Why police assaulted women protesting Panjab University fee hike
"Then he tapped her breasts with his baton. Gently. Tap Tap... Behind him a red and blue board read Politeness Obedience Loyalty Intelligence Courtesy Efficiency." Although a devastating sarcasm, these sentences - taken from Arundhati Roy's novel, The God of Small Things - represent only a tiny fraction of what women face at the hands of those responsible for women's safety.
From the women of Kunan Poshpura, to Soni Suri, to those raped in the Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh, to the women students/protestors of various educational institutions across the country, most have experienced violence at the hands of the police and paramilitary forces.
Be it FTII, Occupy UGC, Justice for Rohith, or We are JNU, each student movement has faced severe state repression, and in each one of them, women students have been harassed, beaten, and manhandled on the streets as well as in police custody.
Panjab University, Chandigarh is yet another institution where women students were arrested, sexually harassed and even denied sanitary napkins in the police custody, merely because they were protesting against a fee hike of up to 1100 per cent - so exorbitant that it meant the end of their university education for most.
However, the fee hike does not only entail the ostracisation of the economically and socially marginalised, which includes women given the gender bias in society, but also the celebration of the disabling nature of educational institutions.
It implies the use of universities as a means to well-defined ends called skill-based careers and their deterioration as centres of critical thinking.
Thus, it prepares the ground for retaining and upholding the status quo, which encompasses all kinds of bigotry, especially patriarchy.
Another peculiar and agonising relationship women have with public places establishes educational institutes as the most accessible and least judgmental places for them to live in.
While entering the university might be the only option at one's disposal to experience the world, education doesn't essentially mean a career, but to be able to live as an independent woman, away from one's city and home.
In such a milieu, it becomes an obligation for women to protest against the fee hike - not only to protect their right to education, but also their right to spaces where change can begin.
This is why one can see women in the forefront of protests against fee hike, organising protests, and rallying around their campuses and the streets.
Even so, they are mischievously followed by police personnel, their gaze trained on the women wherever they go, because a woman is never just a woman when she protests. She is a disruption, an oddity, an animate question mark traversing space and time.
Her presence is never fully accepted for she is not a human being, but a defined gender passing by. A gender who must perform her role adequately at all times. She must not speak loudly, she must not question, she must not find love, she must not protest - everything that a man can do. Instead, she should be judged, mocked, harassed, and "taught a lesson" on how to remain a woman.
Because when women enter educational institutions and fight for their rights, they pose a challenge to the asymmetry of genders; their existence without a purpose inside the campus, at Dhabas and gardens and protest sites, their volitional mobility threatens the set of gendered behaviours and practices that defines their existence.
That is why I believe there is no greater threat to a state than women struggling against it - challenging, redefining, and subverting gender. Because then, women start becoming way more than their gender and bodies; they become fluid and free.
It is this freedom that is being curtailed when women's bodies are used as sites of revenge and punishment repeatedly. It is this fear that women might control their own bodies and genders and their choices that makes the police assault a woman sexually, when she is under arrest.
That is why when women students of Panjab University protested against the fee hike, their bodies (read highly and selectively sexualized bodies) became the first target of the police.
That is why almost all women hostels in India have stringent rules and curfew. That is why women are asked to dress "modestly" and paraded nude. That is why Barkha Dutt and Rana Ayyub are labeled "prostitutes" and Gurmehar earns rape threats.
That is why Inspector Thomas Mathew calls Ammu a veshya and taps her breasts.