Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents

Reversing Reservation

Vol - L No. 37, September 12, 2015 

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Are the upper castes now striking back against the inequities of market-led development?

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Time to Repeal 124A

Vol - L No. 37, September 12, 2015 

• Editorials

Maharashtra reminds us why a law on sedition has no place in a democracy.

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Editorials A Chill Wind The brazen killing of rationalists is a result of the nurturing of intolerance. Read more	H T Parekh Finance Column Can Indradhanush Help Revive Public Sector Banks? T T Ram Mohan Indradhanush, the government's new plan for public sector bank reform in India, may not be the "big bang" reforms that many have been clamouring for. But the government has decided to recapitalise PSBs--a sensible change of mind.... Read more
Commentary What Ails the Implementation of the Goods and Services Tax? V Bhaskar, P S S Kailash Nath Since the Goods and Services Tax cannot be implemented by 1 April 2016, there is a strong case to implement a central GST from that date by merging the excise and service tax regimes. Such an integrated framework will not require any major... Read more	Commentary Caste, Religious Institutions and Domination Sanjana Krishnan, Rahul Jambhulkar The Tuljabhavani and Matangi temples in Osmanabad District in Maharashtra display the relation between religion, caste and power structure in society. The history of these two temples and a study of the priestly hierarchy and practice of rituals... Read more
Commentary Subverting the Land Acquisition Act, 2013 Santosh Verma After coming to power in 2014, the National Democratic Alliance government took several measures to dilute the pro-poor provisions of the Land Acquisition Act of 2013. Though it has backed down, several questions remain over the way the Modi... Read more	Commentary New Health Policy and Chronic Disease Analysis of Data and Evidence Subrata Mukherjee, Anoshua Chaudhuri, Anamitra Barik The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has made public the National Health Policy 2015 Draft for discussion. The draft is more exhaustive and better organised in its coverage compared to the National Health Policy of 2002. It touches upon... Read more
Commentary New Voices in Songs Do Women in Hindi Films Have Greater Agency? Ashwini Deshpande Thin voices in Hindi film music are seen to be associated with "good girls" who are obedient, innocent, and pure. Lata Mangeshkar's thin voice is assumed to have suited a particular vision of femininity promoted by Hindi films at... Read more	Book Reviews GDP's Hold over the World Rama Gopal The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It by Dirk Philipsen,Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015; pp viii+398, £19.95. Read more
Book Reviews 'Understandings of Violence' Rudolf C Heredia The Weight of Violence: Religion, Language, Politicsedited by Saitya Brata Das and Soumyabrata Choudhury,New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015; pp xxi + 271, Rs 895. Read more	Perspectives The Agrarian Question in the 21st Century Sam Moyo, Praveen Jha, Paris Yeros Drawing from the late Archie Mafeje's work and revolutionary spirit, this article revisits the "classical" agrarian question and responds to scholars who argue that the "agrarian question is dead"--indeed, those who feel... Read more
Special Articles Science and Theories of Caste Origins From Colonial Anthropometry to Contemporary Genetics Thomas Sebastian This article delineates three phases of scientific enquiry into caste origins and identifies a set of social and political agendas which were, and continue to be, affected by the results of those enquiries. It examines debates between colonial... Read more	Special Articles Mergers and Acquisitions of Banks in Post-Reform India T R Bishnoi, Sofia Devi A major perspective of the Reserve Bank of India's banking policy is to encourage competition, consolidate and restructure the system for financial stability. Mergers and acquisitions have emerged as one of the common methods of consolidation... Read more
Special Articles Non-linear Relationship between Inflation and Growth in Developing Countries Anupam Das, John Loxley While the orthodox consensus is that there is no trade-off between inflation and output in the long run, there is no unanimity on the short-run effect of inflation on economic growth. We attempt to estimate the non-linear relationship between... Read more	Notes Caste among the Indian Diaspora in Africa Suraj Milind Yengde Caste consciousness is common among the Indian diaspora worldwide, so is the practice of the caste system. This article looks at the Indian diaspora in Africa and tries to understand how Indians of various castes responded to life there. It... Read more
Discussion T S R Subramanian Report K Vishnu Mohan Rao This article takes forward Manju Menon and Kanchi Kohli's criticism of the TSR Committee Report, "Executive's Environmental Dilemmas: Unpacking a Committee's Report" (EPW, 13 December 2014). This piece focuses on the... Read more	Postscript A Proud Tribe Poovi Poovilangothai pKocharethi, the award-winning work by Narayan, Kerala’s first tribal novelist, portrays the lives, triumphs and tribulations of the Malayarayar tribal community of Kerala in the 20th century. Read more
Postscript Slick Illusions Khaliq Parkar Despite lustrous technique and cinematography, the recent Hindi film Masaan is burdened with specious premises of caste, gender and geography. Read more	Postscript The Devi’s Departure Kannan Kasturi An elaborate ritual on Deepavali day in the Jagatipatt temple at Naggar in Himachal Pradesh unveils energy, religious fervour and good-fellowship. Read more
Postscript The Winter of the Patriarch Pushpendra Johar Commandeering, often abusive, sometimes loquacious, the drunken patriarch was never apologetic about his station in life as a low-caste sweeper. Read more	Postscript The View from Above Toothcomber The Economics of Land Acquisition

