By Mandara Vishwanath
In April 2016, according to a news report, Hindu College, Delhi University set up its first women’s hostel (although the college was established more than a 100 years ago) with a whopping fee of Rs 82,000 (as opposed to the men’s hostel fee of Rs 47,000) and ridiculous rules demanding women to dress according to the ‘norms of the society’ and not having any visitors, including women visitors. Perhaps the new notification is to prevent such drastic instances of curbing women’s autonomy. But the new notification by the UGC and AICTE is meant for central universities affiliated to them and some state universities which receive funding from the UGC — all private universities do not necessarily have to follow it.
As a recent graduate from a private university in Bangalore, I know that sometimes autonomous universities have even stricter moral codes than central universities: I am certain my former classmates agree with me when I say that women being forced to wear only long kurtas with patialas so that their body shape and skin was all covered up, and forcing men to wear formal shirts and sport trimmed beards and military haircuts does zilch to ensure the safety of women on campus. What does make women students feel unsafe is that if they do accuse someone of sexually harassing them, there isn’t enough of a support system to deal with the issue sensitively, as the withdrawn case against Ajay Pavitran, accused of harassing several young women at Christ University, showed.
That is something the UGC itself has trouble with: in a previous notification, which came out in April 2015, the Centre laid down guidelines for safety of students. Some of these guidelines include building a high boundary wall around hostels or colleges, topped by barbed wire with a minimal of three entry points; each of these entry points are to be guarded by security personnel, of whom at least one should be a woman “so that physical security check of girl students or visitor can be undertaken”. It appeared that they wanted to frisk female students for their own safety.
Such a rule could be easily implemented by over-protective or conservative woman security guards who could impinge on female students’ privacy with their own biased judgements of who should and should not be allowed to enter the premises, even if the visitor is accounted for by the student. Another guideline suggests setting up a university police station with frequent patrolling: if campus police are anything like civil policemen, I’d be more likely to be judged and moral policed for my choices than made to feel safe. I feel like I am often scrutinised for what they consider to be immoral behaviour — smoking, loitering on the streets, wearing ‘indecent’ clothes — all reasons that come back to pointing out my character rather than trying to keep me safe.
Nikita Agarwal, a human rights lawyer in Delhi, believes that the UGC is “trying to portray itself as a progressive institution” with the new notification. She adds, “it is definitely important that all, including trans students, have the freedom to wear what they want to, but the real malaise is not the code: the real malaise is the ideology that perpetuates this dress code.” We’re hoping that despite the mixed signals we’re getting from the Centre about how it views approaches to women’s safety, the new notification is the start of something bigger. With this baby step, let’s believe that the Centre is genuinely making an effort to ensure the safety of students, rather than caging them on the pretext of caring about their well-being.
Image credits:
Varsha’s Convocation by Harsha K R (CC BY-SA 2.0)
She knows kung-fu by Richard Masoner/Cyclelicious (CC by 2.0)
Co-published with Firstpost.