FemIDEAS

our campuses are heterogeneous and have complex hierarchies.
I mean, this was also something that was discussed
on day one.
We cater to a diverse bunch of students
coming from different social locations.
And I think this is something that’s quite unique
to India, especially.
There are different constituencies within the campus
that we need to engage with, not just students,
but also faculty, non-teaching staff, management.
And these are the three constituencies
which are the most resistant to the idea of change.
So sensitizing them is therefore a humongous task.
Next, we move to internal committees, gender cells,
and committee against sexual harassment
and their role in gender sensitization.
A compelling question that was of course asked
was how autonomous these bodies are
and whether they function in an independent manner,
free from the control of management and administration,
and whether the members themselves are sensitized
to understand the experience of sexual harassment,
which is an intensely personal and subjective experience.
The fact that it is a quasi-judicial body,
operating on principles of natural justice,
examination of witnesses, cross-examining the complainant
and the respondent, I think these processes in themselves
are quite intimidating.
And the complainant may feel overwhelmed and violated,
which is why, and this was something that emerged,
which is why not many survivors approach the IC.
But of course, we also felt that here,
there’s a very important lesson to learn
from the suction committee report, okay?
And how it elaborates in great detail
how the IC and the members must approach a deal
when there is a complainant who approaches them
on issues of sexual harassment.
There’s most certainly a reluctance
to engage with due process.
Students express reservations
about submitting a written complaint.
So what would restorative justice mean in such a scenario?
They would rather have the IC issue a reprimand
or warning to the sexual predators
by the students or teachers,
rather than having to face the committee
and would expect an apology from the respondents.
The approach is to deal with misogyny,
and this was something which came out very forcefully,
that it really makes you angry,
but we have to learn how to deal
with the most misogynistic person on campus
in ways that are corrective and not punitive,
in ways that talk about counseling and not punishment.
While ICs and gender roles have a big role to play
in creating safe spaces and in sensitizing,
the task of sensitization cannot rest on these bodies alone,
but has to be an integrated and holistic one.
Concerning the angro-centric nature of knowledge production,
curricular reforms and feminist pedagogical interventions
are an important aspect of sensitization.
Teaching, after all, is a political project.
Pedagogy and feminist activism go together,
and one must not see them as separate and disjunct,
but one must see, but interestingly, precisely,
this is what has come under attack
in recent times in India.
So you are labeled an anti-national,
and if, as a teacher, you raise critical questions
or talk about issues of social justice
and equity in the class,
and you ask students to think that itself
has become a big challenge these days.
Some good practices were shared in the discussions
of courses on gender and sexuality
that Adrija was talking about now.
Adrija, I don’t think time will permit
an elaborate discussion on this.
Probably when we come out with the report,
we can talk about that.
So the good practices were about the courses
on gender and sexuality that were completely administered
by students using participatory approaches
and experiential learning as key pedagogic practices,
and how this enables students to take ownership
of the programs and spearhead conversations
of feminist conversations, not just on campus,
but also within families, in neighborhood.
There was another interesting story,
there was another interesting aspect that came up,
and that is of CASH,
which is the Committee Against Sexual Harassment.
The CASH support groups that exist, for example,
in Ashoka University in New Delhi for survivors,
and how actively the group functions
to instill confidence in the survivors to approach the IC.
These are all examples of student-led initiatives
and efforts to create safe spaces on campus,
and also in some ways force accountability
from the institutions.
I think I will stop here,
and I would request Ruth to take over from me,
and I’m sure she has many things to say.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Lena.
Okay, so I’ll pick up on some of the other aspects
that we talked about.
And as Lena says,
and we talked about a really wide range
of topics within sensitization,
so there wasn’t always a kind of very clear,
linear progression through the topics,
but we’ll just point out some of the most kind of interesting
and things that we feel might need a bit more discussion.
So a point was made that student activism
is really important, of course, in this topic,
but students are generally at university
for just a few years,
and that means that sometimes their work
and their campaigns about gender-based violence
get repeated by each new generation of students.
At Lena’s institution,
one way of overcoming this is to have
the gender cell volunteers train the next generation
of volunteers, and that creates some continuity.
It concerns that institutional reputation
is the usual motivation for any action.
So universities seem to respond
not through any intrinsic sense of justice,
but because they want to protect their reputation.
So there’s a question for us about
how do we come up with solutions
that universities are also open to accepting
while still being committed to a feminist approach?
We discussed how we can use the curriculum
to sensitize around gender-based violence.
It was felt that in the UK,
there are real limitations
about what we can do with the curriculum
because of the structural constraints
in a neoliberal university.
So in the kind of audit cultures that we exist under now,
there’s very tight control of the delivery
and assessment methods.
So we don’t have the freedom to create
the kinds of optional modules that aren’t assessed,
such as the module that, or the course,
that Lena has talked about.
And we discussed, as Lena has mentioned,
how education is in itself a form of activism,
and that some disciplines might lend themselves
particularly well to teaching about
sexual and gender-based violence.
So literature and teaching women’s and queer writing
and social sciences lend themselves really well
for teaching about gender-based violence.
So they’re very significant for this sensitization process.
But there are other disciplines
where the topic can be incorporated
into the curriculum as well.
There was some discussion about the policy context
in the curriculum,
the policy context in terms of sexual
and gender-based violence in universities.
So I’ll just mention a couple of important pieces
of legislation in each country.
In India, the 2013 Act of Parliament,
so that’s the sexual harassment of women at the workplace
in brackets Prohibition, Prevention,
and Redressal Act of 2013,
provides a statutory requirement
that workplaces are required to constitute
an internal committee.
And that committee is the body that has to inquire
into cases of sexual harassment in the workplace.
So it’s not specifically for educational institutions,
but generally for workplaces.
But there is a problem, as Lena has alluded to,
with inquiry committees or in the UK,
investigatory bodies,
which aren’t connected to sensitization programs.
So these inquiry committees or investigatory bodies
need to have people who are well informed
about sexual and gender-based violence.
So we need people on those committees
who don’t adhere to rape myths,
who’ve got an understanding of the complex
and varied ways in which victim survivors respond to abuse,
the ways in which coercive control works,
the ways in which grooming works.
And in the UK, there are some organizations
that are doing training about this.
And some universities have sought training
from organizations such as Rape Crisis.
In India, there’s also the University Grants Commission,
which is a funding and regulatory authority
in higher education.
And they provide guidelines to universities and colleges
about constituting internal committees.
So that’s the policy context, very simply.
There’s obviously more complexity to it,
but that’s the context in India.
In the UK, there’s no clear statutory responsibility
around gender-based violence.
A body called Universities UK,
which is a network of the heads of universities.
So Universities UK provides guidelines,
but they’re not binding
and they don’t have any enforcement power.
There are laws that exist that can be used
to protect women from violence,
but they’re rarely used and routinely ignored.
So the Equality Act of 2010
and the Human Rights Act of 1998.
This latter act, the Human Rights Act,
incorporates into British law
the European Convention on Human Rights.
And there’s a reference that we can provide
for anyone interested in more detail about that,
a chapter written by Louise Witchfield in 2018.
There was some discussion
about the wider political context.
Again, I’ll just pick up on some
of what Lena has spoken about.
So obviously we’re seeing a global move
to the right politically.
And in India, we are certainly seeing
a more repressive right-wing move
in which feminism is portrayed as a Western import.
And we’re seeing the promotion of familyism
rather than feminism.
In the UK, we’re seeing a similar move to the right.
We’re seeing the entrenchment of a neoliberal approach
in universities as in elsewhere,
a co-option of feminism
and an adoption of liberal feminism at best.
So in both contexts, there’s a move away
from encouraging students to be really profoundly critical,
to engage in profound personal and intellectual change.
And we heard about some universities discouraging PhD work
on gender-based violence.
So I’ve mentioned that universities are often motivated
by a back covering approach,
a desire to protect their reputation.
And it was also reported that there’s a disconnect
between what some universities claim they’re doing
and what students say they experience.
And it might be that universities are providing individual,
short, brief interventions,
which simply don’t figure in students’ memories
of their time at university.
Or it might be that universities are exaggerating
the actions that they’re taking.
Ruth, sorry to interrupt, one minute.
Okay, thank you.
There’s an assumption that people in their 20s are adults
and they know about sex, about what’s okay,
what’s consensual and so on.
But we heard about how men have higher rape myth acceptance
and the more traditional the attitudes people hold,
the more accepting they are of harassment
and even sexual assault.
In Northern Ireland, that’s exacerbated by Catholic context
where there’s very little respect for sexual assault.
There’s very little sex education
and discussions of sex and consent are taboo.
And I’ll just finish then by picking up on something
Lena said, where she talked about the similar gender regimes
in both countries, which obviously manifest
in different ways according to the different
cultural contexts.
But we discussed two similar high profile incidents
that had occurred in each country.
So in India, there was what I think is referred to
as the locker room incident where the conversation
between a group of 11 to 12 year old boys was exposed
and that conversation included misogynistic
and sexually violent talk about girls.
And that led to a lot of media, legal intervention
and a lot of media coverage.
Similarly in the UK at Warwick University,
the so-called rape chat was exposed.
So a group of university young men were discussing
on Facebook, deeply misogynistic and racist views
and they were making threats of sexual violence
towards women in their class.
The university failed to act properly.
Some of the young women involved took to social media
and that consequently led to much higher media profile
and the university taking further action
although it still hasn’t been resolved.
So we talked about how some of these high profile incidents
tend to take a very carceral approach,
which is likely to be of limited value
in terms of actually shifting attitudes and behaviors.
And we didn’t get into talking about it in any detail,
but we need to think about whether there’s space
for a more restorative justice approach
and sanctions oriented around re-education
rather than simply adopting a carceral approach.
So I hope that gives an idea of some of what we talked about.
It was a fantastic discussion and like Lena said,
we’ve just picked out some points to report back on,
but I hope that gives some idea of what we talked about.
Thank you.
Brilliant, thank you so much Lena and Ruth.
I’m not gonna summarize the discussion,
but I’m gonna very quickly move on to Rachel and Nikita
to talk about the next group,
which was accountability and activism.
Nikita is a legal practitioner from India
and she has worked on drafting the code
against sexual harassment and gender based discrimination
in her university campus.
She has also worked with several cases of sexual violence
and domestic violence as a lawyer.
She has worked with collectives of sex workers
and also represented indigenous women
in conflict-orn areas of South Chhattisgarh.
Rachel is involved in community organizing
and campaigning to end violence against women and girls.
Her background is in student campaigning
for arts universities and informal education
for young people.
She currently works for a domestic violence charity
in an outreach and educational role.
And we are very thrilled that she’ll be coming
to do her master’s in SOAS this autumn.
So over to you, Rachel and Nikita,
to talk to us about accountability and activism.
Nikita, do you have a preference for who starts?
I would actually prefer if you go first,
because I just have a lot of things
that I would like to add.
Yes.
Rachel, can I interrupt you for like one second,
because what I’ve got to say is that
you both have collectively like 10 to 12 minutes.
So what I will do is I will like keep a lookout
on your private chat and I’ll send you a reminder of time.
But also if anybody wants to ask questions,
please feel free to drop it in the Q&A section,
which should be at the bottom of your screen
or the chat section and I will pick it up.
And also members from the other groups
who are there in our audience as well.
If you have questions for people from other groups,
please feel free to continue the conversation in the chat
or drop questions in the Q&A section.
Sorry, Rachel.
That’s okay.
I will keep this brief and then hopefully Nikita
will add her abundant wisdom in all of the gaps.
Wow, okay.
We had a mammoth conversation about accountability.
Wow, accountability, one of the most kind of
commonly used words in our shared lexicon in activism.
So I think actually we started by just saying
that we were really tired, tired, exhausted, overworked,
trying to get degrees, trying to get PhDs
and trying to fix this really big problem.
And what does that mean for the process of accountability?
How are we meant to push our institutions,
big, powerful, often very rich institutions
to make themselves accountable,
not only over something that they really don’t want
to hold themselves accountable over,
but also when we’re tired,
when we’ve got other things to do.
Well, that led us to think about the need
for an independent body that deals
with gender-based violence on campus.
How do we take the onus off the individual
and move it towards the onus on a body, on a collective?
We framed our discussion further
with a really interesting conversation
about what constitutes an institution.
When we talk about institutional accountability,
who are we holding accountable?
There were some really, really great contributions
about thinking of the state as an institution.
It has norms, it has legal recourse,
and in that case, we have something to appeal to
for accountability.
But when the institution, the state,
the university is falling apart,
then there’s no sense of being able to appeal to anything.
That can be very disempowering.
It can feel like a free-for-all.
There are no rules, no regulated processes.
That can be really, really complicated.
What does accountability look like?
We discussed it, and this was really kind of a thread
that we’ve all the way through our discussion.
We spoke especially in this online age.
How can we imagine safe spaces online and offline?
What does accountability look like online and offline?
And we spoke in this instance really specifically,
which was really helpful.
For example, if we’re using Zoom
and we are making use of the breakout group function,
what does literally accountability look like
in a breakout room where there is nobody,
no teaching assistant, no lecturer, professor
to oversee that kind of conversation?
And then we made some other suggestions collectively
about steps that we might take
towards safe working practice.
We talked about the ways in which accountability
can break down when there are lots of powerful figures
involved, high-profile cases.