Aurangzeb is a severely misunderstood figure’

Scholar Audrey Truschke says we should not make the error of attributing Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s lack of interest in Sanskrit to his alleged bigotry

In an email interview, Audrey Truschke, Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University, shares withAnuradha Raman the experiences of writing her book, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, to be published in February 2016, and argues forcefully in favour of acknowledging diversity in India.

The present Bharatiya Janata Party government believes Mughals are not part of India’s history. Your book is about how Sanskrit, sought to be made mainstream by the government, flourished under the Mughals. How do we reconcile the two?

We don’t reconcile the two perspectives. Rather, we ask two key questions. One, who is on firmer historical ground in their claims? Two, what are the political reasons for the BJP wanting to erase the Mughals (or at least most of the Mughals) from India’s past? The bulk of my work concerns the honest excavation of history. The Mughals are a significant part of Indian history, and Sanskrit is a significant part of the story of the Mughal empire. Those facts may be inconvenient for the BJP and others, but as a historian I do not temper my investigation of the past in deference to present-day concerns. However, I realise that history matters in the present, perhaps especially in modern South Asia. One present-day implication of my work is to point up the flimsy basis of the BJP’s version of India’s past.

In an ironical way, as the present government fights to push Sanskrit into mainstream discourse, your work concentrates on the Mughals, whom the BJP dislikes, and their engagement with Sanskrit.

The BJP only wants a certain version of Sanskrit in the mainstream. They no doubt love Kalidasa, but I cannot imagine the BJP endorsing students to read the Sanskrit accounts of the Mughals written by Jains in the 16th and 17th centuries. India has a great treasure in its Sanskrit tradition, but that treasure is not only classical poetry and the Indian epics, but also the immense diversity of Sanskrit literature.

Who were the Mughal rulers under whom there was active exchange of Sanskrit and Persian ideas, in your account?

Sanskrit flourished in the royal Mughal court primarily under three emperors: Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan. However, we should not make the error of attributing Aurangzeb’s lack of interest in Sanskrit to his alleged bigotry. Aurangzeb is a severely misunderstood historical figure who has suffered perhaps more than any of the other Mughal rulers from present-day biases. There are two main reasons why Sanskrit ceased to be a major part of Mughal imperial life during Aurangzeb’s rule. One, during the 17th century, Sanskrit was slowly giving way to Hindi. This was a wider literary shift in the subcontinent, and even under Shah Jahan we begin to see imperial attention directed towards Hindi-language intellectuals at the expense of Sanskrit. Aurangzeb’s reign simply happen to coincide with the waning of Sanskrit and the rise of literary Hindi.

Second, as most Indians know, Aurangzeb beat out Dara Shikoh for the Mughal throne. Dara Shikoh had been engaged in a series of cross-cultural exchanges involving Sanskrit during the 1640s and 1650s. Thus, from Aurangzeb’s perspective, breaking Mughal ties with the Sanskrit cultural world was a way to distinguish his idioms of rule from those of the previous heir apparent. In short, Aurangzeb decided to move away from what little remained of the Mughal interest in Sanskrit as a political decision, rather than as a cultural or religious judgment.

