Inside Azam Khan's Cell, According to His Wife

A Fifteen-Day Ultimatum

The Rampur Development Authority has ordered 38 of the 40 buildings at Mohammad Ali Jauhar University demolished within fifteen days, declaring them illegal and warning that if the university does not tear them down itself, the authority will do it and bill the institution for the cost. Nous spoke to Dr. Tazeen Fatma near her home in Rampur, close to the district jail where her husband, the jailed Samajwadi Party leader Mohammad Azam Khan, and their son Abdullah Azam are both held. Fatma, herself a former Rajya Sabha member and MLA who has spent roughly eighteen months in jail over the years, discussed both the demolition notice and the conditions of her husband's detention.

'I Never Thought It Would Be Demolished'

Fatma told Nous her first reaction to the notice was disbelief that the university could actually be torn down, describing a deep personal faith that a project built, in her words, with complete honesty could not simply be erased. She pointed to the students themselves as evidence of how much of the campus predates any outside money: many, she said, mixed cement and laid brick by hand during construction, working through blistering heat as volunteers rather than hired labour. The funds that built the university, she said, came from public donations across communities — from Hindu and Sikh neighbours as much as from Muslims — and neither she nor Azam Khan draws any income from the institution today.

A Notice Meant to Humiliate

Fatma described the circumstances of her husband's arrest in detail. When Azam Khan was first taken into custody, aides tried to send his luggage in after him; jail staff refused to accept it in its original bags, insisting everything be repacked into cloth bundles instead. Khan, she said, refused food and water until his belongings were let in unaltered. She described him sleeping on the floor without a bed, troubled by mosquitoes, having had to arrange his own toilet seat, and going without any cooling arrangement through extreme summer heat.

Fatma said the arrest was intended not only to imprison her husband but, in her assessment, to humiliate him — a leader once powerful enough in Uttar Pradesh politics to be called arrogant, now reduced, she suggested, to demonstrate a message aimed squarely at Muslims: that even someone of Azam Khan's stature could be broken, so that no one else would dare speak with the same confidence again.

A Party's Quiet Distance

Asked why Samajwadi Party leaders as prominent as Akhilesh Yadav and Dimple Yadav had been far more visible on other causes in Delhi and Parliament than in Rampur itself, Fatma said at first that she had no complaint, then acknowledged the gap was plain to anyone in the city — she noted that a local SP member of parliament had been stopped by police at the university gate and turned back, and that ordinary residents raised the absence with her unprompted. She said she had received word that party MPs and MLAs, and eventually Akhilesh Yadav himself, would visit, but wondered aloud whether his ambitions had shifted from becoming chief minister again to something larger. She was careful to add that neither she nor her husband had ever asked the party leadership for anything, not even when Mulayam Singh Yadav led it, and that whatever standing Azam Khan holds today rests on his own record and integrity rather than favours granted.

'He Will Fight For It'

Asked whether her only hope now was for her husband and son to come home and rest, Fatma said no — she expected Azam Khan, once released, to keep working for the university's future rather than settle into quiet retirement, calling it the project into which he had poured his whole life. The interview closed with her repeating what has become the family's public defence of the institution: that it was never built for Azam Khan's own family, since none of his relatives study there, but for the university's roughly three thousand students, whose education, she said, should not be made to pay the price of a political dispute.