Reminded me specifically of something
that I brought up yesterday about this culture
of the visiting lecturer, the kind of professional,
the best director in the UK
who’s coming to deliver a masterclass.
They’re likely a friend of the theatre professor.
They’ve likely not signed a contract.
They’re likely donating a huge amount of money
to the institution.
When they are outside of contract,
when they are outside of regulations,
how can we possibly hold them accountable?
And again, anyone correct me if I’m wrong,
but it feels apt to say that there were more questions
than answers in that instance.
We talked about state violence
and the marketization of education.
And I am sorry to be kind of just moving so swiftly
through what are such huge concepts,
but this is really just intended as a snapshot
of the things that we talked about.
There were some really interesting
and some difficult to hear examples,
especially from our colleagues and our sisters
and Indian universities in India,
talked about the right-wing co-opting narratives
as I’m sure we can all kind of attest to on some level.
There were examples of running a campaign
on sexual harassment in universities
that ended up being co-opted by the institution
and then had things like advocating for a police day,
advocating for increased surveillance and control.
Really, I think Ruth said it really brilliantly
just before that advocating for carceral solutions
is a really big problem for intersectional feminists.
And it’s a really big problem for collectives
who are advocating for violent free universities.
We talked as well about the political binary
kind of especially in the context of India,
but certainly us in the UK are not immune.
That binary between the left and the right, is that useful?
And what does that do to kind of the students
that might be caught somewhere in the middle?
When we’re thinking about accountability,
are we then kind of necessarily thinking
about political accountability?
Are we just thinking about accountability to the processes,
to student welfare?
And if all of those things are true,
how do we package that in a way that’s effective
and appealing to the university?
I mean, if anyone has an answer,
I’ll give you a tenor to tell me it’s really,
I would seriously love to know.
We moved on to have some really interesting conversations
about accountability to more specific parts of the process.
For example, we talked about the unsafe use
of mediations in reporting processes
or in the investigation processes in universities.
And that’s linked to lots of closed door arrangements.
And that’s really inextricably linked to the ways
in which our universities are becoming further marketized
that these closed door arrangements are seen as a way
to save money, to save resources, to not make a fuss
because we don’t want to open the floodgates.
How do we hold institutions accountable
towards third parties?
And this was the most interesting part
of the conversation to me.
We had a conversation about the rise of ex-police officers
being brought into campus
to work on investigation processes.
We talked about the rise of these good lad initiative groups
that are coming onto universities,
the kind of a reformed good man talking to other good men
about how to always be good men.
Jackie, she said it so brilliantly
and I won’t be able to replicate it,
but she said it’s just so fascinating, so classic
how even in this deeply gendered conversation
about gender-based violence, the microphone still
is with the men largely.
What does that mean for accountability?
Often higher education institutions are using
these third party groups, these ex-police officers,
these kind of groups that tackle lad culture
as a way to avoid accountability.
But when letting the young, cool people
talk to other students,
so we don’t really know what your problem is,
that’s not accountability, that’s a decoration,
I think, glorified decoration.
I am gonna leave it there, if that’s okay with you Nikita,
can you give me a kind of a nod or a thumbs up
that that’s all right, yeah?
Yeah, yeah, that’s fine.
Yeah, I hope that was a helpful part
of the picture for you.
Okay, so basically, as Rachel said,
that we started with this sense of feeling alone, isolated,
because we all felt like we were pushing against
the system that seeks to push back on the work
that we all are trying to do collectively,
and this was an experience that resonated
with India and UK.
So in both, we both, all of us felt that the university
puts the pressure on us to do something,
all of us felt that the university puts the burden
of accountability on us, and the bar is so low around
what we can demand from the university,
that a lot of the burden falls on us.
It is a global trend that survivors of sexual violence
don’t report to the level that violence
is actually taking place,
but at the same, and we are very concerned about that,
but at the same time, there was also an articulation around
how do we make the process of this process
that we are all embarking upon above and beyond
just complaints.
So that was a very big question that we all had.
So these were, so a lot of what I will say is also around
just stuff that I thought through since yesterday.
So the feminist student struggle for accountability,
I feel is a longer process.
It is not just, it is not free from structural biases
in India and UK alike.
Accountability in institutions will have to be done
by those people who form the university structure.
It has to be a bottom-up process in many ways.
UK demands a separate process from the student unions,
which must be a political process in itself, right?
And however, it is also felt that in institutions
culturally, there needs to be a shift where people
are speaking and engaging about sexual
and gender-based violence,
and asking that these issues get taken more seriously
than they’re being taken.
And for that kind of work, we do need activists
and progressive institutional committees, right?
And we need to also have these conversations in committees
and in unions and in other bodies
that are already existing, right?
It is the people, the people who form the university per se,
who will have to be compelled and who will have to compare
the university and their own selves
to be more accountable.
All forms of accountability mechanisms to third parties
will also have to come from there itself,
because the whole process has to move
from the people itself.
In some way, the idea is not just to ask of the university
to be a part of the process,
but the freedom of safe space
has to be throughout the university.
The university cannot designate a small room
in the corner saying this is the space
that is your safe space,
but the university will have to strive to be a safe space
per se in its entire campus.
There was also an articulation in UK and in India
that there is those who practice feminist politics
are at loggerheads with the university,
and in the Indian experience is also that
those who are part of this kind of feminist political work
are at loggerheads with the state as well.
And in that kind of a space,
the feminist ideals of what entails a safe space
have to be foregrounded even more strongly.
There is a difference of what is accountability.
So yeah, okay, let me move on.
So there was one very large difference
in the way the UK, the friends from UK
the friends from India kind of spoke about
what they expect out of the university
where the friends from UK said that
they would want the university to be more proactive,
whereas the Indian experiences is one
where we want the university to back off a little bit.
So we also felt that in the UK,
the processes are less formalized at this point,
whereas in India, because processes in some way
are more formalized, but we are trying to push
for a more intersectional
strengthening of the present institutions at this point.
So we spoke about the fact that there is no organized way
of engaging with sexual harassment in India
and UK alike at some level.
In UK, the student union formalizes
and structures student activist struggles
and there are people dedicated to representing
student interests.
However, there is an issue with the structure
while the UK experience shows a certain kind
of relinquishment of responsibility
by sending complaints to third party groups
which work in really devious manners.
There have also been experiences of how universities
co-opt anti-sexual harassment processes.
Like for example, how they protect
and dominate student unions.
In India, student unions are different.
They are elected bodies with larger political affiliation
and play out in different ways.
However, in India and UK alike,
there is a huge problem of co-option of student interests
through various mechanisms.
So for example, in India, there are several committees
and which are co-opted by institutions
and stooges are instituted within those institutions
who do not have a history of working with gender cast class.
Powerful people in universities get preferential treatment
when complaints are instituted against them.
In both India and UK processes get dragged out
for way too long with the clear intent to exhaust
and dilute the processes.
Then there were also things about how,
like there was also this whole issue around
what the unsafe use of mediations,
especially in the UK experience.
So to this, I’d just like to respond a little bit
in the Indian experience where within the policy itself,
there are a lot of checks and balances.
One of the biggest and most important check
that is put within the policy itself
is that the survivor and the alleged perpetrator
are not supposed to be put face to face.
So things like that.
And at the same time, the names of the survivors,
the complainants are never supposed to be publicized,
not even so much as they’re not even supposed to be told
to the alleged perpetrator.
So there is a certain kind of understanding
of the vulnerabilities,
which also comes from a certain kind of feminist movement
that informs the sexual harassment law in India,
which is in many ways lacking in UK.
So that was a lesson that I learned through this process
that when there is a certain history
of a feminist movement that informs a law,
the law in itself is respective of how it functions,
but the law in itself carries a lot of understanding
as to what is violence and how to address
and redress that violence.
Yeah, I’m done.
Thank you so much, Rachel and Nikita.
And we will have time once we’ve gone through
all the groups to,
for the groups to ask each other questions as well,
and for you to carry on the conversation in the chat.
But I’m now going to certainly move on to our final group,
which was policy and policies in UK and India.
And our two speakers are Sunita and Anna.
I am just going to introduce both Sunita and Anna.
Sunita teaches at the Department of Gender Studies
at the University of Hyderabad.
She has served as the chairperson
of the sexual harassment committee
and was involved in setting up the cash committee
in her institution.
Anna Bull is a senior lecturer in sociology
at the University of Portsmouth.
Her research interests include class and gender inequalities
in classical music education
and staff sexual misconduct in higher education.
She’s also the co-founder of the 1752 Group,
a lobby group in consultancy set up to address the issues
of staff student sexual misconduct in higher education.
So over to you, Anna and Sunita.
Thank you so much.
I think I’ll go first and talk about first few questions
and then I’ll pass over to Sunita.
And thank you everybody else for those really, really
succinct and impressive summaries of your discussion.
I hope I can do as well.
And there was definitely some overlap
in what we talked about in our group
in terms of the importance
of developing a feminist consciousness
for committee members,
but that work really continuing
across the wider institution.
And I think that’s something we haven’t talked about enough
in the UK and I’m really, really inspired
by hearing from all the activists from India
about the work that they’ve been doing.
I’m inspired to do a lot more with my students
and inspired to support others to keep doing that work.
So the first question,
which is quite a big one that we were looking at
was what should a survivor-centered feminist
and intersectional policy for dealing
with sexual and gender-based violence in HE
look like higher education?
So really in the 1752 Group,
we’ve really talked about this as giving control
and choice to complainants and survivors
about what actions they take and what they don’t do.
But obviously how you do that is really, really difficult.
In our group, we also discussed ensuring intersectionality
as part of that policy,
because a lot of complaints will be intersectional
if it’s sexual and racial harassment together, for example.
These might not be able to be separated
and discussed together.
They need to be dealt with intersectionally
and that’s not always easy or possible
through current complaints processes in the UK, at least.
And in the Indian context,
people were talking about how actually bias
and discrimination enters the complaints process
right from the beginning, right from the point
where complainants disclose or start the complaints process.
So we talked about the importance of sensitization
of committing members in the Indian context
or of people, what we might call practitioners
in the UK context.
Because of course, I mean, one of the issues is in India,
of course, it’s much clearer who is doing this work.
Statutory requirement to have a committee
means at least you know where the work is happening.
In the UK, this work can be disseminated
across a quite confusing variety of people
in different parts of the university,
both academic and non-academic or support staff.
We also briefly talked about issues between disciplines.
The example from India was that actually scientists
weren’t named on the MeToo list in India.
And this was because it’s harder to make a complaint
because for PhD students,
a complainant risks losing all of her data
if they lose access to their PhD supervisor.
So there’s differences between disciplines.
So yeah, there was a lot we could talk about
in terms of this question of what we want in a policy.
But really this question of feminist consciousness
becoming part of the classroom
and incorporated this across the curriculum.
It does sound like in India,
this is happening more widely than it is in the UK.
And so there’s a lot of work,
there’s a lot that we in the UK can learn
from our colleagues in India.
There was also a question
about the functioning of the committee.
Now, like the committee in the UK,
a lot of institutions don’t have a committee
because as Ruth described,
there’s no statutory requirement to have such a committee.
Universities have to have a complaints process,
but this is complaints for everything.
So for plagiarism, for failing your second year
of your course, or academic things,
your accommodation not being good enough,
all of those complaints, sexual violence
and harassment complaints occur within that context.
But one of the really interesting points
that came out of the India context for me
was about how the functioning of the committee
dealing with these complaints
could create discussions or transparency
across the university.
So for example, in Hyderabad, there’s a newsletter,
I understand, that comes from the committee
about what the workers that they’re doing.
There are some, sorry, you can hear the seagulls
in the background up in Portsmouth by the sea.
I hope that’s not too noisy.
So in the UK, there are a handful of universities,
maybe four or five that do do an annual report
on the number of complaints they’ve received
around sexual misconduct and sexual violence.
This doesn’t tend to have much information
about the types of complaints.
It doesn’t really do this transparency and reflection role.
And so I think that this is something that I’ll reflect on.
That’s really helpful to think about.
So yeah, and then there’s also a question
about who should be on this committee
and how you choose the members.
And I understand in India,
members of the committee that are elected.
Whereas in the UK, a big difference
between the UK and India is that the investigation
is done by an individual, not a committee.
The disciplinary action will be a panel
or a committee, you know, a committee, a small committee.
But the actual investigation is carried out
either by a senior member of staff within the institution
or by an external, somebody external who they pay to do it.
Now, the advantage of that is that they’re usually going
to have a training, gender sensitization training,
hopefully, not always.
And so, and they will have skills
in carrying out these investigations.
And therefore, in theory,
it should be able to be carried out more quickly.
But there’s less transparency and accountability around that.
And then another difference in the UK versus India
is the appeals process.
So in India, it sounds like the inquiry committees
are part of the civil process,
the civil legal structure in the country.
Whereas in the UK, you know, any investigations
that universities carry out is only about that university
that’s not linked into the criminal justice process
or the civil justice process in the country more widely.
So appeals can happen within the university,
within that kind of closed system.
Or otherwise, you have to go to the ombuds organization
for complaints for higher education,
which I can say a lot about that if you’re interested.
Or you can take a legal case,
but that’s very expensive and very difficult to do.
I’m aware I need to rush through.