As a side note, let me clarify that while Akbar inaugurated Mughal engagements with Sanskrit, he did so for slightly different reasons than many people think. Akbar’s reputation is that he was open-minded and tolerant, almost a protosecular figure. This can be a misleading characterisation. Akbar was interested in Sanskrit for its political valence in his empire, not as some personal religious quest. Akbar also had no qualms about harshly judging perspectives that he viewed as beyond the pale. A good example is that he questioned Jain thinkers about whether they were monotheists because to be otherwise would mean being evicted from the Mughal court (Jains assured him that they believed in God).

What was the interaction between the Mughal elites and Brahmin Hindus and Jain religious groups like?

Brahmans, for example, assisted with Mughal translations of Sanskrit texts into Persian. The method was that Brahmans would read the Sanskrit text, verbally translate it into Hindi (their shared language with the Mughals), and then the Mughals would write down the translation in Persian. Jains and Brahmans alike assisted the Mughals with astrology. Brahmans cast Sanskrit-based horoscopes for the Mughal royal family. On at least one occasion, Jains performed a ceremony to counteract an astrological curse on Jahangir’s newborn daughter. My forthcoming book, Culture of Encounters, devotes an entire chapter to reconstructing the social history of links between Mughal elites and Brahmans/Jains.

You argue that the ideology underpinning violence — such as what took place in the 2002 pogrom, in which more than 1,000 Muslims died, or the current intolerance towards them — erases Mughal history and writes religious conflicts into Indian history where there was none, thereby justifying modern religious intolerance. Is it correct to then deduce that there was no religious conflict in the court of the Mughals?

No. First, there was plenty of violence in Mughal India. Violence and conflict are enduring features of the human experience and I would never suggest otherwise. Even under Akbar, violence was commonplace. A far trickier question, however, is, how much Mughal-led violence was religious-based or motivated by religious conflicts? Generally, the Mughals acted violently towards political foes (whether they were Rajput, Muslim, Hindu, or otherwise was irrelevant). It is very difficult for many modern people to accept that violence in pre-modern India was rarely religiously motivated. In this sense, pre-colonial India looked very different than pre-modern Europe, for example. But we lack historical evidence that the Mughals attacked religious foes. On the contrary, some scholars have even suggested that modern “Western” ideas about religious toleration were, in part, inspired by what early European travellers witnessed in the Mughal Empire.

That said, there were limited instances when the Mughals persecuted specific individuals over religious differences. A good example is that Akbar sent a few of the Muslim ulama on hajj to Mecca, which meant that they were effectively exiled from the court. Some of these ulama were murdered on their way out of India.

Is there a problem with a Marxist interpretation of history as is being argued now by the BJP government?

Marxist history is limiting, in my opinion. This strain of thought tends to emphasise social class and economic factors in determining historical trajectories. Modern historians have a much wider range of approaches at their disposal that better situate us to understand other aspects of the past.

Mughal history is such a contentious part of history in the Hindu nationalist imagination. How do you propose to shed light, and create space for a scholarly engagement with the period? It also comes at a time when there is a wave of revisionism in India.

My approach is that of a historian. I seek primary sources from numerous languages and archives, read deeply in secondary scholarship, and attempt to reconstruct the most accurate vision of pre-colonial India possible. My work has plenty of present-day implications, but those come secondary and explicitly after the serious historical work. This approach is unappealing to many in modern India (and across the world). It is painstaking, requires specialist knowledge, can be slow, and often leads to nuanced conclusions. But there are also plenty of people, non-academics, who view what is going on in modern India with scepticism. For those who want it, my work offers a historically sound foundation for challenging modern political efforts to revise the past.

What are the dangers of rewriting history?

So far as the dangers of rewriting history and subscribing to narrow interpretations of specific texts, there are many risks. One is that we risk rising intolerance going forward, something already witnessed on both popular and elite levels in 21st century India. Another risk is that we cheapen the past. India has a glorious history and one of the richest literary inheritances of any place on earth — it would be unfortunate to constrict our minds to the point where we can no longer appreciate these treasures.

