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 assaulted with police batons, rods with nails, and even pellet guns. But nowhere did the police rain bullets on protesters. Nowhere, that is, except Siwan.Viral videos showed policemen, unprovoked, firing multiple rounds from the AK-47 as well as pistols. The Wire travelled to ground zero, and found that the firing took place in at least three different spots in Siwan and had at least three victims. Bullet is one of them. An investigation by AltNews had revealed that at least nine rounds of the AK-47 were fired in the incidents. The Bihar police, however, had said only four rounds had been fired, and justified it by saying the constable had “got trapped in the crowds”.Three weeks after the firing, on August 18, facing flak for the police excess, the Bihar government finally shunted out the district’s Superintendent of Police Puran Kumar Jha but refused to take disciplinary action against him. It suspended a constable, Abhishek Kumar Patel, for firing the AK-47 firing, but hastily added that his firing had not injured anyone. The injured, the police told the Supreme Court, were hit when an Assistant Sub-Inspector fired two rounds of a 9-mm pistol. However, there has been no action on the sub-inspector.A spot in Siwan where firing took place during the protests. Photo: Md Fahmi KhanAll three victims told The Wire that the Bihar government had covered their expenses, and had even ferried them to Bihar’s Medanta hospital on the day of the incident.Yet, for the victims of the police firing, this is no consolation.A month later, all three victims are struggling to move ahead, their lives irreversibly transformed within minutes because of the actions of those meant to protect them.The Wire has reached out to Bihar Director General of Police Vinay Kumar as well as Nilesh Kumar, the Deputy Inspector General of Saran Range, which Siwan falls under, over email. The piece will be updated with their responses.Caught unawareBihar is the country’s youngest state; more than a third of its population, 37.2%, is under 18 years of age.It was natural, then, that the state’s youth would not be far behind in joining tens of thousands of young protesters rising up to demand more accountability in the country’s education system.After all, Bihar’s education system has some of the worst indices. It has the highest drop-out rate among classes 9 and 10 across the country after Odisha, at 19.5%. Even at the primary level, its dropout rate of 3.8% is nearly three times the national average of 1.4%. The 2022-’23 caste survey threw up some more sobering data: less than a fourth of Bihar had studied up to class 5. Only 7% could complete graduation.Which is also why Bihar saw two waves of protests. Various parts of the state saw protests on July 22, two days after the Delhi police brutally attacked student protesters during the ‘Sansad March’. Some of these protests, especially in Patna, turned unruly and the police even filed multiple FIRs against protesters, apart from detaining dozens.Left-wing student bodies called for a ‘Bihar Bandh’ on July 25, announcing district-level agitations.By definition, the protests should have sucked 17-year-old Imran* straight in. Imran is a GenZ himself.Except India’s youngest state straddles another reality inside it – every third Bihari family is multidimensionally poor, as per an index developed by the NITI Aayog, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHDI).For many adolescents like Imran, this means that they must carry the burden of lifting their family out of poverty. Bihar has 2.07 million such child and adolescent labourers, and accounts for the second highest chunk across the country.Imran is one of them. At 17, he is the sole earning member of his family of four, working at a garment store and earning Rs 5,500 a month. He couldn’t afford to protest.Unaware of the bandh call, Imran, per usual, reached his workplace on the morning of July 25. “But soon, when my employer saw lots of police officials and protesters moving around, he told me to shut the shop and go home,” Imran says.So Imran did what he was told. But just when he was turning round the corner, he saw protesters and police officials exchanging stones. Afraid, he moved to the side of the road. Before he knew what was happening, he was hit on the right shoulder.Imran’s cousin, Tabrez, said he later learnt from Imran that he froze because of the shock. “Others had to take him to the hospital. He couldn’t move out of the shock of being hit by a bullet,” he said. Thankfully, the bullet had just grazed his shoulder. But even then, moving his shoulder is painful. He hasn’t resumed work. “For now, the family is surviving on the monetary help they got from different political leaders, like Pappu Yadav and Tejashwi Yadav,” said Tabrez.Even now, Imran can barely recall the events of the day. All he remembers is the walk till he was shot.Videos shot by locals show Imran being rushed into a cycle rickshaw. In the visuals, seated next to him in that rickshaw is another young man, his hand on his left shoulder, with blood oozing out.That man was 21-year-old Akash Kumar. Akash, like Imran and Bullet, was an accidental victim.If Bullet can’t move his leg, Akash can’t feel his hand.Akash Kumar. Photo: Md Fahmi KhanAkash had gone to JP Chowk, in the heart of Siwan, to buy a cake. It was his birthday – a date he didn’t usually celebrate, having lost his mother when he was a toddler and being estranged from his father.This year was different. A resident of Kanpur, where he worked delivering food from a cloud kitchen, he arrived in Siwan feeling upbeat. His marriage was on the cards, and his fiancé’s family insisted that they celebrate his birthday.“But when I got to JP Chowk, I saw the protests were on and the policemen were assaulting a young boy,” he recalled. Incensed at this sight, other protesters came to rescue the boy and started pelting stones at the police.“Suddenly, the police picked up their guns and aimed it straight at the crowd,” Akash says.Before he could react, Akash’s left shoulder had gone numb. He touched it and realised that blood was oozing out. “I couldn’t see the wound, but others around me started screaming that I had been hit by a bullet.”The bullet entered his left chest and exited from his back, leaving his vital organs miraculously unaffected. But in the process, it left his left shoulder impaired and lifeless.He was discharged from the hospital in three days, but the lifeless shoulder has remained. The doctors have told him it will take a few weeks for it to revive. Till then, Akash has to survive with one functional hand.But one hand can’t carry the responsibilities that Akash had started shouldering. His impending marriage had forced him to quit his Kanpur delivery job. Instead, come September, he was supposed to head to Delhi and look for better work that would allow him to earn more and save up for the wedding.None of that can happen. Nor can he go ahead with his marriage plans.“We had decided on getting married next year. But now I can’t go ahead with that. I can’t afford the wedding,” he says.“Humko kamaana hai, job karna hai. Job nahi karenge toh fir kaise sab kuch kar paayenge? (I want to earn and I need to have a job. If I don’t have a job, how will I manage all these expenses?)” he asks.“Hum fass gaye hai yahaan.” I am stuck here.*Imran’s name has been changed to protect his anonymity, since he is a minor.Kunal Purohit is an independent journalist.