So I’ll just move on to the next question.
How can policies deal with questions
of natural justice and anonymity?
Now, we could have said a lot more about this,
but the question of anonymity,
and if a student wants to make an anonymous report,
or if they want a bystander to report on their behalf,
we discussed this at length.
And it seems like this is something
that hasn’t been resolved or dealt with adequately
either in the UK or India.
The question of when anonymous complaints can be used
and in what context is one that we still need to work with.
In the UK, there is a piece of software
for anonymous reporting that’s run
by an organization called Culture Shift.
And so when they receive anonymous reports
across the institution,
you can analyze those reports and find out, right,
there’s a whole lot coming from this particular department,
or there’s a whole lot coming
from this particular hall of residence.
And so there can be analysis done of anonymous reports.
So that’s one way forward.
Also in the 1752 group,
we have, with our legal partners,
come up with some guidance on how anonymous reports
could be integrated in with a named complainant.
So if you have one person in a group complaint who’s named,
you can then have anonymous complainants alongside them.
This hasn’t been tested yet,
so we don’t know if universities will take it up.
I’ll just briefly say something, moving on now,
about the relationship between institutional policy
and the criminal justice system.
Now, this is an area where there are significant differences
between the UK and India.
In the UK, there is some guidance
on how universities should intersect
with the criminal justice system.
And it says that universities can still investigate
anything that is also reported to the police.
So they can investigate things
that have been reported as criminal cases,
because in the university,
they’re not investigating it as a criminal case.
They’re investigating it as a breach
of the code of conduct for the institution.
So there’s been a lot of discussion about this interplay
between the university’s process
and the criminal justice process.
Whereas I think in the Indian context,
if I understand it correctly,
criminal cases should not be investigated
by the university at all,
where only sexual harassment cases
should be investigated by the university.
And maybe Sunita can say more about that,
because I might not have got it exactly right.
So I’ll pass over to, I’m sorry,
I possibly talked a little bit too long,
but I’ll pass over to Sunita.
And yes, thank you to all my group
for some really valuable insights.
Hello, everyone, may I come in?
Can you hear me, please?
Yeah, yeah, the overlapping is inevitable, I suppose,
because we have all been talking around the same point.
And Anna has made most of the points.
I’ll see what new points I can make.
And I’ll pass it over to you,
because I think it’s a really good question.
And I think it’s a really good question.
And I think it’s a really good question.
I’ll see what new points I can make.
There has been a very, very intense discussion
yesterday around these points.
Let me, I hope I’ll be able to bring in a few more points
in addition to what Anna has made right now.
One point that, one very important point
that we discussed at Lent,
which Anna also has referred to,
is functioning of the committee.
I think since the group was discussing the policy,
we were basically discussing what the policies were,
how the policies were needed to be,
what were the gaps in the policies,
and what were the gaps in the implementation of the policies.
I think some of these gaps were concrete,
and some of these gaps were abstract.
The concrete gaps were like the questions
which can be raised in a very, very pertinent manner,
like what about the outsourced employees
who are in great numbers now in universities?
Do they come into the purview of the committee
against sexual harassment?
That is like that has become mandatory
in every university now.
And what is the scope of the committee
when it comes to the question of classroom as a site?
Or what about the collective complaints?
Are they considered by the committee?
Some of the concrete loopholes or gaps
or drawbacks in the committee like this were discussed.
And some of the abstract gaps in the policy
and also in the implementation of the policy
were also discussed at Lent.
I think it’s a little more complex.
It’s a little more difficult
to address these abstract questions.
That’s because they’re invisible most of the time.
Like Anna was rightly referring to,
like the other groups were also referring to,
for instance, the intersectionality.
Intersectionality on the basis of equality
or on the basis of superior and inferior.
The prejudice that is involved based on age, region,
caste, class, religion, conduct, quote unquote conduct,
which is a big issue in the Indian context.
How do we deal with these gaps
was one of the points of discussion,
which was discussed at Lent and various examples
were also given to show how the prejudice,
actually the bias or maybe the fixed notions
affect the inquiry or even acceptance
or receiving of the complaints from the students,
faculty and non-teaching staff as well.
And one more point that came up
is about training of the committee,
sensitization of the sensitization committee,
like how sensitized it is in terms of,
as we have been discussing, feminist consciousness
and apart from feminist consciousness,
how sensitized, how aware is the committee
about the rules, laws, the inquiry procedure,
some idea about one another’s expertise,
whether it is the counselor or the legal expert,
NGO representative who is present on the committee.
So knowing about each other’s work
and also being sensitive to some of these
very important points about identities
and especially one more point
that we also discussed is language.
How to develop a register of language
to express harassment or violence
because so especially in the Indian context,
we only are given like derogatory language
for sexual harassment, sexual violence.
How do we provide, how do we also design a language,
a register to lodge a complaint,
to articulate the harassment,
to understand the complexities,
the various levels of harassment and violence,
the nuanced language, the nuanced understanding of violence
was also one of the points that we were discussing.
And apart from this, we were also referring
to the committees other than gender sensitization committee
or GS cash or internal complaints committee
because there are a number of committees
that do function at the university level
and some of these committees
do have very close interactions,
close interactions and closed interactions as well
with the faculty, students and other stakeholders
where there is lot of sexual harassment going on,
violence going on, sometimes intentionally,
sometimes like unintentionally using
very, very offensive language.
So training at the university level,
at the institutional level, at various levels
and also having some subgroups of GS cash,
not just having an institutional level one,
but at the level of department,
at the level of the school
so that there is some kind of decentralization,
some trust that is built for the committees,
for the procedures.
And while I’m on the topic of the trust,
like Anna was referring to,
I think the trust and distrust question
is one more abstract point in the policy itself,
which has to be concretized,
which has to be included in the policy as well
that when a complainant comes,
the first thing that the committee has to manifest,
I mean it like manifest,
I think that is what some of us
were trying to argue yesterday.
Manifest trust for the complainant,
assurance for the complainant
and this is where I think the comparisons
that all the panels were making between India and UK.
The Indian context,
which actually depends a lot on silence,
depends a lot on suppression and repression,
probably is, I think there should be a very conscious effort
to break the silence
and also the distrust and the bias that emerges from
the immediate context, the intersectionality,
the hierarchical identities that exist in the society.
And yeah, probably I think I have made most of the points
because Anna has said most of the things.
So I only added to what Anna has said.
I’m sure more will come in the discussion
that is going to happen.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Anna and Sunita.
I am just going to first pick out questions
that we have from other members of the group.
Lena has posted a question who was a part,
who’s one of our speakers
and Lena, do you want to actually, you can talk.
So yeah, because you’re on the panel,
do you want to ask the question
or do you want me to read it out?
Adreej, I’m not too sure whether I asked a question.
I think it was a comment.
Oh, you said power dynamics
within an educational institution.
Okay, okay.
So basically,
so I was just trying to complicate the issue a little bit
and trying to tell the attendees and the panelists
that these are extremely complex issues.
I mean, something that of course has been highlighted
by the other panelists as well.
And how do you deal with these issues?
For example, now what,
since we’re talking about the kind of pressures
and that the members may be subjected to
if they do not operate in an independent autonomous manner.
So what happens, for example,
if the protector or the respondent
is someone on contractual staff
and then it becomes,
although we are not supposed to be punitive,
there have been instances where you say,
okay, let’s fire the person.
But supposing it’s a permanent employee,
would you do that?
You know, so these are the questions
that one really needs to ponder over and understand.
I’m sorry, I think I put a question mark,
so it became like a question.
Oh, no, absolutely.
But like, this is the time for conversations.
Yes.
Does anybody else on the panel have any comments,
any questions or any of the other members of the group?
Sorry, we have to do this format
because of security issues.
So we do have members of the groups
as attendees.
So if any of you have questions,
please put it on the chat or the Q&A
and I will, and I can add you, ask the questions.
But in the meantime, while that is happening,
does anybody on the panel have any questions or comments?
Any of the facilitators they want to ask or add something?
Chandni Shalza, feel free to join the conversation as well
if you have anything to add or any questions.
Leena, please.
Adrita, can you post the link on the Saqsham committee report?
I think that’s a very important one and important document.
And if we can post it here, then it will be good
for the audience especially.
Sure, I will do that.
And I posted that in our first day as well.
We of course have it.
We have it.
Yeah, so I’m circulating that right now.
But is there any other comments or questions
from the panel itself and the facilitators from yesterday?
I have a question if I may.
Yes, please, of course.
Sorry, Anna, I jumped in.
I can’t raise a hand or anything.
I was really interested in a comment made
in the chat on the side by Nilesha
about the difference between the Indian
and UK context of student activism.
And I wondered if they could expand on that.
Yeah.
Would you like me to read that question out to you?
So this goes to Nikita and Rachel.
So this was about, I think Nilesha was talking about,
and we had quite a long conversation on this
actually, that how UK and India are
in different stages of neoliberal development
where the UK university has become so marketized
that any form of resistance is actually looked down upon.
But in India or larger South Asia,
we still see a different potential
of more radical struggles.
And Nikita, Shelza, and Rachel?
Hi, I think this comment was by Nilesha.
So I don’t think they have.
So do they have speaking rights on these platforms?
Maybe they can elaborate.
Sure, I can give Nilesha speaking rights.
Yeah, please do that.
Hi.
I think I have the speaking rights now.
Can anyone hear me?
We can hear you, Nilesha.
Sorry, yeah, because the screen wasn’t showing anything.
Yeah, Ruth, I don’t know.
I think, as we just said, that they had discussed this
yesterday as well, even though I wasn’t
in the private chats yesterday.
But this is just what stuck me, because I was also
the women’s officer at one of the student’s unions,
at the student’s union at UCL.
And it just stuck me.
The system is so much enmeshed into neoliberal economic
structure, which is sometimes it is good,
because universities have this obligation
of making policies that adhere to maybe
ethnic swan or stonewall and all those things, which
at least the universities have a directive
to make policies which would offer student well-being,
including those who have survived sexual misconduct
in various capacities.
But this is completely lacking in India.
I think it is mostly because universities
are seen as public good, and then students
are just learners.
But just because of that, students and staff,
they also have much higher potential
to engage in activism.
And grassroot activism is something
that you definitely see in India,
I think most of the South Asian context.
But you don’t see that much in UK universities,
like UK higher education, where even the student unions would
be like, oh, so this particular thing,
it belongs to charities, it belongs
to non-governmental organizations.
So probably if you want to engage
in that sort of grassroot activism,
students and staff is not like the people who would do it,
that sort of thing.
And it is just like when I was training
for the teaching assistantship, so I’m a PhD
and I also teach for the course that my supervisor leads.
When I was training for it, our trainers were like,
so someone raised the question of,
so what about critical thinking?
Should we encourage our class students to think?
And they’re like, students come here for employability.
You teach them the skills, the transfer of skills
and other things and knowledge of the subject.
And activism is not something that you
should be touching on, that sort of thing.
So it’s like it’s not endemic to any one university.
It’s a very UK thing, I think.
So in that sense, I think Adrija can definitely
speak more on it, because I’m sure
you’ve had big discussions.
But in that sense, I think it gives us
potential opportunities on how to make inroads
into this very, very difficult problem,
both in the UK and India.
In the UK, what I’ve seen is the way is definitely,
even though it’s not perfect, but the way
is definitely a corporate way.
So you have to ask your university to be accountable,
to sort of stick to the audit culture
that you were discussing about earlier
to make better policies.
But execution remains problematic, even still,
as Anna was saying about that answer,
in the 52 group has done a lot so far.
So as the policies are there,
but then execution remains problematic.
But one thing I see working in the UK,
rather than India, is like the top-down approach.
Like you take a buy-in from your SMT,
you force your university from the top down
to implement and execute it.
Of course, sensitization has to be there.
But in India, I think another way to do it
is like grassroot activism, like students and staff
asking their university to be sort of accountable
in that sense, because a university initiative
in that sense is lacking.
There are no audit cultures that will hold
vice chancellors and deans accountable for that sense.
Yeah, just that, thank you.
Brilliant, thank you so much, Nalesha.
What I’m gonna do is, because we have so many questions
coming up and we have very little time,
I’m gonna put forward some of the questions,
but maybe one person from the group can give,
I know this is really hard,
but a one-minute answer to the questions,
if that’s okay, one or two minutes,
so we can go through some of the discussions.
Is that okay with the speakers?
Thank you, and so one of the questions that we have
is around, because we spoke about how it is difficult
to integrate questions of feminist consciousness
into all disciplines, and it very often becomes centered
around feminist studies, queer studies, or women’s studies.
And how do we make feminist consciousness
integrated more into curriculum across disciplines?
I’m gonna put forward three questions,
and then we can take them all together.
The second is one on what to do,
and it’s a really important question,
because we’ve seen that quite a bit in the UK right now,
that what do the panelists feel about private players
coming in as groups or agencies
dealing with sexual harassment on behalf of the institution?
And the third question is,
doesn’t restorative justice still rely
on criminal justice procedures,
or what does a restorative justice mechanism look like
to open it up a bit more?
So does one person from each group want to take
or comment on these?
But I would really appreciate if you could be brief
so we can take another round of questions,
because I know Mary’s already here,
and we start at half 11.
I think, okay, yes, yes, no, no, no, please go ahead.
Sunita, please go ahead.