You argue that “a more divisive interpretation of the relationship between the Mughals and Hindus actually developed during the colonial period from 1757 to 1947”, a legacy that the present Modi government appears to have inherited. But while the British positioned themselves as neutral saviours, who will emerge as the neutral saviours now?

In the BJP vision, I believe that the new saviour is the BJP itself and affiliated Hindu nationalist groups that will restore India to its proper, true nature as a land for Hindus. This is an appealing ideology for many people, which is part of what makes it so dangerous. I maintain that India’s greatness is found in its astonishing diversity, not some invented, anachronistic, monolithic Hindu past. Part of the sad irony of the BJP’s emphasis on rewriting Indian history is precisely that India has a deep and compelling history, which so many seem intent to ignore.

ndanu@ thehindu.co.in

Keywords: Aurangzeb, Audrey Truschke, Mughals, Indian history

Migrant crisis: Europe feels the pinch of a continental shift

The anguish of seeing a toddler’s body washing up on the Turkish coast gripped us all for the last few days. As Europe struggles with one of the largest humanitarian crises after World War 2, questions and accusations are flying thick and fast on the failure of the European Union (EU) to respond. The EU is confronted with the biggest refugee and migration influx and the wars in Syria and Iraq have only exacerbated the exodus to Europe that also includes people coming in from Afghanistan, Pakistan and conflict zones in Africa.

The unabated flow of people risking everything to get on to a boat to Europe, and depending on ruthless smugglers has created fault lines within the EU. The south and southeast of the EU is under siege with Italy and Greece bearing the brunt of the incoming refugees. The Syrian civil war and the subsequent rise of the Islamic State (Isis) have turned the steady stream of refugees into a raging torrent of humans fleeing war, exploitation and poverty.

A cursory glance at the map of the region raises the question: Why are the refugees heading to the EU and not their immediate neighbourhood? Around 4.5 million Syrian refugees have been on the move and Lebanon, a tiny country, has taken in over 1.2 million and 1.8 million others have gone to Turkey, along with many more escaping to Egypt, Jordan and Iraq. In stark contrast to these, the wealthy Gulf States like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE have not taken in any refugees as they are not signatories to the United Nations refugee convention.

A European consensus on the migration crisis has not come forth as national borders have become stronger calling into question the European solidarity at this time of crisis. In the light of Britain’s refusal to accept more and more refugees last week, Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, termed Britain’s immigration policies as “politically toxic”. Within the EU, under the Dublin regulation, asylum seekers stay in the country they first arrive in till their application gets processed and it is this rule that has turned into a nightmare for Italy and Greece, as since last year the numbers coming across the Mediterranean has swelled.

German chancellor Angela Merkel took a bold step recently when she suspended the Dublin regulation with respect to Syrian refugees and confirmed the country would take in more refugees. This action has also unleashed a larger wave of refugees attempting to cross Hungary and Austria to reach Germany. Merkel’s call for a unified European migration policy has not resonated within the EU. The four Visegrad Group states — Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovak — have rejected the proposal of migrant quotas.

Rather, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said the crisis was a “German problem”. Both Hungary and Austria enhanced controls within and the border checks can be seen as violating the EU’s open-border policy. The humanitarian crisis has multiple implications, but more importantly, calls into question the norms and values of the EU and in this context, Merkel’s decision of taking moral responsibility has stood out like a beacon of hope.

Across the Atlantic, the growing refugee crisis appears to have taken a backseat in the United States with no leadership in this regard as the country is headed for presidential elections. The economic slowdown in Europe, coupled with the financial crisis, has contributed to the rise of Right-wing and anti-EU political parties, which have only served to enhance the fears that refugees and immigrants will transform society and endanger culture as it is largely a Muslim influx. The responses from some EU countries have only brought out the bigotry into the open as the refugees are seen as a threat to Europe’s prosperity and stability. And for many others, it has raised fears of Isis infiltrating among the refugees and targeting European cities and people.

It is here that Germany has stood out as an exception by taking a stand; this goes back to the time when Germany had the most liberal asylum laws and also to its historical responsibility in Europe. But given that it has taken the largest number of refugees along with Sweden, it has also lead to sharpening of the debate on seeking asylum. The Pope joined other sane voices in calling for protecting and sheltering refugees alongside common people’s initiatives who opened up their homes and helped in cash and kind.

Juncker attempted to devise ways of addressing the crisis on Wednesday, including introducing mandatory quotas that may have the support of the German chancellor and French President Francois Hollande, but will face resistance from the East European countries, who want distinctions to be made between wartime refugees and economic migrants. Given that there are different asylum-processing timelines in the EU, there will also be an attempt at creating wide benchmarks. However, the challenge lies in the EU’s open borders policy and thus holding people back after giving them papers will be difficult and will still lead to internal mobility which will undermine the quota system.

According to the International Organisation for Migration, since January, 350,000 migrants have been registered in Europe, while the actual figures could be more. As Europe faces this dark hour, the bigger question is, whether the issue of refugees is a European regional problem or a global concern; apart from more fundamental issues of what make people refugees.

Ummu Salma Bava teaches at the Centre for European Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University

the speaking tree - Isolation As The Cause Of Conflict

Satsang: Swami Sukhabodhananda





Should we live by logic or by emotion?

Life should be filled with feelings and feelings have their own sense. Logic alone will not suffice. The heart of education is education of the heart. Put your heart in what you do, be it at office or home. When you apply only logic, then it becomes stupid.One should be emotionally fit, and that emotion should be directed by intellect. Intellect without emotion and emotion without intellect; both are incomplete.
Everyone knows that life is impermanent, but when death happens they feel cheated. Why it is so?

One knows intellectually that life is impermanent, but the emotion is still hooked on to illusion and expects life to be permanent. So, apart from intellectually knowing, one has to know emotionally also.
What shall i do then to my emotion?

Whatever you do, learn to know through feelings. For example, you are looking at a flower; you feel the flower, try to touch it emotionally .Look at the flower through 100 eyes as it were. Then, you will find there is a kind of exchange which happens between you and the flower.You will feel the flower is seeing you, you will know through your heart how the flower is contributing to you through its fragrance and appearance. You will learn to understand the flower other than through the mind. Even when eating an apple, feel the apple through your touch, through your eyes, through smell and with feeling eat the apple and you will see how the apple is contributing to you.
Can you do your work in this space? Can you relate to your wife, husband or boss in this way?
Learn to know through your feelings also. Then work becomes joy; work becomes a holiday . You don't need a holiday to enjoy your life, work becomes a movement of joy and hence a holiday , a restful day and spiritual vacation.
My wife and i quarrel a lot. Should i leave her, for it is not leading me anywhere?

Look impassively . Observe deeply . By leaving her, you continue to keep the same mind which has the conflict. It is like despite wearing clean socks, moving around with dirty socks in your pocket. Every place you go to or visit will stink. This stink is not because of the place but because of your dirty socks. So the cause for the conflict is not your wife but your mind. Your mind has not learnt to deal with your wife.
Have you seen a surf rider? He knows that the oncoming wave is dangerous. Still he is flirting with it.The surf rider knows how to deal deftly with the wave and have fun. Any difficulty is like a big wave. You should know how to deal with it. So the cause for conflict is your mind.When the mind is using the other for joy, there is a process of isolation which happens. When one uses the other, then “i“ becomes more valuable than “other“, and the same happens to your partner. Each one is using the other for meeting one's end, and this creates isolation. Any isolation is the cause for conflict. Connectivity is the way out. Love brings in connectivity and ego brings in isolation.

Reclaiming `waste' food could feed 800m hungry around the world

Subodh Ghildiyal Ankara





Cereals and food products thrown away from fridges unused or from store shelves after the “sell-by“ date may feed the 800 million going hungry every day around the globe.The G20, in its bid to fix the problem of food losswastage, has found that “perfectly nutritious food“ was being wasted because it remained unsold on its “sell-by“ date or owing to the demanding specifications of food processors.It is felt this food can be “recovered and redistributed“ across many countries.
“The recovery and redistribution of such food is an initiative the G20 is seeking to encourage,“ a key G20 official said, indicating the issue may figure on top of suggest ions to curb food wastage.
Concern over rampant food deprivation co-existing with the luxury of surplus and quality-driven dumping tops the priority closer to a G20 commitment on curbing the menace at the Turkey summit in November.
The waste figures are staggering. As per findings available with the G20, fruits, vegetables, cereals and rootstubers account for 80% of the food lost or wasted. Crucially, 60% of roots-tubers available are wasted while 40% of fruits and vegetables, and 25% of cereals, go waste.
Perishable products run greater risk of being spoilt, largely owing to inadequate storage and transport facilities. Besides fruits and vegetables, 25% of fish and seafood is lost or wasted, while the figure stands at 20% for meat and dairy products.Overall, around 30% of total global food is thrown away .
Given the linkage between waste and hunger, a G20 technical platform will establish a common measurement system to estimate food loss.“Countries can use it to monitor the problem and the progress made in reducing it,“ the official said. The November summit may adopt the common formula being devised.
For the full report, log on to http:www.timesofindia.com

Campus gender politics

By Asmita Das

Universities are often seen as relatively safe spaces for students from all genders to interact more freely than they would be able to off campus. Many students get together to imagine a more equal society, one that does not tolerate discrimination, by organising demonstrations, awareness programmes, or social events. But recent cases of sexual violence against women on university campuses have raised questions regarding the safety of the university space, and revealed the pressing need for gender sensitisation through active and efficient gender cells in the form of Gender Sensitisation Committees Against Sexual Harassment (GSCASH).

In recent months, the molestation and rape of female students on the grounds of Jadavpur University (JU) in Kolkata, English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) in Hyderabad and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi have led to student protests demanding better mechanisms to appropriately address such cases at universities. At JU, a female student reported to the university and police that she was assaulted, dragged to the boy’s hostel and molested by a group of male students during an annual festival organised by the Arts Faculty Students Union. Her male companion was also beaten up (on 28 August 2014). At EFLU, a female student was reportedly gang-raped in the Men’s Hostel after going there to visit a friend (on 31 October 2014). And at JNU, a PhD student reported that she was sexually assaulted by a research scholar and blackmailed to hide the incident (12 November 2014). While these cases are not the first incidents of sexual violence on campus, they have drawn attention to the fact that university administrations are ill-equipped to appropriately address gender violence.

University campuses are among the few spaces where there can be, and often is, some semblance of gender equality.

Reactions to each of the cases differed. Jadavpur University launched an internal investigation, but authorities were slow to respond and did not take immediate action against the perpetrators. Instead, female representatives of the university paid the girl an unauthorised visit, and questioned her presence near a boy’s hostel on the night of the incident, asking her what she was wearing and whether she was drunk. This violated the Vishaka Guidelines against Sexual Harassment at Workplace, which condemns the use of external pressure on the victim or the accused during the investigation period. The police had started an investigation, but also did not take immediate action based on the victim’s identification of the perpetrators.

JU Students were enraged by the university’s slow and inappropriate actions and called for a fast-track independent investigative committee that would look into the incident and make its proceedings public. They also staged protests demanding a public statement from the vice chancellor (VC) as to why a proper investigation was not taking place. When the VC ignored the protests, students began to stage an indefinite sit-in in front of his office. In the early hours of 17 September, police and unidentified men in civilian dress forcefully broke up the protests, injuring several students and arresting over 35. Reportedly, few female police officers were present, and students – male and female – were beaten and molested by male officers and the other men in plain clothes. This only enraged students more, leading them to organise further protests to demand the VC’s resignation. Eventually, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee visited the JU campus on 12 January 2015 to announce to the students that the VC would resign.

At EFLU officials decided to form a separate taskforce, specifically for dealing with the reported rape, instead of reviving the GSCASH which had been dissolved in 2012. University authorities, reportedly, did not make enough efforts to sustain the GSCASH. Students protested to highlight that the GSCASH had been lying defunct for some time, without any elected student representative. The accused rapists did not expect the victim to take recourse to the law. Instead, they thought they could ‘handle the situation’ and ‘talk it out’ with the girl. The assumption that they would be able to get away with it seems to underlie their statements; perhaps they felt more confident as the girl had been drinking and gone to the Men’s Hostel, therefore not fitting the idea of an ‘innocent’ victim. Notions of women’s complicity in cases where victims did not conform to ‘norms’ of dress and behaviour, unfortunately, also prevail on campus. For these reasons, some students fear that universities, under the guise of a ‘taskforce’ for gender sensitisation, want to prevent cases from becoming public by internally dealing with the issue, potentially letting rapists get away with just a suspension.

