Are BHU’s girl students finally casting off their chains?

BHU protest: Students and police in a standoff in Varanasi late Saturday night. PTI

At Banaras Hindu University, set up just over a hundred years ago in 1916 by noted freedom fighter Madan Mohan Malviya as an Indian response to the reigning ‘Macaulay-putras’ of the time, female students have to be back in their hostels by 8 pm, cannot use their cell-phones beyond 10 pm and must dress modestly. Moreover, unlike in male hostel canteens, girls aren’t allowed to eat any non-vegetarian food in their hostel canteens.

So when one female student dared to protest last week the catcalls and sexual abuse by three young men on a bike inside the BHU campus, the hostel warden instead of sympathizing with her and taking up the matter, asked why she was returning back so late. Matters escalated, when the girl and her friends were not allowed to meet Vice-Chancellor and well-known RSS ideologue Girish Chandra Tripathi, upon which they sat in dharna outside their hostel and the main gates of the university and were lathi-charged by the police. Some of the students have received head injuries. When visiting prime minister Narendra Modi’s convoy in Varanasi was forced to take a different route and avoid the university, the V-C alleged that “outsiders” were involved.

Welcome to BHU, once acclaimed as the Oxford of the East, its 1300 acres of tree-lined avenues and grand historical buildings reminiscent of a past that was both confident and curious – Rabindranath Tagore was the chair in 1920 of its noted arts and archaeological institute, the Bharat Kala Bhavan, while his nephew Abanindranath Tagore was the vice-chairman – even as its present, an outward oasis of beauty and calm like no other educational space in the Poorvanchal, is seething with suppressed ferment.

Perhaps, Varanasi’s famously impertinent spirit is finally re-emerging from the spell cast by the BJP three years ago. Perhaps, the girl who was molested just got fed up of being told that she was an equal citizen. One poster at the demonstration at Lanka, the name of the area outside BHU’s gates, baldly said “Agar beti ko padhana hai, to ussay bachana hoga.” If you want to educate your girls, you will first have to save them.

The warning, that the prime minister’s “Beti Bachao/Beti Padhao” slogan, once a rallying cry against social conservatism, was in danger of being reduced to a shibboleth, is unmistakable. Truth is, that BHU has not been overnight turned into a fortress where girls have to mind their language and dress as if the Taliban is waiting in the wings to check out their clothing code. BHU echoes the times that we have been living in for several decades, watching with bated breath as the locks of the Ram Lalla temple next door in Ayodhya were opened in the 1980s, the Babri Masjid destroyed in the 1990s and how the Poorvanchal became a crucible for caste and religious politics in the succeeding decades.

With the ascension to the throne of RSS ideologue G C Tripathi in November 2014, the ferment has settled like sediment at the bottom of the sea. Students unions haven’t been allowed in BHU for several years, and now only the RSS’ student wing, the ABVP, has been given permission to be active.

The Bhagat Singh Chhatra Morcha or the CPI-affiiated All India Students Federation (AISF) groups are banned from carrying out demonstrations and protests on campus. Even teachers have to sign statements before they join that they will not criticize the university. The pledge forces them to look away or refrain from commenting on what is right or wrong. In BHU, even considering the ‘lakshman rekha’ of morality has become an acid test of whose side you belong.

So when Delhi’s Lady Shri Ram College’s Gurmehar Kaur questioned the morality of war or when students from Ramjas college in Delhi University or Jawaharlal Nehru University were variously attacked on isues around freedom of speech and expression, or when Rohith Vemula committed suicide and the University of Hyderabad fell into a deep crisis, BHU students heard the protests from one ear and exhaled from the other.

Some students sought to discuss Gurmehar Kaur’s silent, anti-war poster campaign, but were refused permission to hold a seminar; they resorted to talking among themselves in small groups on campus lawns. At the weekly seminar at the Centre for Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, around the time of the UP elections in February, saffron-robed saints took the floor and discussed the importance of the cow.

Only one kind of thought is encouraged, said students brave enough to speak up, unwilling to come on camera. Which is why the protest by BHU’s girl students last week is even more significant. For a university which largely sources its 30,000-strong student population from the largely conservative Uttar Pradesh-Bihar hinterland, standing up to sexual abuse is the equivalent of a revolution. Did the ferment from JNU, University of Hyderabad, Delhi University etc leach into BHU? How did these girls have the courage to stand up and say, No?

The important thing here is that the rage has reached BHU. When I visited the University in February, both male and female students were largely quiescent. Whether this anger will be swallowed up by the Ganga or it will grow to become a forest fire, is anyone’s guess. Certainly, the rest of India’s universities are watching the direction BHU will take.