So if I may, Adrije, if I may respond to the first question,
you know, how do we integrate a feminist consciousness?
And this is something that I feel very strongly about,
you know, I have believed over the years,
I mean, in this time period,
it’s almost like two decades or so
that I have been involved in this,
and I think that’s something that I’ve been really,
I think it’s almost like two decades or so
that I have been involved in creating
this kind of gender justice spaces on campus.
One thing I’ve come to realize that, you know,
it is very important to integrate a feminist consciousness
and to bring about changes in the curriculum.
And the reason I say this is,
I have come across guidebooks and textbooks
that are so transphobic and that are so sexist,
communal, casteist, okay?
And unfortunately, this has been read by students
who have otherwise no exposure to gender,
because these are students who are into management,
and this is something that we discussed yesterday,
either into management studies,
or these are science students,
and gender doesn’t figure prominently
in their scheme of things.
So the only exposure that they have to gender
is through foundation courses.
And these books that I’m talking about
are books which are prescribed for foundation courses.
And I, for me, this is extremely dangerous.
And they go with those kinds of ideas.
Now, so, you know, which is why I always argue for,
you know, sort of, so the curriculum, in fact,
does a lot of violence.
The curriculum actually reinforces, you know,
patriarchal violence, and of course,
other forms of violence, and how do we change that?
That has been, you know,
that has been one of the biggest challenges.
Now, if you, I also feel, and for me,
curriculum and pedagogy go together.
Because if you simply make changes in the curriculum,
and you do not integrate feminist insights
into the teaching or the administration of the curriculum,
then I think it’s not going to serve any purpose.
Which is why it is very important
that we institutionalize a set
of feminist pedagogical practices
when we are, you know, dealing with these kind of curriculum.
And I think, you know, this can really bring about,
I mean, I always give examples,
and people always, like yesterday,
when we were having a discussion,
Ruth says, you know, it sounds like heaven.
And I often, sometimes, the course that we run,
and the fact that it is administered by students,
the fact that students have taken it upon themselves,
complete ownership by the students,
even I often wonder how we have been able to do that.
Maybe we have been able to get,
have support from the administration.
How long, I don’t know.
How long that support continues, I don’t know.
But as of now, we do have support.
But one thing is that the students,
it’s a student-led initiative.
And that, I think, is very important.
And I’m going to tie this up with what Vita
has also written in the chat.
And she says, you know,
for those of you who do not know,
you know, we have these WDCs, Women Development Cells.
Now, IC is, of course, a statutory body.
But WDC was a statutory body at one point of time.
But today, it has been tasked,
it has been given the responsibility
of gender sensitization.
And I think in all colleges where you have WDC and ICs,
they really need to, our universities,
they really need to work in a very coordinated manner.
And they can borrow so much from one another
and bring in rich kind of discussions on campus.
And I think that will really bring about changes on campus.
Anything else, Dr.
Brilliant, thank you so much, Lina.
Sunita, did you want to go?
Anna has also responded to some of the questions
in the Q&A sections, and she’s put brilliant responses.
So please go have a, yeah, have a read of that as well.
Sunita?
Yeah, I do agree with Lina
that there should be more and more courses.
I think feminist pedagogy is one of the tools
to spread feminist consciousness.
And this has been happening in many universities.
But the university is not just students,
but teachers as well as non-teaching staff,
all of them together make the university.
So it is important that the other sections
also get some of this consciousness.
At least they should be able to raise questions
which happened in our university some time back.
The university administration was installing cameras
in the administrative building.
I think the women employees were so articulate,
so conscious.
They came out, they came to GS Cash
and said, this is what is happening.
We feel that we are under constant surveillance,
especially even when we are going to the restrooms
or taking grass, the water it is,
we feel that we are being survived.
And we don’t want this kind of a system.
I think this questioning can happen through courses,
through teaching, getting into all departments
in the form of maybe guest lectures or workshops, courses,
and also some other programs where not just the students,
but others are also involved.
Maybe some, like we had, I think many universities in India
had this color of transference tents
where everybody had come together.
I think a lot of the thought had reached out to people.
And talking about other external agencies
or external people becoming part of the inquiry,
I think we already have legal experts, NGO representatives,
external experts from other universities.
I think the ideal combination of a committee
is to have some internal people
as well as some external experts
and with a student component as well.
I think this came up for a discussion yesterday
about the restorative justice.
I think whatever be the case, whatever be the complaint,
whatever be the outcome,
they need not be confined to the complainant
and the respondent alone,
but the principle that is drawn from their complaint,
the nature of the complaint,
the instance, the form,
the manifestation of sexual violence
that can get into the constitution
that every committee drafts for itself in every university.
I think that will, to some extent,
reach out to others as well.
And that will become a restorative justice,
not just for the complainant, but also for others.
I think one point that I forgot to make
in my quick presentation as well,
which was discussed yesterday,
which was referred to Anna is about rehabilitation
and relocation of the complainant and the respondent.
I think that is very, very important
because in most universities,
quickly the complainant is rehabilitated or relocated
or is given protection,
is told that you stay in the hostel,
don’t come out for a few days,
or you go home, don’t come back for a few days,
or your workplace will be changed to a safe place
or you go on leave for some time.
I think that practice has to be completely discouraged.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Sunita.
We have to wrap up now,
but I want to put one final question
possibly to Anna and Ruth.
There’s a question from Sabha
who runs Alliance of Women in Academia,
which is a wonderful organization.
She says that what mechanisms could be put in place
to actually strengthen or formalize
such cross-border solidarity on these issues?
So I was just wondering if you have any comments
because I thought it might be,
because this is a cross-border dialogue,
it might be a good question to end on.
It’s a great question.
I’ll just jump in quickly.
I just think it’s a fabulous suggestion
and maybe this conference can be the start of that,
of a India-UK network
where we share this sort of knowledge
and have more frequent discussions on email,
but also live discussions like this.
I just think there’s so much learning going on
that we really need to capture this and move it forward.
I think, Sabha, that’s a wonderful suggestion
and let’s make it happen.
Yeah, I think the quality of the conversations today
and the last couple of days as testament
to what an amazing job Adrige has done
in bringing together this group of people
and I’m learning such a lot.
So, yeah, I would support.
Yeah, I mean, I don’t have an answer to that question
other than, Adrige, you’re doing it.
That is very kind of you, Anna.
But I think, no, I mean, you agree that this is only,
I think, the start of a conversation
and we’ve already had so much interest from colleagues,
not only in India,
because I think there’s some phenomenal work happening
in Pakistan, in Chile, in Brazil,
in South Africa, in Nigeria, in Australia.
And the sad part is that we don’t know
about this amazing work that is happening
and it’s happening in silos.
So I think we will definitely try to make this
into a longer conversation
and try to bring in more people from other context
and keep learning from each other
because we, I mean, one of the things that we have learned
more than anything else in the last couple of days
that this is a global struggle
and much of our problems and issues
that we are dealing with are related
and this requires, hence, a global solution.
So I’m sure that this is only the beginning
of a conversation and we’re also gonna put together
a report and the report,
please feel free to ask those questions.
I think you can switch on your mics,
but if any of the attendees want to ask,
please drop your questions in the Q&A section
or in the chat function and we will pick it up.
And that’s about it, I guess.
Also, Mary, is it okay if we record this session
and if it is-
Oh, absolutely, totally.
Yeah, I will come back because I only have a lot of notes.
I don’t even have a PowerPoint.
So I’d welcome that,
even if I’m gonna be a little more into times, yes.
That’s absolutely fine.
And we are also going live on Facebook
from the account for this page,
which is a campaign which was started in SOAS.
So we have a Facebook page
and we are live streaming on that as well
because for security reasons,
we can only have a certain number of people on this.
And if somebody puts a question there,
we’d pick that up from there as well.
Anyway, over to you, Tej.
I think that’s it for me.
Sure, okay.
Hello, everyone.
My name is Navtej Puriwal
and I’m a professor of development studies at SOAS.
I’m actually chairing this,
but in fact, Adrija Dey,
who has been organizing this entire three-day event,
is doing a postdoc at SOAS with me,
but actually rather independently.
And I’ve learned so much through this project
and obviously through the three days here also.
So I’m here not as an expert,
but someone who’s very much learning
and I have been listening for the last,
you know, through the conversations.
I will, I’d like to just also kind of say that
I think what Professor Mary John was just saying,
he’s delivering our keynote,
was alluding to is the importance
of having these conversations across contexts.
And I think this could be an important session for that
if people would like to have those kinds of,
make those connections in terms of thinking
beyond this workshop in itself.
So, and if people could ask the questions
in the chat function,
I’ll do my best to kind of field some of them
and to bring them together.
So yes, thank you very much Adrija
and to Sarah and Jandini and to Shelza,
or all people who actually have studied
at some point at SOAS.
And I think there’s something about the kind of
critical focus,
which isn’t through the institutional lens always,
that SOAS I think does work on sexual harassment,
gender-based violence,
and does it in ways that are kind of
out of the box oftentimes.
So it’s nice to hear these conversations,
which are quite fresh and critical,
but also engaging with institutions and processes as well.
So let me introduce Professor Mary John,
who is giving our keynote today,
who is a senior fellow and professor
at the Center for Women’s Development Studies in New Delhi.
She was Director of the Center from 2006 to 2012.
And before that was Deputy Director
of the Women’s Studies Program at JNU in Delhi
from 2001 to 2006.
Another institutional context,
which is very much at the center of these conversations
that we’ve been having.
She was, importantly here,
was the co-chair of the task force set up by the UGC,
the University Grants Commission in 2013
to look into sexual harassment on Indian campuses
and brought out the report,
Saksham, Measures for Ensuring Safety of Women
and Programs for Gender Sensitization on Campuses.
She has a number of publications,
ranging from looking at gender issues
in the contemporary Indian context,
looking at feminism,
sexual economies of modern India.
The list is quite long,
so I won’t carry on too long here.
But she’s definitely one of the most outspoken
forefront feminist academics who are working in this field.
So it’s a real honor and pleasure
to have her with us here today.
So what I think we could do just to have as a format,
and I think if we want to have it organic, we can,
is to allow Mary to speak for however long you want.
I mean, I think we planned for 30 minutes,
but if you’d like to speak for a little less,
that’s fine also.
I might ask a few questions in between,
but we will also then at the end have time for questions
for people who are here also.
Well, thanks very much, Navtej, for that introduction.
And thanks, Adrija and Sara and everyone for having me.
I’m not even sure that I’m the right person for this moment.
I’m not even sure that,
given the richness of the conversations we’ve been having,
whether I’m actually gonna take you forward
or sideways or backwards at this particular point,
it’s been a very, I think just as a, you know,
the word decolonial has been used,
and it’s actually quite a remarkable moment
to think that here is a conversation
that is in some sense being led by feminists in India
or with connections to India
and addressing a situation in the UK,
which in some way is being,
at least the sense I’m getting,
is that it’s in some way being found wanting.
And that you’re turning to us other than say to the US,
which has Title IX and what have you all in place.
So I just think this is very, very interesting.
I have to admit though that I am not very well-versed
and I’m not familiar with the UK academic situation.
And as I was mentioning,
it does sound bleak from this distance,
but then ours is getting bleaker all the time.
So, you know, maybe there are things
that we are going to be sharing more and more.
But it’s, I think the difference,
and that’s the difference
that has maybe brought us to this point.
And I’m curious to know how that difference
actually has emerged in the UK context,
because I heard frequently,
at least by many of the speakers here,
that there isn’t an activist context.
And we grew up reading a lot about the Southall sisters
and many, many things that were very much
a part of the UK situation.
So there is a big question at the back of my mind
because where we are now or what we’re talking about
in terms of sexual harassment will be inconceivable
without there having been a women’s movement.
And that women’s movement is still
in as many different forms, fractured forms.
We have deep differences with each other,
but it’s still a point of reference for us.
And so one of the, you know, at the back of my mind,
I have this question for,
is that not a point of reference anymore in the UK context?
Because that would make a profound difference
in the way we think about even institutionalizing
something like sexual harassment
and procedures for dealing with sexual harassment.
A word about maybe I’m a researcher primarily,
I’m also a teacher and I’ve had teaching experiences
in a number of universities.
Very happy to see Sunita Rani here
because many, many, many years ago,
when I was much younger,
I was on the campus of the Hyderabad Central University.
But my more recent teaching experiences
have been at the Jawaharlal Nehru University,
which has been very much a point of reference
and we have discussions here.
But I would also just mention another kind of university,
which is the Ambedkar University, Delhi,
which is a state university
and actually a very interesting example,
we have an MPhil PhD program with them.
We’ve been teaching an MPhil PhD program in gender studies
with them for the last so many years.
And it’s an example of a new university
that possibly shares some of the quote unquote
neoliberal characteristics
that I’ve been hearing about on your side.
And I also live, as it so happens,
in the Delhi University campus,
which is another kind of university.
And I’ll say a little bit more
so that you have a sense of the range
of actually our university complex,
which I think makes a big difference
in terms of how we think about something
like institutionalizing sexual harassment.
There is no one homogenous way of doing it,
even if we have national laws and national guidelines.
Even though you could say
that the rebirth of the women’s movement in the late 1970s
was practically coterminous
with issues of violence and sexual violence.
I mean, I’m sure many of you have heard
about the quote unquote Mathura case.
We still call her name, even though we shouldn’t.
We all know about anonymity and confidentiality,
but there’s no getting around the custodial gang rape
that was so formative,
the rape campaign that took off in the late 1970s,
as well as the dowry murder kind of campaign.
So there was a way in which violence actually made its mark.
The 1980s was very much about rape reform.
I mean, I’m not trying to say it was the only issue
we took up by no means,
but it sort of made violence in some ways coterminous
with what feminists were about in India.
The moment though that I would like to use
as a takeoff point here
in order also to say a few words about suction
is the Delhi Gang Rape of December, 2012,
which again, I imagine all of you are familiar with
since it marked a kind of turning point.
I sometimes think that it’s our Me Too.
The beginnings, if you want to think about some,
a new beginning, a new moment
that leads into and makes Me Too
not something brand new that happens in 2017.
I would say it was the aftermath of that gang rape
because it brought sexual violence,
not a new question, a very old question for us,
already much debated, much fought over.
It nonetheless brought it into public life as never before.
It made it the sort of number one question.
I’ve called it in some of my writing the touchstone
for what ails women in India.
It was very much violence and sexual violence and so on.
And in the wake of this moment,
we also saw a remarkable, I would say,
a re-energizing of spaces in so many different ways
from the most institutional.
So we had the criminal amendment bill,
that is to say an amendment to our rape laws
that had been demanded for a long time
and suddenly was in its own way with its own problems
actually came into being.
We had a sexual harassment workplace act
for the first time.
We had only Mishaka guidelines before that.
We had no act whatsoever.
So this happens in 2013 in rapid succession.
The UGC, the University Grants Commission,
puts a task force together
to look into sexual harassment in our universities
across the country.
Again, something that the UGC had never done before.
So we have a series of institutional moves.
And on the other hand, we also have a whole range
of what you might say on the ground activism.
Activism emerges across cities.
It happens in Kolkata.
It happens in Hyderabad.
There was an online forum called Hyderabad for Feminism.
There was the Weiloyter group
that takes its inspiration from a book,
but actually they take to the streets
after the gang rape and so on.
We have the Pinjara Thode a year or two later
that you had an activist who spoke to you on day one.
All of these sort of took off
as it were in the wake of this moment.
So it’s really very interesting to think of
how something so horrific could actually be a moment
of energizing of positive change, broadly positive change.
For me, it was a time of, as a researcher in particular,
it was a time of looking at data,
it was trying to understand
how do we study something called violence
because it’s one of the hardest things to study.
And I got involved in some work of that nature.
So the suction report
that I don’t want to spend too much time on,
but we were asked to form a task force.
We were given complete.
I have to say, again, it now seems like a paradise moment
because the UGC gave us complete freedom
in terms of how we went about this process
of laying out some guidelines
for colleges and universities in our country.
We were a group of about seven or eight of us,
and we were able to travel, have open kind of forums
within different parts of the country.
We sent out questionnaires to all the universities
and colleges under the jurisdiction of the UGC.
And all of that and our own thinking and so on
went into the final product,
which I really would encourage,
it’s very much available online for you to look at.
And actually it was a shock for us
because many of us were somewhat older
who had seen the very early campaigns
and you might find almost quaint
that the very early campaigns against sexual harassment
in the late 70s and early 80s,
we didn’t even have the word sexual harassment at that time.
We use this very quaint term, eve teasing.
When we were being prodded and poked
and wolf whistles came our way on buses
and on public streets,
the term that was used was eve teasing, Adam and Eve.
So it’s really funny as to why in India
did we have this particular word for it.
And the campaigns that then took off at that time,
that was the…
So we assumed, wrongly I think,
we assumed that with at least two generations
from our time to the present moment,
a millennial generation,
we assumed that issues of sexual harassment
would have been much, much more well understood,
much more clearly fought against.
And so we were very shocked to discover
that most students, and I’m talking here largely
about undergraduate college students,
even in a city, in a metropolitan city like Delhi,
but we also went to Hyderabad, we also went to Kerala.
In over and over again,
we were told that young students had more or less
internal young women students
and people of non-conforming gender,
of course even more so,
that they had internalized the fact
of everyday harassment being part of life.
Now, I’m very curious to know whether this would,
there would be a comparable parallel in the UK.
I mean, the idea that when you travel to college
or whatever that you’re going to have to endure
unwelcome behavior on the part of people around you
of a certain sort,
and also sometimes in college
and co-educational college spaces,
this was not something that we expected to hear.
Even more so, we’ll be surprised to hear
that many undergraduates who were perhaps just crossed 18
or 19 had perhaps left home for the first time
in their lives were very unsure
about whether they wanted to raise this as a public issue.
They said to us that if they did,
the chances were that a conservative
administrative establishment
that more or less treats them as children
would in fact contact their parents,
this would be the first in fact response
to anybody trying to say that I’ve been harassed by someone
and the honest, the victim blaming
that was so much a part of our culture
would undoubtedly mean that she would have to face,
the student would have to face the ire of parents
and might even be asked to leave.
So we were actually very thrilled to hear this.
So in yet, of course, this was,
I’m not trying to say that this is what everybody said.
I mean, many were on the streets and protesting loudly,
but there were many others.
And again, if you want to bring intersectionality
into this, we can imagine for ourselves
which kinds of students from more conservative backgrounds,
from more conventional backgrounds,
first-generation learners,
these would be the more likely students
who would say they’d rather put their head down
and not raise their voices.
So in our interactions, we then found
and I think this is an important,
I don’t know what image you have got so far
of the extent of institutionalizing
of sexual harassment in India.
Actually, the number of such committees in India
is few and far between.
Most colleges don’t have anything.
Most universities have something on paper,
but nothing really in practice.
So, and most important of all,
even if they did have something in paper,
it was a very confused understanding
of what actually meant to combat
cases of sexual harassment.
Most confused of all was what,
and you’ve had a wonderful discussion of this
just a little while ago,
what constitutes gender sensitization?
And what constitutes gender sensitization
in a context of a highly heterogeneous,
and I’ll say a little bit about that in a moment,
a highly heterogeneous student body?
What would that imply?
What happens when you have first-generation learners
from rural areas?
Maybe even having a co-educational experience
for the first time as college students
who may have been in government colleges
or government high schools,
boys and girls separate and so on.
We have to, I’m asking you to picture
this really remarkable moment in India
where we have this genuinely heterogeneous body.
What would gender sensitization mean in that context?
So this was the moment within which we generated
the suction report.
You will see how much emphasis therefore we played on,
we placed on gender sensitizing.
Yes, we did also want to make it very clear that,
yes, we needed procedures.
We felt that those procedures,
at that time we’re talking 2013,
there were at least two good examples we had.
One was of course, GNU.
You heard from, about that on day one.
The other was Delhi University.
Delhi University is an affiliating university
with almost a hundred colleges under it.
It’s the standard Indian system.
I have no idea whether you have anything remotely
like that in the UK.
And therefore it required a rather different way of thinking
about institutionalizing committees
compared to a standalone, small residential,
largely residential university,
largely post-graduate university like GNU.
So we did put those in, you’ll find those in the appendix,
but our main concern was workshops
and other kinds of ways, courses,
that could be devised around just getting people
to think more about gender in contexts
where many of them may not have even been socialized
into thinking about gender equality.
So if I fast forward from there, we moved to 2017.
Oh no, actually I should, sorry.
So our suction report became guidelines.
We were very pleased with that.
Became guidelines for, and a missive was sent out
from the UGC to all, we’re talking 1000 universities
under the UGC to say that these should be your guidelines
and you should implement them.
You should start courses and so on and so forth.
And we were extremely pleased.
But of course that pleasure was very short-lived
because then these are guidelines.
Guidelines are only suggestive.
Guidelines do not have the force of an act or a law.
And before long, they then had the law ministry
and the home ministry come in
and produce a set of regulations
which have a very different status in the system.
And this was then called ICC,
very hopelessly named Internal Complaints Committee.
So it was as now, to be fair,
these were, I would say a complete narrowing down,
a complete removing all the gender sensitizing
part of things, just narrowing down very, very strictly
to the basic structures that would be needed
for lodging a complaint.
It was as though the entire question
of what constitutes sexual harassment,
how do you want to deal with it?
The question of it being an alternate wrestle system
and all of that had just been junked.
And in its place, you had a very narrow legalistic
kind of understanding, not a travesty of the law
by no means that that would be, I think,
unfair to the ICC understanding.
It brought in a few, I think there were a few
intersectional ideas which we found
being reproduced from the suction report
in the new regulations,
but a lot of it was simply narrow legalism.
And as I think Aisha mentioned,
it doesn’t have, it’s the biggest single difference
from what we had looked for earlier
was that there wasn’t any more autonomy.
In my view, it was not so much the question of elections,
but rather the question of autonomy
that is, I think, critical.
It was no longer autonomous of the administration.
And to our mind, that was actually
a very critical limitation.
So this comes into being around 2015-16.
And of course, GNU has this horrific experience
of seeing their own GS cash closed forcibly
in the most violent of ways
by the kind of administration that took over
and ICC being enforced.
Elsewhere, it may not have been spiked so,
the attack may not have been spiked in that form.
In 2017, we have the Raya Sarkar list
and its fallout in the discussions
that preceded and followed it.
The differences amongst us,
that too created a whole set of debates, questions,
students coming together, forming panels in universities
and so on.
I participated in a couple of those.
2018 is the official sort of entry of Me Too
into workplaces in India.
So we have actresses,
we had comedians, people like that speaking out,
giving testimonies about what they had been through.
And so this is the trajectory that we are,
I’m not just giving you this kind of trajectory
to give you a sense of the incredibly dense
and the many different moments
that if now I had to look back on
and I would have a very hard time
in the midst of this pandemic
and in the midst of the kind of right-wing government
that we now have to say,
how does one actually take stock of the many, many,
it’s a many layered.
And I would say at each point in time,
each of these moments raised new questions for me.
Each with times when I thought,
okay, I think I’ve understood enough about sexual violence.
Let’s talk about something else.
I would find myself having to rethink that position
and I would find myself having to relearn things
that I thought I already knew.
So that’s the context within which I want to just say
a few things then about what is the university system?
What is the higher education system in India?
We have about, the numbers keep expanding.
We have about 37 million students
in higher education in India.
It’s the second largest after, it’s after China.
We’re the next in line, which is no surprise perhaps.
But what is surprising
is that we have been expanding exponentially.
The other surprising thing,
we have about 1,000 universities
and about 40,000 colleges.
So this gives you an idea of the peculiarity if you like.
It’s an affiliating system.
We actually got the idea a century ago
from the University of London.
University of London a century ago was an affiliating system.
I don’t know if SOAS is an affiliating body too,
in which case, that’s the system we have.
But the difference is that Delhi University
has maybe 100 colleges.
Mumbai, I’m sure somebody can correct me, maybe has 600.
Rajasthan, Jaipur has probably 800.
I mean, it’s crazy.
Imagine that kind of a system,
a mix of public and private,
some of them absolute teaching shops,
commercial establishments and others, of course,
maybe a little better, but this is the mix.
And so when we have to think about
where is sexual harassment in all this
and where are committees in all this,
please keep in mind,
we’re talking about the tip of the iceberg.
We’re talking about a few places here and there
where committees actually are in place of some form.
We’re also talking about a history,
I should say very, very quickly
of the institutionalization of women’s studies,
which has also taken a very interesting form.
India has taken the form of independent programs,
sometimes with faculty, sometimes without,
sometimes teaching, sometimes not.
There are a hundred plus of those now across the country.
And we have, I think I could mention by Lena in particular,
we have women’s development cells,
as they are called in colleges.
And various universities have implemented them
to various degrees.
So, in fact, some of these are more active perhaps
than any sexual harassment committees might be.
And I think that may also be something
for all of you to think about,
that we have these spaces from which gender gets discussed,
talked about, and debated,
and conscientization and so on happens.
The other kinds of…
So I already said that there is a way
in which everyday harassment is ubiquitous.
We are a genuinely heterogeneous body
when it comes to the university and it comes to colleges.
We are close to parity.
I often emphasize this in India,
where we’re otherwise so gender unequal.
We have close to parity when it comes to higher education.
And we, in fact, Delhi University, for instance,
has more women than men on its rules.
This is very unique.
You will find nothing like that in the workplace.
You will find nothing like that in our parliaments.
And you will find nothing like that on our streets,
which are otherwise extremely gender segregated
and where women are often very, very hardly to be seen.
So there’s a unique quality to that.
And the other unique quality is that it’s intersectional.
In other words, thanks to reservations,
we have scheduled castes, scheduled tribes,
other backward castes who now occupy
half of the student body.
This is a new phenomenon.
It’s barely 10 to 20 years old.
Otherwise, it was a relatively homogeneous,
mainly male, mainly upper caste, mainly urban body.
So we are looking at…
Unfortunately, there are other groups
who are very underrepresented.
Muslims are underrepresented, for instance,
and increasingly so.
People with disabilities are underrepresented.
Sexual minorities, I’m sure, very much so,
but are visible in our campuses.
People with disability are also visible
in a way that was not true earlier.
So I’m just trying to…
And within all of these youths,
you could say that half of them would be gendered female
in some shape or form.
So imagine for yourself what this student body is like.
