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Siwan (Bihar): Only one family in Dumrahar Bujurg had the audacity to publicly declare their dream.

They wanted their son to don the olive green of the fauj. If not the fauj, then at least the khaki of the police. They named him after the dream – Bullet Kumar Gond.

The village, less than 40 km away from the city of Siwan but a journey of nearly two hours due to its remoteness, had not seen anyone from Kumar’s Gond community become a fauji. Some upper-caste men from the village had, but not Gond people.

His friends in the village and school laughed at his name. Better friends advised him to change it. He would refuse – his grandparents had named him because they dreamed his dream. He was going to make it happen.

“Naam mein kya hai. Mera kaam se jaaniyega na,” he would urge his friends. Why fuss with the name, watch out for my work.

He delivered on the promise. Last year, he cleared the physical fitness test in the Border Security Force for the head constable’s role. Then this year, like a man obsessed with his dream, he cleared it again for the second time, this time for the sweeper’s post in the BSF. He wanted to be in uniform, and he couldn’t wait.

On September 1, he was going to jump over the final hurdle – the written test that he was confident of clearing.

On July 25, a bullet from another man in the very uniform he aspired to be in shattered his dream forever.

Bullet is one of the three victims injured when Bihar police officials opened fire at crowds using AK-47 rifles and pistols when student outfits had called for a shutdown to demand Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation.

Bullet wasn’t even a part of the protest; he was shot when he was on his way to obtain a government caste document for his BSF exam. Unaware that student bodies had called a protest that day, Bullet spent nearly two hours in reaching Siwan from his village, only to be shot by a police official standing a few hundred metres away from him.

He doesn’t know why they had to shoot him. “The protests were not violent at all,” he told The Wire outside his home. “In fact, I had walked past the policemen just minutes ago. If the protests were so violent, would they have allowed me to enter that area and walk around?”

Across the country, hundreds of thousands of student protesters staged demonstrations in the week starting July 20, when the Delhi police assaulted young protesters in Jantar Mantar for demanding Union minister Pradhan’s resignation.

Students were........

© The Wire