Following the incident and protests, stricter rules and curfew hours were enforced at EFLU, mostly for female students, supposedly to protect them. Students were infuriated and with the support of student bodies and various committees, they began to protest. They demanded that a defunct GSCASH be reactivated with elected representatives from all sections of the campus community. For the students, gender segregation and moral policing were not the right solution to gender violence. Indeed, by forcibly keeping men and women apart and reinforcing the idea that men are constantly trying to rape vulnerable women, the authorities are strengthening a culture of segregation rather than one of sensitisation.

These incidents led to protests on campuses across the country, where students were dissatisfied – enraged even – about the fact many universities still fall short when it comes to basic requirements for gender sensitisation and complaints procedures. The University Grants Commission (UGC) guidelines urges universities to establish GSCASH on campuses to take necessary action to prevent any form of violence within university premises:

The students are entitled to protection from sexual harassment by complaining to the Gender Sensitization Committees against Sexual Harassment. It is mandatory for each college/university to constitute and publicize this committee as per the Guidelines and norms laid down by the Hon’ble Supreme Court.

In response to the brutal Delhi assault and gang rape of a medical intern in a bus in 2012, the UGC created a task force which drafted the Saksham report to “review the measures for ensuring safety and security of women in campuses and programmes for gender sensitization”. The report states:

A major finding and deep concern for the Task Force has been that the weakest aspect of our institutions of higher education is their lack of gender sensitivity. This is evident from the mode in which the questionnaires were answered as well as the Open Forums. This means that there is a widespread culture of not speaking out on issues, one which affects the more socially and institutionally vulnerable students the most.

The report recommends that the focus should be on confidentiality and fair enquiries, not coercion, and that gender sensitisation should be required in all colleges and universities, for students as well as faculty, teaching, administrative and other staff.  

Universities have urged that GSCASH be established everywhere in line with the UGC recommendations. The GSCASH is to be an autonomous body comprised of elected representative members from each section of the university community – students, teachers, and non-teaching staff. The function of the committee is not just to take down complaints of gender violence and set up enquiry probes; one of the primary functions of the GSCASH is to bring about gender sensitisation within the university space.

JNU was one of the first universities to implement GSCASH in compliance with UGC directions. JNU has had a history of gender violence on the campus, and students and teachers have been seen turning to GSCASH to take appropriate action. At JNU, students and the university authorities, across party lines, are now proclaiming ‘zero tolerance’ with regards to sexual harassment. On the JU campus, posters for upcoming students’ elections mention the need for active GSCASH at the university. EFLU and other universities, such as Aligarh Muslim University, followed JNU and also implemented GSCASH. However, as reactions to the recent incidents at Jadavpur University and EFLU show, students, teachers and the university authorities do not always understand the importance of GSCASH as opposed to merely an internal complaints committee.

What the recent cases reveal is that sensitisation without segregation is needed more than ever. Women and men must be provided greater access to spaces within the university where they can meet and socialise as equals. This might be one of the early steps towards building a more egalitarian campus. A central university like EFLU has students from different parts of the country and from different backgrounds. There is no need to create more dividing lines than there already are. The university has the power to influence students and define the way they think and understand the world, so why not teach them a sensitive way of interacting with other genders?

Sensitisation has to be a universal process – at home, in school, college, university as well as at workplaces. It may seem ‘convenient’ or ‘easier’ to curb the freedom of women, emphasising that such restrictions are for their own good, but this is no long-term solution to the problem of sexual harassment and violence. University campuses are among the few spaces where there can be, and often is, some semblance of gender equality. As alumni and ‘other concerned individuals’ wrote in a public statement following the rape case at EFLU:

While no academic space is free from gender discrimination and/or violence, erstwhile CIEFL and the formative years of EFLU were known for the relatively free ways in which men and women could access common space, move about the campus in relative safety. 

At a time when such freedoms seem increasingly restricted, students are rightly protesting for better gender sensitisation through GSCASH, amongst other initiatives, in order to feel safe and move freely around campus.

~ Asmita Das is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

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