Indraprastha College for Women, which is part of the Delhi University, was in the news recently after students reported that several men had entered the campus by scaling walls and made the women feel severely uncomfortable with their sloganeering, catcalling and harassment during day two of the annual fest on March 28.
Students said the men chanted slogans that went, “Miranda, IP dono humara!” The chant literally means ‘Miranda, IP are both ours’ but refers to the students of the two woman-only colleges.
Some students said that the men also shouted “Jai Shri Ram!”.
While day one had seen some men on campus behave loudly during the musical performance, attendants largely kept the peace. It was only on day two that crowds of men swarmed the campus and began harassing the women students.
Students say that in reaction, college administration asked day scholars to vacate the campus and women who stayed at the hostels were locked inside them. Many students said that they were petrified of finding boys inside their hostel when they were initially made to rush inside.
The fest’s activities for March 28 was later cancelled.
A second year student pursuing a Sociology honours degree said that she had never seen the campus so crowded. “Men scaled walls and catcalled the students, me included. The administration was there, but they took no action. We were eventually asked to leave before the situation got worse,” she said.
A third year student of History honours alleged that the administration was also nowhere to be found when students were panicking. Through the whole ordeal, there had been no police at the IPCW entrances, another student said.
This incident at IPCW is not an isolated one. A similar thing took place when Miranda House hosted its Diwali Mela on the October 14, 2022. Men entered the campus and chanted similar sexist slogans. Students of the college had then said that they felt unsafe and also as if they were property whom anyone could claim with slogans like these. There too, rampant hooliganism by men led to the women students, who had every right to be there, to leave the campus.
While police were stationed at the campus, Miranda students said they did little to protect them.
Lady Shri Ram College’s (LSR) fest Tarang, between March 24 and 26, also saw men trying to scale walls and harass women. Students of the college said the tight security presence may have averted a bigger ruckus but noted that here too the environment was made unsafe for women by men who had entered the college with the apparent purpose of enjoying a college fest.
Three years ago, the Gargi College fest saw similar scenes of men scaling walls and harassing women on the campus. There have also seen incidents of harassment in other women’s colleges like Maitreyi College, Kamla Nehru College and Jesus and Mary College.
It is noteworthy that men are allowed into women’s colleges during fests if they register for participation.
What unites the women’s experiences in all these colleges is that while their safety and spaces are violated, it is the women who are asked to leave or otherwise made to pay.
One is forced to think of how if in the Delhi Metro, men are asked to leave ‘women’s only’ coaches, they cannot be asked to leave women’s campuses instead of the very women who are being harassed.
Women are relegated to separate and often segregated spaces but do not even get privacy or safety even there. They are controlled and violated in spaces that purport to exclusively belong to them.
When women are asked to leave a campus when they are not the perpetrators of mischief there, such a decision reflects that they have little agency in educational institutions. Already their freedom of dressing is taken away from them. On top of that, they constantly have to be on guard around men who harass them.
File photo of a Pinjra Tod protest. Source: Facebook/Pinjra Tod
Fetishisation of students in women’s-only institutions is nothing new, but colleges need to recognise that this leads to harrowing incidents such the one at IPCW which women have to live through and revisit each time they are repeated.
The incident at IPCW was met with fierce protests from the women of the college, who wanted to reclaim the campus space. The protests were stopped by the administration. Some of the protesting students were detained in police buses and the campus was barricaded. When the principal was asked to resign, she was seen leaving the campus and not addressing the issues of the students. This caused dissatisfaction among the students who felt like they were antagonised in a situation where they were the victims.
The Wire tried to contact the principal Poonam Kumria over phone but she was not reachable.
Students alleged that the parents of some of them have been ‘warned’ of the possible suspension of students who are part of the protests and some of them have also allegedly been told that they will not be allowed to write exams if they continue protests.
Students said that during protests by Left students organisations at the Arts faculty, calling for the resignation of the principal, police warned that Section 144 could be imposed and students could be detained.
These protests are no less important and carry the ethos of the Pinjra Tod protests that shook university spaces and the country. Having autonomy and agency in educational spaces is a fair demand raised by women. Locking women inside hostels and penalising them for crimes they didn’t commit is regressive.
Despite women outnumbering men, despite it being their campus, it was still women who were asked to leave and men have not yet been held accountable for their actions. Facing no repercussions for the things that they do only enables them further, causing these instances to become repetitive.
FILE IMAGE: A Pinjra Tod rally on International Working Women’s Day. Photo: Facebook/Pinjra Tod
Meanwhile, students have said that the committee IPCW set up on April 3, to internally probe the incident, put out a notice with the wrong fest dates and has also not addressed the detention of students and the arrest threats made to them.
“The committee did not include the inputs of the students at all,” the Sociology student quoted earlier in the piece said.
Students feel that by holding the men responsible, the management and police will be able to show solidarity with the women who suffered and also prevent such instances from happening in the future.
It is only by extending support and solidarity to the protestors that one can hope to have women feel safe in campus spaces. Their dissent should not go unheard in educational institutions when they’ve fought so hard to be in them and have defied centuries worth of patriarchy to take up that space and find their voices through education.
Instead of focusing on the safety of the students, colleges have resorted to cancelling fests which doesn’t seem like a long term solution and only goes on to curb the freedoms of women instead of holding men accountable.
Sagarika Chaudhary is pursuing studies in English at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi.