Over the past two weeks, I have closely witnessed the aftershocks of the unfortunate hooliganism, trespass, sexual assault and abuse of young women students attending Gargi College’s annual festival Reverie’s closing evening concert held on February 6.
The allegedly outrageous breach of peace, security, law and order that left the entire Gargi College community anguished, traumatised and devastated has been unequivocally condemned. The college has upheld its academic sanctity through internal checks, balances and institutional processes coupled with an unwavering commitment to securing for its students justice, as also deeper restorative justice.
The college has initiated both external and internal action by lodging an FIR with the Delhi police and constituting a college-centred high level fact-finding committee comprising elected faculty and student representatives; which is investigating what went wrong that evening, attendant issues and concerns attempting to redress what women students’ underwent.
All of this action is foregrounded in a constant collective conversation amongst the wider student-teacher community. These conversations have in fact turned into a point of inquiry into the broader framework of a tenuous relationship between teachers, students, patriarchy, state, society and law.
The matter has received considerable attention in the public sphere, has been raised in parliament, condemned by the chief minister, has provoked a general all-round outrage in the print and electronic media and attracted a variety of opinions as also counter opinions. However, some of its media reportage has been based on rather flawed assumptions.
This brief article is an insider’s autographical interjection attempting to unpackage some of these presumptions and the worrying argumentative analysis that follows them.
Also read: ‘Drunk Men Molested Us’: Gargi Students Recount Mass Assault During Fest
One of the commentaries (Pratiksha Baxi, ‘Our Unsafe Campuses‘, Indian Express, 14 February 2020) began with twin assumptions about the nature and extent of the tribulations that students experienced. These include: first that there was mass sexual violence and second that the male mobs enjoyed some degree of impunity. Both are distortions.
The first assumption that the festival turned into ‘a theatre of macabre sexual violence’ is an over-exaggeration to say the least. This is not to condone the sexual misdemeanours that happened but to draw the conclusion that macabre sexual violence took place, in a crowd of thousands and thousands of young boys and girls, is not appropriate.
As for the second assumption that the mob enjoyed impunity nothing could be farther from the truth. I myself stood at one of the entry gates, in the evening for hours, appealing to the pushing- to-enter students to return back as the number of students on the grounds was unmanageable; and by pushing in to attend the event they would be adding to the over-dense space where there was no place to even stand, jeopardising safety. It was already well past the pre- announced entry time. However my appeals, efforts and concerns got bulldozed under the crowds.
As a matter of fact, some of the duty teachers too faced physical violence while ‘managing’ the gates, in an attempt to protect students as much as possible. So to say that the mob that perpetuated violence on the grounds enjoyed any kind of impunity is factually incorrect. It is particularly important to counter this assumption as it can also be read as a hint of complicity by the college community in acts of gender based violence, to which there is not an iota of truth.
The author of the aforesaid piece laments that the news of the violence took 4 days to reach the mainstream media. As a member of the college community residing on the premises itself even I did not hear of it. I am not active on social media and in the days following the festival; the college was closed for the remaining week.
In fact, three days later, I even went to my regular class and began a lecture on Gandhian Basic Education for some time. It was after a while that I sensed some unease on the faces of my students and initiated a conversation about its cause. Only then did I learn about the alleged violence and also that the FIR was lodged on the same day. All the teachers who were on duty on that day have already submitted a written statement to the police investigating officer. An immediate important step forward towards restorative justice was setting up of the internal high-powered fact-finding committee through a participatory, democratic, decentralised, collaborative and non-bureaucratic department wise process in order to address the concerns of students.
The selection process of setting it up ensured that all the representatives were only those who enjoyed the confidence of students across the 18 departments of the college, selected through a secret ballot. All eyes are now on its report that will unravel the full truth of the matter. The committee members have undertaken to commit whatever time it takes to complete the process of exhaustive fact-finding in a time bound schedule.
The report may open a new window in broader terms by providing a new vocabulary of institutional self-appraisal beyond systematic limitations articulating creative possibilities necessary for ensuring liberal spaces for young women students.
It has been said that this is a new model of violence on offer by the police to certain elements in society. The author lubricates her argument by the fact that before the Gargi incident there was violence inJawaharlal Nehru University that occurred barely 20 days following the entry of police in Jamia Millia Islamia campus.
The happenings in JNU and JMI do not provide a foreground or framework in which to locate what happened in Gargi College on that eventful evening, which had their basis in completely different set of reasons. The author seeks to appropriate the former undercurrents in her view of what happened in the college though they are non-existent in the present case on that particular evening. The alleged violence on the Gargi grounds was mainly a security breach on the culminating evening of a student festival where the arrangements made turned less than adequate due to the exacerbating crowds of thousands upon thousands.
Also read: SC Asks to Take Gargi College Incident Plea to Delhi HC, 10 Held on Molestation Charges
Another disturbing argument in the print media (Meeran Chadha Borwankar, ‘Fight the Monster‘, Indian Express, February 20) appeals to Gargi women ‘to thrash the goons if we are in good numbers as you were in your college festival’ when the ‘monster’ entered the festival. The author of this piece (both the articles I speak of appeared in a national daily) does not hesitate to write that she would have ‘loved to hear of one of the PCR vans of Delhi Police rushing 20 young and old monsters to AIIMS after they were thrashed by Gargi College women’ and she even missed looking at ‘photos of the moaning injured monsters on hospital beds in national newspapers the next day.’
Is this the kind of society we want to create? She concludes by extolling the young Gargi woman to lead the war against the monster. The war is already on albeit weaponised differently; with a critical education that interrogates inequalities, hierarchies and hegemonies; waged inside and outside the classroom and the college. The Gargi College community is a liberal space where women students have rights: to dissent and protest; in a spirit of inquiry, openness and freedom. Life at Gargi College is an adventure of ideas as exemplified by the life of ancient woman sage Gargi on who’s name on the college is founded.
Academicians, practitioners, leaders, activists, artists and other speakers cutting across theoretical orientations: of the ideological left and the right, liberal and conservative, male, female and the other; from the mainstream and margin have been warmly welcomed for decades. The college even brings together the arenas of school education and tertiary education in the field of teacher education at its elementary education department. The college fosters a vibrant public sphere synthesising the creative and the critical, intellectual and non-intellectual, personal and impersonal in self-reflexivity.
Interdisciplinary groups like Equal Opportunity Cell, Gandhi Study Circle, Eco Club and Woman’s Development Cell work proactively to create a discrimination free, inclusive and egalitarian environment while facilitating teaching-learning processes. The argument: that the state is incubating a vicious culture of impunity to discipline and punish college students does not hold true for Gargi College, which continues its student-centric, uncompromising pursuit of knowledge, gender justice, critical enquiry and self-liberation.
Jyoti Raina is Associate Professor, Department of Elementary Education, Gargi College. She is also the Anti-Discrimination Officer of the Equal Opportunity Cell of the college.