Imagine for yourself what it means
to then think about what living together well would mean,
what gender equality would mean,
what tackling sexual harassment would mean,
and that too in relationship to a faculty body,
which is much, much more homogeneous.
The faculty body is more male, more upper caste, more Hindu.
So just think about this,
and I think this also maybe helps us
to also understand aspects of the Me Too moment
as it also fanned out in our context and so on.
So given all this, the question then is,
what would institutionalization look like?
What would it mean to think
in relationship to student politics?
Now, just to give you an example of the contrast,
GNU has a famous history of left politics
dominated by left groups,
where right-wing groups have only very recently
made significant inputs.
Okay, if you look at Delhi University on the other hand,
it’s completely dominated by right-wing political groups
who take the BJP and the Congress.
There has so far been no space for left-wing groups
to gain any kind of electoral room in our student bodies.
So I’m putting this out to you
because this has created big questions for us
in terms of elections.
Do we want actually,
whereas GNU is very much in favor of elections
and using the idea of being elected
to the sexual harassment committee
as a moment of politicization and conscientization,
that would not work in Delhi University
if you’re going to imagine BJP and Congress stooges,
if I may say so,
being brought into a sexual harassment context.
So in fact, if you look at the guidelines,
the acts that were put in place for Delhi University,
they have a mix of,
a careful mix of elections and nomination.
The question is, who does the nomination?
It should not be the administration.
It should be people who have proven themselves
in the field of working on women’s issues.
So each, this is just to give you a sense
of how very localized and different
we need to think about all these issues
of sexual harassment.
What people, when I think for suction,
for us in the suction context especially,
and I think even more broadly,
the most important question for us
when we thought about institutional mechanisms
was to think of them as alternate redressal systems.
In other words, they have to abide
by the principles of natural justice,
but they are not meant to mimic the law
and the police and the courts.
That’s, I mean, the whole idea behind them is to,
in fact, in some sense, be an alternate space.
The idea behind them is to be primarily preventive,
educative, pedagogic, rather than punitive.
And in fact, in my own,
some people may disagree with me here,
in my own view that if you’re in a situation
where an act of sexual harassment
actually leads to the dismissal of a student,
of a male student, because we have gender,
we have gender-specific.
So far, we do not have women as in many,
I mean, I think it’s changing over time,
but at the time when we were part of these discussions,
we wanted the situation to be gender-specific.
When a male student, a young male student
is being thrown out of the university,
it’s worse than putting him in jail.
It’s the end of his student life.
So in my view, it’s a sign of failure on our part.
It has to be the very last step that one takes
in a process where you want to reintegrate, restore,
think of ways in which the person,
if to the extent possible,
can actually continue to be part of,
without jeopardizing it to that degree.
So I just want to emphasize that in much of the work
that I have been a part of,
it was this aspect of things that was very important.
When we saw what was happening,
even with GS-cash type situations
where a lot of the work tended to be more punitive,
you ended up spending a lot of time.
And by the way, I should say here that,
again, I’m in conversation with the UK.
Please understand that all the labor
that is being put into being on these committees
is completely and totally voluntary.
Faculty are taking time out to be on these committees
in order to be part of a natural justice process,
which makes it very, very, very laborious.
It means that each and every case requires many sittings.
This is being done gratis.
This is being done, you’re not paid anything for this.
The only people who might be being paid a certain amount,
and that would be just a token kind of payment,
is the outside member, the so-called NGO expert,
women’s expert who’s on such a committee.
But everybody else is doing this.
And think of people like Aisha Kidwai,
who is actually a linguist.
She teaches linguistics,
but has spent so much of her life actually building GS-cash.
For nothing, for no returns.
And my sense is that what you have in the UK
are professional bodies and people whose job it is to deal.
And I’m not trying to, don’t get me wrong,
I’m saying we need to very carefully
look at both these models.
One where it’s an expert, so-called expert whose job it is
to adjudicate as distinct from people
who are part of the university’s structure
and who are doing this out of whatever,
out of care, love, or maybe some kind of pressure,
are taking care of these kinds of issues.
Here I want to say that after I felt I had to rethink,
I had a very, very rosy sense of,
and I’ll stop very soon,
I had a very rosy sense of what we achieved with Saksham
till the MeToo moment happened,
till we had phenomena like the list happening,
until I had engagements with students of mine,
students in some of the universities where I was active,
who actually pointed out to me that
the situation is not as you think.
We have not created conducive environments
for students to come forward.
And least of all, when it comes to faculty.
I think one of the less well-developed parts of Saksham,
if I look back on it, I think in our minds,
when we’re thinking of what Saksham would achieve
through gender sensitization,
we were thinking primarily of student-student relationships.
And 90% of the cases that came to GS Cash or other bodies
were student-student cases.
A very tiny, tiny proportion
were in fact, embodying faculty and a student.
And what I think became clearer to us was that
this was because of a culture of silence.
This was a culture of repression.
There were these cases,
but there was no way a student felt empowered
or felt ready to come forward to complain.
In other words, after all,
the whole purpose of a complaint is to give relief.
The number one purpose of a complaint
is to give relief to a student.
If a student thinks they’re going to become worse off
as a consequence of complaining,
if they think they’re going to suffer from a backlash,
if they think that their future is going to be in jeopardy,
because whatever confidentiality you may try to impose
one way or the other,
it’s going to become clear as to who has lodged a complaint,
then they’d rather not step forward.
So this was something that forced me to rethink
the ways in which we have created or not created
conducive spaces and the kinds of conversations
we need to have.
In fact, conversations shifted very much
from just processes and procedures
to questions of what is consent?
What should be a code of conduct
between a faculty and a student
if there is a sexual relationship?
We have not had that kind of discussion in India really.
Should there be a code of conduct here or not?
Even more interesting in a context where sexuality
had increasingly become a name
for non-heteronormative sexualities
and recognizing the marginalizations
of non-normative sexualities,
many women who was heterosexual said,
don’t we need new conversations around heterosexuality?
That is to say, what counts as female heterosexual desire
in a context that is in some ways,
even though India is famous for its repressive culture,
is famous for not being open about sexual relationships,
nonetheless, in spaces like universities,
you do have subcultures, countercultures of sex positivism.
And what happens when sex positivism is actually,
if you like, taken over by senior sex positive men
in ways that then appear as damaging to young women?
These were the kinds of very difficult questions
that the Me Too moment opened up.
The question was, where do we have these discussions?
We can have a panel called Questioning the Silence,
but where else can we have these discussions
and how would they find a place
in a sexual harassment committee space?
Finally, I think the other big question,
and I think you briefly alluded to,
is that sexual harassment, after all,
is primarily concerned with gender,
gender non-conforming or otherwise.
But we have other mechanisms in our university spaces
that are meant to deal with other kinds of discrimination.
And the only one I’ll mention here
is the question of caste discrimination.
We have what are called
Scheduled Caste Slash Scheduled Tribe Cells.
They’re usually just simply called SCST cells.
And these are bodies that are meant to deal with cases
of discrimination based on the caste of the person,
based on particularly Dalit students and so on,
who had become more vocal in the politics
that had happened in the last 20 years
thanks to reservations,
were experiencing in a context
where they were now being included,
they were now present in our student body,
were nonetheless experiencing forms of discrimination.
Where were those experiences intersecting
with questions of sexual harassment?
This was something that was only,
I would say we’re at the very early stages
of asking that kind of question.
And if you look, I was shocked to discover
when I look at the elaborate and the very loving way
in which we have actually developed sexual harassment
guidelines that run into pages and pages and pages.
If you look at the equivalent guidelines available
for an SCST cell, which is meant to monitor,
primarily monitor reservation policies
and make sure that actually positions
that are quotas are being filled.
If you look at the,
there are no guidelines for a grievance,
what is called simply a grievance.
And that’s all there is.
So where are those?
So there have been a lot of questions raised
by Dalit women, for instance,
where are we in your Me Too movement?
Where are, do we even count?
We don’t even appear on the horizon
in our relationships to faculty
because faculty actually dismiss us.
We’re not even attractive enough for faculty.
Very different kinds of questions were being raised by them
in comparison to the experiences
of unwanted sexual advances that were coming
for upper-caste women students, for instance.
So we are right now in a moment,
of course, the pandemic has forced closure at this time.
We have no idea when we are going to reopen,
but in the last year or so,
it is these kinds of questions
that have taken up more space.
We have to ask,
I think Lina asked that kind of question earlier,
who is raising the question vis-a-vis whom?
Why has it been that much easier
to settle students’ student cases
or settle a case when it’s a class for employee?
Why has it been so, so difficult?
Why has there been so much denial
when it comes to faculty and so on?
And here, I would say that in your own thinking through
of what kind of committees you wish to put together,
and I heard questions about,
should it be insiders, should it be outsiders?
My quick answer to you is,
do not make it an either or question.
You have to have both.
In the Indian context, we have committees
where there is just one outside expert,
and there may be as many as 10 or 15 members from within.
I think that may be something that needs to be rethought,
because there is, unfortunately,
a tendency to band together.
Their friendships get in the way.
Collegiality gets in the way.
Even the very idea of sitting in judgment over a colleague
can be a very painful experience for many.
So I would suggest to you that please consider
having a combination of quote unquote insiders
and outsiders that can act as a balancing force
for each other.
Please look for outsiders who are not necessarily
only lawyers who would be acquainted with the law,
but please look for people who have community experience.
And I imagine the UK, I don’t know,
this is my image of the UK,
that all of you are community, active in your communities,
and that you’re doing tremendous work in your communities.
And this would give you the kind of understanding
and sensitivity to handle the kinds of cases
that might come up, maybe more so
than maybe some faculty would.
I’ll close on that note,
and I’ll be very happy to take questions.
Thanks.
Thank you, Mary.
There was so much there for us to think about.
I’ve been kind of writing a couple of notes,
and I have some specific questions,
but we’ve got a number that are also in the chat.
So maybe I’ll begin with one,
which I think you’ve been referring to
some of the connections between the UK and India,
but also maybe some surprise about how
and why activism is not responding,
and why we actually are looking to India
for potential models, or even actually
for looking for routes towards developing
and reinvigorating activism in the UK.
And I’m actually speaking from the position
of having been involved in activism
in terms of South Asian women’s movements,
anti-racist organizing.
So there’s a lot of overlapping movements.
And I don’t wanna kind of simplify it,
but I think what we’ve seen at least for the last decade
is that the violence against women agenda,
or violence against women and girls it’s now called,
has become this well-known acronym,
which many of our sisters in solidarity at one point
have become part of the apparatus
and institutionalized process,
whereby the state in the process of austerity measures,
they became the new kind of leaders
of the institutional processes,
and oftentimes didn’t look back
or weren’t thinking about the communities
that they were answerable to.
And it’s actually led to a lot of fractures
in the women’s movement in the UK.
And I can see the fault lines drawn very, very clearly.
Some of the organizations who take government funding
to do work on behalf of community in the name of that,
but so criminalization of certain cultural practices,
they’ll be fighting for them on the one hand,
and then it will lead to other things.
So we’re quite cautious about engaging with the state
and also oftentimes with each other,
because we thought we were all together.
In fact, our understandings of the processes
are quite different.
And I think this is a moment for us to connect with India,
where we’re at a position of really deep
and heightened fascism in India.
And we have deep, we have far right policies
coming in here also.
We’ve had over 10 years of austerity here.
There are a lot of connections that we could make
in terms of the spaces for that kind of,
but in going specifically to looking at sexual harassment,
gender-based violence, even in 2010,
the equality legislation that came in the UK,
I think also had a numbing effect.
And maybe it’d be interesting to hear
from other people who are here,
has I think had a numbing effect on how institutions have,
we did have these administrators come in who were high,
because institutions had to show, it’s a duty,
a public duty that you show that you are in terms
of disability, in terms of gender, in terms of age,
you have to show that you’re aware,
and therefore you have those mechanisms
to respond to discrimination.
And so basically gender-based violence became something
that will become just another thing,
part of the audit culture that we look,
and many people inside the institutions,
especially on the left will say, oh, it’s just a,
this is just the institution trying to survive
in the context of cuts,
and to show that it’s doing its responsibility.
But what we found, and there’ll be activists here
who’ve been involved in these institutions, right?
So we have 1752, Goldsmiths, we have Count for this,
so as we see very few cases came up,
it’s surprising, some institutions, no cases emerging,
despite that being the point at which
the measures were being introduced.
The policies and procedures supposedly existed,
but once we scratched the surface,
we realized there was no one there to actually answer
any kinds of emails for any kinds of complaints
or grievances, so we are far behind India.
I mean, that’s why it’s such a pleasure to hear,
but I would like to hear what other people,
what other, you know, there are a few questions.
Not to say I have a completely cynical view of activism,
but we’re in a position where we need the activism,
and the student movement is where it is,
and it’s the only place in which we can also think
about the decolonial moment where we’re in,
which is also thinking, which I think goes a step further
than intersectionality.
It’s also saying these institutions
actually represent structural violence,
and we therefore can’t just have an audit culture
that says you’ve ticked those boxes off.
We need to really be introspective about
what these institutions are reproducing and represent.
So, you know, it’s a moment for us really to reflect on how,
and actually we need to be thinking about
how sexual harassment, gender-based violence
should be part of those conversations,
that it isn’t just about race or about caste or other,
it needs to be forefronted there, very much so.
