jamia have gone on to join mainstream politics. The names of Samajwadi Party’s Azam Khan, who was honorary secretary of the AMUSU in the 1970s, and former Union Minister Arif Mohammad Khan, who was AMUSU president in 1972-73, come up often in AMU.Fuzail Ayubi, Supreme Court Advocate-on-Record who was active in Jamia’s student politics in the early 2000s, points to SP MLA Kamal Akhtar and former Congress MP Danish Ali as those who made their way to parliamentary politics from the Jamia union.On both campuses, many say that the absence of student politics over the years led to an underrepresentation of Muslims in national and state politics.Uzma Parveen, a PhD student of International Relations in Jamia, who took part in the recent protests, says, “Jamia has historically been associated with public leadership, but without an elected union, that pathway has narrowed. Students lose opportunities to acquire organisational experience, build constituencies and learn how to translate grievances into political demands,” she says.Story continues below this ad The historic red-brick Aligarh Muslim University Students’ Union (AMUSU) Hall located on the university campus (Express photo by Praveen Khanna)Salman Imtiyaz, who was elected AMUSU president in 2018, the last before elections were suspended following the CAA-NRC protests and the Covid pandemic, sees the students’ union as an institutional route into politics for students without resources and connections. He counts himself as one.Imtiyaz contested the 2022 Uttar Pradesh election as the Congress’s candidate from Aligarh city constituency, and is hoping to get a ticket this time as well.Once upon a time, two campusesOld-timers in AMU and Jamia talk of a political culture that once engaged with the larger world.“Before every election, candidates were handed a topic on the spot and given 15 minutes to prepare. There was no Google then. Whoever spoke fearlessly usually won,” says Adeeb, recalling the elections of the 1960s.Story continues below this adSome of the most influential publications, including the Aligarh Gazette and The Aligarian, which carried essays on national and international questions, informed many of these debates. Mahatma Gandhi during a visit to the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) campusMohammad Sajjad, who teaches Modern History at AMU, says, “In the 1970s and 1980s, and even before, the issues of the community and the nation were debated in the student union, in pamphlets, in election speeches. During the JP movement and the Emergency, the campus was in a frenzy. In the 1970s, the fight over the AMU Act and the university’s minority character set off another wave… Jayaprakash Narayan was given a lifetime membership of the AMU union.”Adeeb recalls how, when the Kothari Commission report on higher education came out in 1966, the AMU student union took it apart line by line. How Muslims could contribute to a plural, democratic India was a question asked again and again, he recalls.Others talk about a time when protests raged on the two campuses, but were rarely clamped down.Danish Ali, former Amroha MP who was active in Jamia student politics in the 1990s, recalls those highly charged years. “Our union would invite leaders of different parties to the campus, including during the anti-Mandal protests. A lot of these invitations were in collaboration with the administration,” he says.By the time Soheb Niazi, now a history researcher, joined Jamia in 2007, the union had been suspended.“Though the union was gone, we still had a lot of Left politics on campus. I was in the AISA [the CPI-ML Liberation’s student wing] and we would still be allowed to do meetings with departments on subjects such as the Gujarat riots or Palestine. But it would usually be our JNU comrades who would come and mobilise students. There weren’t really any leaders in Jamia and student politics was viewed negatively. But even this space narrowed and student politics became weaker after the Batla House encounter,” he says, referring to the 2008 encounter in which a Jamia student was killed.While AMU has had more space for student politics than Jamia, considering it held elections until less than a decade ago, though with frequent disruptions, student leader Nashra Naim believes Jamia’s location gave it an advantage.Nashra, who is contesting for the vice-president’s post in AMUSU, says, “Jamia is in Delhi and has exposure to different organisations. They are more politically active, more involved in society. AMU is very different. There are no organisations here… We are missing intellectual leadership.” Painted ballot boxes being readied for the Aligarh Muslim University Students’ Union (AMUSU) Elections 2026–27, which mark the return of elections to the campus after a gap of eight years(Express photo by Praveen Khanna)What next for AMU, JamiaBut for the students who won a hard-fought battle for elections, the question isn’t just of “revival” but also of evolution.Candidates Amina and Nashra are, for instance, also fighting for a space that has never opened up in their university. AMU has never elected a woman in its “chair” posts of president, vice-president and secretary.Nashra says her father, an alumnus of the university, was unsure when she told him she wanted to contest. “I initially said I wanted to contest for president. But my father said it would be very difficult since the campus is unlikely to accept a woman president immediately after the union has been restored. Since I am contesting to win, I decided to aim for vice-president,” she says.But Amina, who is standing for president, says she wanted to tackle established “traditions” head-on. “When you are protesting, everyone wants the support of behano (sisters). But when women contest for vice-president or president, their potential to represent is questioned,” she says. Students gathered around the kusum tree by the central library canteen at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) ahead of the November 5 elections (Express photo by Praveen Khanna)There are other “traditions” that need challenging, say students and professors.AMUSU elections have long run on lobbies, networks drawn from Gonda-Basti, Seemanchal, Purvanchal, Kashmir and Kerala, each with its dedicated votes.It’s the same in Jamia, says a professor who asked not to be named. “Elections and student politics in Jamia have always been cursed by regional groups and divisive, inward-looking politics. It ends in violence or disruption,” he says. “They fight for short-sighted, selfish reasons, often at the cost of the larger Jamia community and its future.”AMU’s Prof Sajjad talks of a bigger concern. “There is a larger pathology among Muslim elites, a silence on issues we see today. Either they are afraid, or they just don’t care…There is a criminal silence, a muted or inadequate response and action, on corruption on campus, and on larger issues that concern minorities: SIR, paper leaks, lynchings.”Many hope the upcoming elections will help some from within the community find that voice.Imtiyaz, the last AMUSU president, says, “I am hopeful that AMU and Jamia are places where new Muslim leadership models will emerge in the near future and revive a morally upright political discourse in India.”