Dalveer Singh said his grandson was the first non-Muslim student in AMU's history to contest for the post of president on his own strength in 2017.

Singh told Swarajya, "You can gauge the extent of under-representation of non-Muslims by the fact that I was also the only non-Muslim candidate even in 2014 polls. And the only Hindu member of AMUSU right now, Nishant Bhardwaj [a cabinet member], won because he openly said that he is a Hindu only by birth and has been raised by Islam.”

A video of Bhardwaj that Singh shared with this correspondent corroborates it.

Singh says the run-up to the polls in 2017 was a revelation as his opponents ran a campaign against him solely over his religious identity. Singh shared audios and campaign material from 2017 where Muslim students are appealing to not vote for Ajay Singh in the name of Muslim unity, Khuda and Islam.

In AMU, there is no involvement of any political party in student polls, and candidates compete individually.

In what he says was a highly polarised election, Singh lost but emerged as the closest opponent to the winner. Veerendra Singh Bahadur, 64, a former student of AMU and Singh’s neighbour, calls it “historic”. “For a non-Muslim candidate to achieve this without the backing of Muslim students is no mean feat,” he said.

Singh says, "I'll be honest. I wouldn't have come this far if I was an ordinary Hindu student. The political stature of my grandfather has played a role.”

Singh, who lost his father when he was just 12, says he routinely gets threats to his life. He showed this correspondent some messages he has received on various social media platforms that are full of abuses and threats.

Singh says that after the elections, he embraced the identity that was forced on him – that of a Hindu leader.

He sums up this journey, "I joined the campus in 2011 for Class 11. I noticed that every now and then, non-Muslim students would get thrashed and the administration would turn a blind eye to it. There was and there is, little place for the sentiments of non-Muslims. We are constantly made to feel alienated. That, combined with the experience of the 2017 polls, convinced me that there was a huge need for dissent. At the same time, non-Muslim leaders were looking up to me. I decided there was no looking back."

He upped the ante in January 2018 when he and his supporters decided to hold a rally against the murder of Hindu boy Chandan Gupta at the hands of some Muslim men during a tiranga yatra in UP's Kasganj district. Singh says he was stopped by the administration, so the group simply handed over a memorandum to the police. But he managed to stage a protest next month demanding justice for minor Hindu girl Geeta (name changed) who was raped in a Delhi mosque.