Support coming in but so is abuse, hate, harassment and uncertainty
New Delhi: An aspiring journalist and an Aligarh Muslim University student, on Friday, publicly announced that he is stopping a crowdsourced fundraiser for his education due to the hate, Islamophobia, and harassment he and his family have been receiving.
"I am ending this fundraiser because my family, my father and my mother, and my very close friends have been subjected to the worst kind of abuse, harassment, and threats imaginable… As things stand, I would choose to end it all rather than subject my loved ones to such a crisis because of my dreams," he wrote in a public statement.
He had been trying to collect funds to pursue a Journalism degree at a top-rated private university in the United Kingdom. He will now be returning the funds to his (anonymous) donors through the crowdfunding platform they donated through.
He is not alone. In the past weeks, many bahujan and minority students have had to turn to crowdfunding as a last resort to fund their education at prestigious universities abroad. While some have been successful, most have had to face hatred and intrusive questions online and harassment in their personal lives.
Journalist and researcher Maknoon Wani, a Kashmiri Muslim from Anantnag and a graduate in Journalism from Delhi University, is trying to raise funds to cover tuition and living expenses to study MSc in Social Science of the Internet at Oxford Internet Institute.
"For me this is an issue of representation, apart from my personal goals. I am a Kashmiri and my course is about the Internet. I have personally been affected due to this. There are hardly any papers on how the internet affects people, how it affects the society, healthcare, business etc. I have personally seen and suffered through this.
"My dad's business suffered in Anantnag because of this. My studies were affected. My brother's education also suffered. How many Kashmiris do you see in Oxford? We have a population of 8 million and hardly a dozen study there. These are not ordinary spaces, these are the most extraordinary spaces. The representation of marginalised society — if people donate to our society we can make an impact and can affect a much larger population."
Maknoon says assuredly that if he is unable to fund his goal amount, he too will return the money back to his donors.
He added that he had got personal messages in which people accused him of "taking the easy way out instead of applying for a loan". But more often than not, the traditional financing routes such as donation from friends and family or bank loans (or even from moneylenders) are not available to a large number of students due to a lack of collateral, poor family finances, and high interest rates.
Fully funded scholarships are not just extremely competitive but also very limited. In fact, for most students, even the cost of applying is a big gamble.
Ibrar, a senior correspondent with an English broadsheet here, is trying to crowdfund his tuition fees to study South Asian Studies at SOAS in the UK. "I have received a lot of support but I have also been harassed by a lot of people. I have been blocking people a lot," he said, adding that crowdfunding was always a last resort for him.
"I have applied for various scholarships, exhausted every place... It is the pandemic year so many scholarships are limited or not even happening. People are asking why can't I defer. The thing is I can't do that because I have set myself a goal. I want to expand on my career now and progress with my life goals. There is a lot of stagnation," he said.