So we, I mean, I hope, you know,
that these conversations will continue.
There’s some questions that have been raised,
which I thought I would-
Because I’m, yeah, please read them out to me
if you don’t mind.
Yeah, sure, sure.
And I may, actually, one person has left
and I was messaging them to see if they wanted to,
but she’s left, is, let me see here.
Yeah, so, yeah, this was a reference to the public activism.
Let me just go back.
I think there are a few comments, small comments
about the expert and the insider-outsider,
the kind of constitution of the committees and the labor.
And of course, we see here, someone has commented,
Gita has commented on the quadruple burden
of the feminist academic who hadn’t,
who had, it’s this unpaid labor, unvalued,
but it’s still seen as, you know, work that we must do.
How do you view this?
I mean, obviously this is in the space of activism.
You’re an activist, but you’re also doing this
in a professional kind of capacity.
How do we work through this?
Yeah, I get my pay, if you like, as a researcher.
I’m actually in an institution
that is outside the university system.
It comes under the Indian Council
of Social Science Research.
So I’m actually a full-time researcher.
And what I did, when I was director of my center,
what I did was I said, we can’t be full-time researchers.
We have to teach.
And through teaching, connect to students.
And that’s how we developed the link
with America University Delhi
and did a collaborative MPhil PhD program,
which is then how, and that was done gratis, okay?
So there was no reason we did not have to teach.
All our teaching was for free, if you like,
in the sense that it was not part of our remit
as a research institute.
Alongside advocacy campaigns, well, it’s part of life.
Mind you, let’s not be foils for each other.
I think institutionalization has happened everywhere.
NGO-ization is in fact the face
of the women’s movement today in India,
more than anything else.
The number of women’s organizations
like, say, Saheli in Delhi,
or the Forum as it’s called in Bombay are tiny.
And I don’t look upon this as a fall from grace.
I really think that would be unfair
and that would be a wrong description.
I think if there are people who are part of NGOs
whose job it is to do feminist conscientizing
and campaigning, great, you know?
That’s not, the problem is not that you’re earning your,
that it’s, you’re earning a living that way
compared to those of us who get our living
from some other source of livelihood,
primarily faculty and so on, and then do this on the offer.
Because as faculty, we don’t have nine to five jobs.
We do have a lot more time.
I think it would be actually not disingenuous,
if I may say so, to place one on a pedestal.
And we’ve done this in the past.
I think those, there were accusations of funding.
Whose agenda are you now, you know?
Even the fact that violence started being called,
wow, B-A-W, was a question.
Where the hell has this phrase come from?
Why are you using these acronyms?
This is just a foreign, imperial agenda
that we are following.
So we’ve had all these questions and more.
So I would say that depending on the kind of work
that you’re doing, make time.
Students, I heard a very, very, you know,
how shall I say, very impassioned presentation.
I think it was, I forget who it was, Rachel,
who said, we are exhausted, we are tired.
As students, now students are supposed
to have infinite energy.
I mean, you have no other, you have to have infinite energy.
There is no other choice that you have.
And the fact that your first statement
was that you were exhausted and tired really hit me.
Now, I would say that, again,
I’m not saying that our students have infinite energy.
In fact, they’ve been beaten down at this point in time,
given the times we’re in.
Their activism is actually,
can result in being put in jail, okay?
So we’re in a very, very, very different moment.
But I would say that if I go to the prior moment
before this particular government took over,
students were very active.
Students were forming groups of various kinds.
Some of them affiliated to political parties, some not.
Some of them with all India kinds of membership.
Some maybe just 10 people forming their own little group
and sitting up all night to discuss whatever, revolution.
So, I mean, to me, student life involves all of this.
It involves as well as all the coursework,
all the other things that I know
a new liberal system is now throwing at you.
But if you’re already exhausted,
then we have to really ask afresh what has gone wrong
and take that and start with that.
Because extra energy, extra time,
being there for each other, forming support groups,
those are the glue
that makes everything else sort of hang together.
A couple of people have been talking about this challenge
or predicament of the idea of passing on the baton.
So if it’s been such a struggle for people like yourself,
to be part of these tasks force
and to tirelessly be working in this
and then also watching the exhaustion factor,
how, and of course the disillusionment
with higher education institutions that we’re now seeing,
with new generation of students coming through
who are seeing academic positions,
it’s not a place to find a job.
What future do you see for how
we can work within these institutions
which are crumbling around us also,
where we see activism,
the voices of activism are actually quite clear,
they’re crystal clear in fact,
but the institutions we see are-
I tell myself this too will pass.
That’s what I say over and over again,
that this cannot be because we are seeing out,
we are seeing different styles of attack.
The JNU mode of outright attack,
calling everybody anti-national and so on,
is a very, has attained international invisibility.
There are other modes of attack,
not so visible in Seattle University,
which is a form of no corrosion from within
where your energies are constantly being sapped
in a very, where the current administration is comatose
rather than being megalomaniac as is JNU.
This is a comatose administration where I live.
So each of those can be equally debilitating.
So the fact that, however, students,
the future of students is very much in question.
I have PhD students who are going to get degrees
in Women’s Studies, brilliant young women,
whose future I have no idea what jobs they’re going to get.
I think we may have to think in many different ways.
One is to think that no higher education
cannot be broken to this extent,
it will regenerate itself.
But I also think we will have to think otherwise.
We will have to think of spaces outside universities.
We will have to think of job spaces outside of universities,
which in any case, I think is where we need to think
because everybody cannot become a professor, right?
Every student that you have is not going to take your place.
So what are the spaces that in fact we must raid
and that we must infiltrate as products of higher education
that in fact, if you think about it a little more,
is in fact essential that we don’t form a bubble,
a higher education bubble where things are good,
but that in fact, media, houses,
even other kinds of spaces or employment spaces
where they nowadays may want a gender person as well,
for instance, that we infiltrate those kinds of spaces
as well and make those livable,
make those inhabitable for our students.
And so those are ways of writing,
our styles of writing also have been changing.
We can’t be just academics talking to academics.
So I think social media has done that for us to some extent
so that we break some of the false ways
in which we have made the university
the end all and be all of our life.
But on the front of how bad things are right now,
I can only hope, and we’ve just today,
the new education policy has come out and so on.
And we’re just trying to get our heads around that.
It looks bad.
We’re gonna suddenly overnight
create an American style system.
We have the more British style system.
We’re suddenly gonna have a four-year undergraduate program
and graduate studies
and everything else is thrown out the window
and you can leave after lots of wonderful words
like flexibility and choice and what have you.
Our system cannot even handle any of that.
But I think we have to simply,
I don’t know, Gramsci, I suppose,
pessimism on one side and optimism on the other, right?
I mean, some way of imagining
that this cannot be the only thing I’d get up against.
And at the same time, think very practically
about alternate futures for our students
outside of the system.
In many ways, having a Zoom conference like this
for three days and connecting,
this has been a time where we see these conversations
happening in ways we may not have even six months ago.
So perhaps the bubble is already bursting.
And we might probably also agree
that the elitism of Indian universities
and of course, British is also something
that needed to be burst.
All completely, absolutely, yes.
I think we’ve reached the end of this session.
It’s 12.30, is that right?
This is such an amazing conversation.
Maybe we can go 10 minutes more and to take some questions.
Of course, if Mary doesn’t have a problem.
I’m okay, I’m all right.
I’m enjoying it, but it’s really your call.
No, we can take, I think,
another round of one or two questions.
There’s a question here from Hiba Akbar,
who is a lawyer, activist based at Pakistan.
And she’s asked,
what kind of non-punitive measures have been implemented
or worked for Indian campuses,
especially for less egregious cases of harassment
beyond sensitization training, of course?
Well, the very first one, which I’m totally in favor of,
actually for a lot of cases is an apology.
I just think that some form of an apology
where you actually acknowledge,
let me put it even more simply,
acknowledging that the behavior was unacceptable,
acknowledging that you not repeat it
and saying you’re sorry.
In my view, in a lot of cases,
and I’m even including faculty here,
if they could just say, rather than going into denial,
if they could actually accept,
I think for many, many complainants,
this would be a huge relief,
that they would know that they were not carrying
something shamefully all this time on their own,
or that there is an acceptance
of that being actually wrong behavior.
So in my view, a lot of it is simply that.
Otherwise, it takes the form of maintaining distance.
You should no longer be in the vicinity of the person
if you’re stalking that person
or doing any of those sorts of things.
You’re unwelcome, your presence is unwelcome.
This again involves students mostly.
And as I said, the vast majority of cases
have been these are the students
maintaining distance and so on.
Sometimes there is a bit of punitive action
then may take the form of being asked to vacate,
if you’re in a hostel, for instance,
being made to ask to vacate a hostel
for a certain period of time
after which you’re allowed to come back.
In my view, these are all boards
that lend themselves to restoration.
In other words, you show through behavior and so on
that you can come back.
In the case of faculty,
it takes the form of having your salary.
In the worst case, of course,
if you’re close to retirement,
you may be asked to retire in any case,
but otherwise it takes the form
of docking your salary in some way.
An increment, as we say, we have a very,
in Indian universities, at least public universities,
all our salaries are pretty much publicly fixed.
You all get annual increments and so on.
It’s completely unlike say the American system,
which is a market system.
So you can get your salary docked.
You can lose a couple of increments,
if for instance, you’ve been found guilty
in some way of unwelcome, of quid pro quo behavior,
or creating a hostile environment and so on.
So these, I would say the tendency when you,
once you go down the road of an inquiry,
and this is something we should pay attention to,
the tendency is to go into some form
of punitive penalty mode.
You call it, the tendency is to make them minor
as far as possible,
rather than go into what are called major penalties.
I think that’s one thing that we should recognize
that this particular part of the inquiry mode,
whether you like it or not,
tends to have some kind of punitive outcome.
And that’s often in fact what the student
or the complainant wants some kind of outcome,
which is why, as I see, most of the time,
we’re looking for preventive action,
we’re looking for pedagogic action,
we are feeling success
when the number of cases genuinely fall.
In other words, behavior has changed to such an extent
that the number of people who come,
who have to feel the need to complain
has actually come down.
Not that you’ve repressed the cases
and they’re continuing,
but that the actual number of a certain kind of, say,
forms of creating an environment
that is unpleasant and unwanted,
that kind of behavior actually changes.
So there are, I would say there are minor major penalties,
but in my view, the apology
occupies a very important place.
Thank you.
I’m just trying to see here.
There’s one comment which Gita Chah does raise,
which is around mentoring.
And sometimes passing the baton I mentioned earlier,
which is another point,
it implies a kind of continuity.
And the continuity carries with it power also,
because you have to let go
and you only pass it on to those you think are fit for,
the role that those who are passing it on feel.
Yes, yes, yes.
But what about this idea of feminist mentoring?
I mean, I think the Lok Shah,
I mean, think the kind of social media dimensions to MeToo
in terms of a lot of the ways
in which activism is being organized now.
How, I mean, is there other ways
in which you’ve seen that can present?
The question is who’s mentoring whom?
I mean, this is a very interesting question
because I was fairly sure that I was doing the mentoring
and I was senior older than my students.
And with post-Lok Shah, it was reversed.
I was being mentored.
I was being told a few things
that I had not actually considered very carefully.
And the tables was not turned exactly,
but it actually had changed.
It was graduate students who actually had things to say
that forced me to rethink what I thought I knew.
So the question, the difficult question though,
is that it doesn’t take away the power dynamics
between I’m after all,
what we would call a 10-year professor.
These are students whose futures are uncertain.
There are other colleagues in the picture as well.
It’s a complex scenario.
Who is sympathetic?
Who isn’t?
These are very, very complex questions.
And in my view, I think the post-Lok Shah moment
was both a plus and a minus.
It was a plus because I think it made us look afresh
at the significance of institutionalization
and alternate ways of thinking about it.
It was a minus because it somehow
also divided us vis-a-vis each other.
And that’s always the worst situation to be in
when you are, and of course the media
made the most of that moment of setting us in some senses
as though you had to be pro or contra,
as though there will be two possible positions
to be taken and so on.
That was, I think, very, very damaging
for the women’s movement.
And I think we’ve probably come out of that moment
and have built bridges to some degree.
But I think the teacher-student relationship is one
I still wrestle with a great deal.
And though I say that I learn so much from my students,
I know that that doesn’t alter
the power relationship between us.
And so mentoring for me is a complex question, actually.
And I think it’s maybe easier.
I’m also aware that I’m close to retirement.
I’m a very much older person now.
I imagine the mentoring relationship
could be much, much more fluid and open-ended
if you’re a younger faculty person
and you have students with age difference,
perhaps, is not so great.
No, thank you for that.
I think that that was a really honest reflection
on that mentoring.
I think I’ve changed myself to struggle
and have been struggling with that,
particularly around issues around cast, race.
We look around at the institutions we are working for
or complicit in, therefore,
and we don’t call out things
or we are part of conversations and don’t stand up.
Then this is that part of our kind of role as mentors
and as feminists as well.
Okay, let me see.
There are a few more questions,
but I know time is running out.
Adrija, shall we?
Yes, I think we should wrap up at this wrap-up.
So I’m very sad to end this conversation
because I’ve learned so much
and it’s been such a good conversation.
