Imtiaz Alam, an event organiser and PR professional who lives in Delhi's Jamia Nagar, is flooded with offers of help for the students of the city's Jamia Millia Islamia University. Alam, who is in his late thirties, is assisting students find alternative accommodation and extending other help that they may need as the varsity campus is out of bounds for students and semester examinations stand deferred in the aftermath of the student protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the brutal Delhi police crackdown that followed.

An uneasy calm prevails in Jamia Nagar, a predominantly Muslim locality where the university is located. But Alam is pleasantly surprised by the show of support that has poured in from a wide section of the people against the police action at the Jamia campus. "People from all walks of life and communities have come forward to help the students," he says.

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Students recount the horror of December 15 evening, when a seemingly peaceful protest went out of control, leading to the torching of buses, vandalism of public property and police storming the Jamia campus, firing teargas shells and lathi-charging students. Meeran Haider, 29, a PhD research scholar at Jamia's Centre for Management Studies, says 95 per cent of the students were protesting around the campus and perhaps only a handful were at the protests in New Friends Colony, which turned violent. "We are protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act as it is against democracy and the country's secular and socialist character," says Haider, who is busy working with other students to chart out the future course of the protests that have spread to campuses across the country.

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Nabiya Khan, a 24-year-old student from a private university, was pursuing a master's degree at Jamia until last year. "Nothing had prepared me for what happened on December 15. I was at the campus. The students were protesting and then the police started the lathi-charge," she says. "People started running inside the campus. We were so sure that the police will not enter, but they did. It was pitch dark. The lights were out and the police were beating up everyone." Khan describes CAA as an "organised way of turning India into a Hindu rashtra where Muslims would be treated as second-class citizens".

In solidarity, students of elite colleges have come together to stand up against how the Delhi police dealt with the Jamia protesters. According to India Today's Data Intelligence Unit, at last count, 22 campuses across the country had joined the agitation.

History shows how student-led protests can galvanise quickly to reflect a national cause or sentiment, and governments can afford to be blas at their own peril. Some of the most defining protests in the country have emanated from universities. Several prominent leaders of the present government are products of the protests against Emergency imposed in 1975 by then prime minister Indira Gandhi-several cabinet ministers were college students at the time. The list includes the late Arun Jaitley and late Sushma Swaraj. They went to prison and were hounded by the police of the day. The Emergency period, from June 1975 to January 1977, is remembered for the suspension of civil rights. Even today, any dark phase or incident in India's democracy is referred to as an 'Emergency-like' situation.

Jamia is a centrally funded university with 50 per cent of seats reserved for Muslim students. While the police excesses at the campus have given critics of the Narendra Modi government a handle to paint it as 'anti-minority', sympathisers of the government point out that the anti-CAA protests are mainly concentrated around universities with a high concentration of Muslim students, notably Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia.

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In many quarters, the protests are being seen as a tipping point for the Muslim community as a series of developments this year have heightened its vulnerabilities-the legislation scrapping the practice of triple talaq, which has not gone down well with hardliners in the community; the withdrawal of special status of Jammu and Kashmir and its downgrading from a state to a Union territory; and the Supreme Court's ruling on the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid title dispute. What has certainly not helped is the fact that the ruling BJP does not have a single Muslim member in the Lok Sabha.

Students at Jamia Millia say they are in solidarity with the protesters in Assam, who are up in arms against the CAA, albeit for different reasons. The protests in Assam are driven by the onslaught of Bengali-speaking settlers from Bangladesh and other countries, who, locals say, are putting their livelihoods and culture at peril.

Students at Jamia say CAA uses religion as a discriminatory tactic and have vowed to continue the protests till the Act is revoked. In the past, galvanised protests by Muslims have forced overturns of even court verdicts. In the Shah Bano case, while the Supreme Court in 1985 ruled in favour of maintenance for the divorced Muslim woman petitioner, the Rajiv Gandhi government gave in to pressure from Muslim hardliners and enacted a law that shifting the onus of maintenance to the relatives or the waqf board. In 1988, the central government banned Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses owing to protests that it projected Islam in a derogatory way.

In the case of CAA, the Supreme Court on December 17 redirected petitions against the legislation to the respective high courts. No protests are apolitical and often end up being exploited by political parties. Whether it is the alleged incitement of violence in Jamia Nagar by a Delhi MLA of the Aam Aadmi Party or the petitions filed against CAA by leaders of political parties, a protest is an opportunity best exploited for political gains.

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Given the intensity of the anti-CAA protests, the Union government cannot afford to brazen it out. Rather, it needs to show humility and engage in dialogue with the protesting groups, take steps to dispel apprehensions of targeted religious discrimination in the garb of CAA, and prevent politics of polarisation over the contentious issue.

It's tragic that with CAA, the government appears to have committed the same blunder it did when it announced demonetisation in November 2016-lack of groundwork.

While the Hindu-right argues that the country has become accustomed to the politics of entitlement and CAA is a shake-up of a system entrenched in appeasement politics, the ruling BJP, at the moment, runs the risk of turning the aspirational youth away. The same youth that Prime Minister Modi strategically designed his electoral pitch of development and jobs for. A segment that is conscious of its rights, values freedom and has faith in the India story.

Perception has the power to eclipse reality. At the moment, the perception seems to be that the government is bulldozing its way through crucial structural shifts in India. That this has happened before is not good enough reason, because times have changed. In the age of information explosion, every move is a public act. And a state perceived to be aggressive rarely comes off looking good when put face-to-face with agitating students.

FROM THE MAGAZINE | We, the People | ProtestsALSO READ | At the stroke of the midnight, how universities across India united for Jamia studentsANALYSIS | Jamia protest: Can police enter university campuses?ALSO READ | Several students missing after crackdown on AMU protesters: Fact-finding teamALSO WATCH | In Depth: How students' anti-CAA protests spread across the country

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Citizenship Amendment Act: The anatomy of a protest |India Today Insight - India Today