Thank you, Adrija.
Thank you.
And thanks, Navtej.
I hope we interact again sometime.
Yes, thank you very much.
I really enjoyed your presentation
and our interaction too.
Yeah, big thank you to Mary.
Thank you so much for taking the time out for being here.
So last minute, this whole workshop was organized
within a few weeks because of bureaucracy
and Tej for being an absolutely amazing mentor
who teaches me every day
not to follow rules and break more rules.
So I’m actually very privileged to have a mentor
and so as who encourages me to do that.
And it was such a pleasure watching this conversation.
So thank you very, very much, both of you.
Thank you.
We are actually going to very swiftly move on
to the last part of this workshop.
A number of us, both in the organizing committee
and people who helped us through this process
of organizing this conversation are cultural activists
are associated with theater music
as a tool and weapon of resistance.
So we thought that we would end with some music
because it’s been three really hard
and intense days of conversation.
And we realized that there was a need to kind of
remember the joys in struggle,
remember the joys in resistance.
I remember a Kurdish activist told this to me
in a conversation that we were having
around sexual harassment in Kashmir, Palestine
and Kurdistan.
And she said that one of the things that I always remember
is the joy that is there in the struggle.
It’s the happiness that this struggle has given me,
is the comradery that this struggle has given me,
the new sisters that this struggle has given me.
And I know that this world around us
is not the best place to be in right now,
but it is this joy that keeps me going.
And I think we wanted to remember this
and remember the beautiful
just the joys in struggle and resistance
and how beautiful it is.
So we are going to have two performers in this,
one from UK and one from India,
keeping in mind that this is a dialogue
between across borders.
So our first performer is Nafrid.
Nafrid, are you here?
Can you hear us?
Hello.
Freeti?
Hey, hi.
Hi.
So Nafrid Karla is an undergraduate student
in Newton College in University of Cambridge,
where she’s studying human social and political sciences.
She has been active in feminist organizing
and student politics around intersectional
anti-racism as well.
And she’s going to perform
a little spoken word piece for us.
So over to you, Freeti.
Thanks, thank you.
Yeah, so I have kind of written like a spoken word,
kind of discussing like injustices
that kind of facing focusing on 2020
and the different kind of pandemics of injustice,
of like racism, misogyny, transphobia,
casteism, capitalism, and COVID,
you name it and we’re facing it.
And so while I was like,
born and grew up in the UK,
I’ve also lived in India and Pakistan.
So I think having the connections
between North and South is something
I’ve always thought about and it’s really important.
So yeah, this is-
Sorry to interrupt you for a second.
Did you have, did you want your slides?
Yeah, I’m-
Yes, please.
Yeah, so I’ll just be sharing for Freeti.
Okay.
Yeah, you can start it.
Just wait for the screens here to start then.
Whenever.
Thank you.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
The year is 2020 and the cops are in the streets,
beating protesters calling out
if there’s no justice then no peace.
Black bodies brutalized,
black lives lost,
black lives lost,
black lives lost,
black lives lost,
black lives lost,
black lives lost,
black lives lost,
black lives lost,
black bodies brutalized,
somehow counter to our lives,
which lives matter and which do not need to be decolonized.
The year is 2020 and the US will decide
from which mouth they want to hear
regressive policies to abide.
The normalization of sexual predation
has made a choice of two predators
the conventional situation.
The year is 2020, slave owner worship still lives on
with statues to symbolize how abolition never won.
The White House residents,
the white supremacist is one of many statues
to be toppled from the front premises.
The year is 2020 and resistance continues on
in institutions pushing power
for getting the knowledge it comes from.
Cops are on the campus to uphold the status quo
and prevent revolution,
university policing has to go.
The year is 2020, university inclusion is defect
because the system cannot fail those
it was never built to protect.
Racist and sexist institutions
with their equality illusions
act like reforming modes of exclusion
can be a coverup solution.
Sexual harassment and gender-based violence
are just policy documents filed in an admin office.
Without student agitation and feminist activism,
universities would not be held accountable
for institutionalized sexism.
The year is 2020 with lockdowns all across the world,
Americans wanting freedom from masks
oblivious to the rest of the world.
What about the freedom of the voices
ignored in the corridors of the powerful,
institutions built on the backs of oppression
capitalized by keeping the masses fearful?
The year is 2020, the US, Brazil and India
lead the world in COVID cases worsened by fascist hysteria.
The way out of this pandemic
is to see the issues that are systemic
and put people before profit
because all else is just polemic.
The year is 2020, pandemics are far and wide
of hatred and of violence in which capitalism can thrive.
The cure to end injustice and the violence it encompasses
is revolution in the world and change in abundance.
The year is 2020 and we have been forced to recognize
the bare bones of the system with our collective eyes.
We will look back on 2020
as a year of introspection and unrest
of how systemic change lies in the power of protest.
Oh, wow, that’s amazing.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
That was so powerful.
Thank you.
I think I need to take a breather after that.
Our next performer is Jigjeet Kaur, Nikki.
Is a singer and artist and activist.
She has completed her MPHL
from Punjabi University Chandigarh.
Her focus is Punjabi protest and folk music
and she has been involved in student movements
of university campuses
and has been part of a student organization
called SFS in Punjab.
I think Nikki and Shelza are together.
Shelza.
Hi.
Thank you, Preeti.
That was really powerful and amazing.
So Nikki, as we call her,
is going to introduce herself
and she’s going to speak in Punjabi
and I’m going to do my best to translate
and take you through the songs
that she’s going to perform for us today.
So you guys can hear us okay, Adruja?
Oh, we can, but it’s a little soft.
Can you get closer to the mic?
Can you speak?
Is this better?
Yeah, slightly better,
but come even closer to the mic if you can.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, pre-introduction, if you want to.
First of all, I want to thank all the organizers
for giving me such an important conference.
Student for Society,
a part of the SFS organization,
is protest music and theater.
Through that, whether it’s gender-based violence,
caste-based or any other university issues,
they are mobilizing people
and playing a very important role in art.
Your topic is related to women’s freedom of expression,
so the first song I’m going to play is
a song about women farmers
who suffer the most.
A woman is a Dalit woman
who works in the fields.
Shailza will explain that song to us.
After that, we’ll start singing.
So, thank you to the organizers
for asking me to be a part of this important conference.
As part of student organization SFS
in northern state of India called Punjab,
protest music for me and theater
have been an important part of mobilizing people
and reaching out to them on issues of gender
and caste-based violence and other university issues.
So, the first song that she’s going to perform for us
is called Mitpi the Moor or Clay Peacock.
So, just setting the context of this song.
In 2015, a land rights movement
swept across 70 villages of southern Punjab,
beginning with the village of Balat Kalan,
where the landless peasants raised their voice
for statutory rights over one-third
of the common land of the village.
They won the rights to lease the land
and have begun farming on a cooperative model.
The struggle in this village created a wave
in various other villages in the state,
which saw major participation from agricultural laborers,
and women have been at the forefront
of this struggle since then.
This song struggles with women of Punjab
who are agricultural farmers in the countryside.
The woman in the song sings about her life
and labor in the farm.
She has had to mortgage her land, her thoughts,
her body to the upper caste men.
Her people have been under lifelong debts.
Her ruminations about her life on the fields indicates
that not only she suffered endless exploitation,
she has also been a victim of sexual violence.
She tells the audience to ask the old battered dupatta
lying in the field about her agony.
These words are painful because even in the song,
she hides her experiences of sexual harassment
behind metaphors.
The next lines tell us of the practice of untouchability.
It is almost as if she’s asking those upper caste men.
Your caste practices ask you to avoid
the impure water we touch,
but what about the consumption of our bodies
through labor, exploitation, and sexual violence?
The form of the song draws on existing folk song patterns
in Punjab where women sing about their domestic life
using the common tropes of the household,
the jewelry, or their married lives.
In this song, however, the Dalit woman uses these very tropes
and turns them around to deliver a mode of caste critique.
Over to Niki.
I’ll start my song.
Kall jad do miti lon
Laggi mai kandholi uthe
Kall jad do miti lon
Laggi mai kandholi uthe
Kall jad do miti lon
Laggi mai kandholi uthe
kandholi utte miti da bana baithi aur hai
pehla hasi phir roi challe aade vang
galla sujiya hor diya hor hai
kal jado miti lon laggi main kandholi utte
kay ruta sirto di langiya chhople hi
ruta sade chamadi nahi hai
ruta sade chamadi nahi
khet gadeh soch gadeh jism bhi gadeh asi
sadiyan toh hoi karzai hai
om ek khur jaana saadi zindagi da sach hai
om ek khur jaana saadi zindagi da sach
jive karia ne mor dena khor hoi
pehla hasi phir roi challe aade vang
galla sujiya hor diya hor hai
kal jado miti lon laggi main kandholi utte
vadi bade yaa sada udja gang sehle
chugde yaa udje jawani hai
chugde yaa udje jawani
kheta vichhol bhi kiseh mehli ja hi chunni ko
puchh lehda saadi kahani hai
sada hath lagga pitte peena jo paani hai
sada hath lagga pitte peena jo paani hai
bengwali mehk nun chod hai
pehla hasi phir roi challe aade vangu
ruta muklawe wali gohe de ambathla de
vich saadi margai bolwe hai
kal jado lama wala kar koi gal daso
paru ki hun gara ode kol mein hai
hun mere pehra vich chanj raan viron hai
meri bide bade honke jai tore hai
pehla hasi phir roi challe aade vangu
gal asujiya hor diya hor hai
kal miti lon laggi main kandholi utte
thank you so much
thank you mickey so the second song is actually very close to the theme that
we’ve been discussing in terms of student
activism and what also priti pointed out in her poem about
the activism that is required on camps
or women of my country so i’m just going to set the
context of where the song has been sung and used in
activism so since 2015 the student
organization sfs based in punjab university
chandigarh had begun a conversation around 24 hour
access this campaign had begun with
on the issue of incidents of sexual harassment and eve teasing as
mary pointed out the use of the term faced by women students perpetrated
by all outsiders instead of asking for protectionist measures or surveillance
the student organization campaigned for the establishment of a culture where
women have the freedom to claim public spaces within their university and
outside as their own consistent mobilization talks struggle
against patriarchal attitudes of the management dialogue with both male and
female students of the university finally gave way to amendments and the
rules in 2018 priya was elected as the first
female president of punjab university student council
and this proved to be of immense help to the cause
for many of us this is a testament of broad-based student activism where all
students participate to struggle against patriarchal boundaries
it resonates with the oft-heard slogan in student struggles
which is which roughly translates as
patriarchy is a sham now is the time to dismantle it
so this song is a to all women students and universities to join
the fight against capitalism and patriarchy
what is really interesting about the song is that it does the work of
reclaiming the dominant masculine punjabi identity
by asking women to use the sword as their weapon
where usually the use of weapon is associated with the identity of the
punjabi male here a reversal of that image is
instrumentalized to point the sword towards fighting
the violence of patriarchy sexual harassment
against inequality in nutrition and education
the ends by calling on the women to be active agents in their emancipation
develop their independent political thought and claim their rights over
half the sky
sing
sing
sing
my freedom
on
your wish
nashiyaan tak rejena
teri azadi pabaan kalba nashiyaan tak rejena
jakad ke punjiwaad ch koi teri sochnu lejena
hak apne tu aap pachhane
hak apne tu aap pachhane nis samjh bana le tu
ter te koi zulm kare talwari utha le tu
ho kudiye mere desh diye
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
hak ate adhikaar apne le ke mani tu
addaam bari tera ae ho
addaam bari tera ae adhikaar jamal hai tu
ter te koi zulm kare talwari utha le tu
ho kudiye mere desh diye
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
lagge surakhaya na te saare talay pane tu
raising the banner of truth up against barricades of lies
on the highways, who find stories of persecution
filed on each threshold, who find
that tongues which could speak have been severed.
It is we sinful women, even if the nights give chase,
these eyes shall not be put out.
For the walls which have been raised
don’t insist now on raising it again.
It is we sinful women who are not awed
by the grandeur of those who wear gowns.
We don’t sell our bodies.
We don’t bow our heads.
We don’t fold our hands together.
So this conference and this workshop
is dedicated to all sinful women
and maybe continue our resistance and maybe win.
Thank you so much for being there
and making this what it was.
And we will of course continue with our conversations,
but thank you very, very much.
And in clubs in the world.
And can I say a huge, huge thank you to Adresia.
I’m sure many people will want to echo me or follow me.
We’re saying thank you because it’s been an incredible job
organizing this, wonderfully ambitious.
And there have been so many obstacles,
not least a global pandemic and you have succeeded
and you have brought together North and South,
you have brought together cross-border dialogue.
And I think I’m sure I speak for many of my colleagues
in the UK when I say how incredibly inspired
and humbled we are to hear about the amazing work
that is going on in India.
And I have learned so much and I will be thinking
about this work for many, many weeks, months to come.
So thank you.
Well, thank you so much Anna, that really means a lot.
And as we said, this is only the beginning
of the conversation and we have so much more to learn
from comrades, colleagues, friends, sisters
across the world who are continuing this resistance
in various forms.
So hopefully we will all see each other soon
in another space like this.
And of course, keep your eyes out for the report
that is coming out soon as well.
Brilliant, thank you so much.
Have a great rest of the day.
Thank you.