It is with deep dismay that we have read the Statement published last month

on ​The Wire.in ​(subsequently, ​Round Table India​ and ​Maktoob Media)​, raising

serious concerns about the nature of Pinjra Tod’s politics and its internal

processes. These are concerns for any progressive movement and the

subject of many ongoing debates in the political milieu of the country today.

Signatories to the statement are friends that we have lost on this journey;

some among them having played an important role in shaping it from the time

of its inception. Their absence in the movement remains with us and the

criticisms they have placed have been the cause of renewed and an even

more systematic thinking through for the entire movement. Some of the

conclusions they have arrived at have been points of long drawn out political

debates internally. Significant investment has gone into these questions

through engaging in different issues and movements, observing and learning

from them, and reviewing our own collective positions through such

participation.

We share many of the concerns raised by the signatories, yet differ from

the conclusions that they arrive at. ​We feel that this difference in

conclusion owes as much to a difference in political outlook as to a difference

in experience. Therefore, in responding to these assertions we have not only

tried to revisit some of the experiences of the movement, but also some of the

debates which have taken place within, including with the signatories of the
Statement. We hope that the response will open up a space for productive

engagement within the larger women’s and students’ movement.

1. Some Preliminary Reflections

The statement put together speaks of discussions panning over a period of

almost 4 years given that ​the signatories have had varying degrees of

engagement with the movement, have remained active and left at

different points of time​. Those from the LSR team distanced themselves

around March-April in 2017 after intensive discussions, two of them being

active from the very beginning of the movement. In the case of Jamia are

people who dissociated very early on, while two others were active till the

previous semester. The movement in this entire period has gone through

many phases. As an independent movement of women students, emerging

out of spontaneous struggles in a turbulent political context, we have not

enjoyed the benefit of a well-defined and stated, prior political articulation.

Instead, both the form of the movement and the demands have been products

of constant discussions and decisions taken in open meetings. These

discussions while being informed by a political imagination challenging

structures of caste, class and patriarchy also emphasized on ensuring the

active participation of a heterogeneous set of women students in putting this

imagination into practice. These processes allowed many students to own

such a political imagination through their own struggles and initiatives as

participants of Pinjra Tod, despite this not already being laid out as in a

manifesto or established as a formal criterion of membership. This has both

been a strength and a challenge. ​Informed by a recognition of some of the

criticisms reiterated in the statement and strengthening our capacity to

overcome these, over the past year the movement has invested

significantly in internal processes towards evolving an organisational

structure and a political common minimum​ which we hope shall help

address some of the concerns raised in the statement.

The feeling of alienation, hurt and of being let down shared by the signatories,

however, is our greatest collective failure. Such a feeling is the most damning

for the movement, which has constantly tried to be an enabling space, and a

support system for women in their journey of political exploration. A sensitivity

to individual experiences, taking into account differing social histories and

locations have been important and recognised aspects of our internal

processes. ​Being active, or engaged in the decision making processes of

a movement are not necessarily enough to ensure that a person does

not also feel alienated from its processes, or find themselves on the

margins.​ In a milieu so internally fractured, brutalising people into insensitivity

towards each others vulnerabilities, the experiences of marginalisation shared

by the signatories are reflections of how far and deep the struggle must go to

build lasting unities and spaces of security. Any such experience was not

inevitable, and must be attributed to the lack of political maturity and capacity

of the movement collectively, and all those participating in it individually.

Those of us who remain in the movement today, stay here committed to

the responsibility of continuing to learn from our struggles, in building

firmer solidarities, unities, and our own political understanding towards

better equipping ourselves to ensure that no others feel similarly in their

engagement with the movement.

2. Points of Clarification

Reinvestigating our own processes since, we have found ourselves at a loss

in identifying instances for the attribution of such alienation to conscious acts

by the movement: of using Dalit, OBC and Muslim women as “tokenistic

gestures only needed to step up and be seen when Pinjra Tod needed to

showcase that it did have Dalit, Muslim, Tribal women in its organization.”

Such an approach is completely contradictory to anything the movement has

stood for, and how it has understood its struggle against Brahmanical

Patriarchy as such. It has constantly maintained that the struggle against

Brahmanism or religious fundamentalism or capitalism is a struggle that all

women, including ‘Savarna’ ‘elite’ women, must fight as a necessary part of

their own emancipation. The illustration offered for such an argument in the

Statement that, “Marginalized women were only called in when they needed to

write a post on Delta, Jisha or Hadiya” too, we were not able to trace back. All

these posts were written, like most other posts, by a process first of

volunteering on the WhatsApp groups, and subsequent discussion and

revisions made to the initial draft, either in meetings or on the WhatsApp

group.

Signatories to the statement who have been active organisers of the

movement have also occupied positions of ‘leadership’ within the movement;

represented the movement in protests, public meetings and before the media,

on issues pertaining to the demands of the movement beyond their particular

identities. They have written statements, conceptualised and led protests on a

range of issues. They have also been consistent participants in the

decision-making processes that have evolved within the movement. ​The

invisibilization of these roles played by some of the signatories

themselves, and over significant periods of time would be unfair, both

towards them and the movement as it was during their presence.

Unfortunately, the statement released by ex-members completely discounts

all the conversation around the politics and processes of the movement that

they themselves have participated in and developed, and bases itself on a

very selective account of it’s activity. It also erases the presence of all among

us — Muslim, Christian, Sikh, practicing, non-practicing, Dalit, OBC, Tribal,

non-mainland, Kashmiri, north-eastern, queer women — who do not fit the

Hindu-elite-savarna-cis-hetero assumed description of the oppressor. We are,

and have been many more of us here than the statement has acknowledged.

We find it unfair that the statement closes off to us this space that we have

built for ourselves through much effort – in saying that Pinjra Tod’s ‘time is up.’

This continues to be an important space for us, even as we engage with the

limitations and challenges that the movement is confronted with. ​We respond

to the statement as women who themselves come from different caste,

class and religious backgrounds who continue to participate in the

movement. We assert this now, only because in the logic of the

statement, any discussion of our politics without this initial clarification

of fact becomes a futile discussion.

Our contestation is not with the assertion that Pinjratod isn’t a Dalit, Bahujan,

Muslim, or a working class women’s organisation or movement. It is not, and

has never claimed to be. Nor has it ever claimed intersectionality as a political

framework. Our difference lies in the assertion that this does not make

Pinjratod a savarna – Hindu – or elite women’s organisation, unidentifiable

with the concerns of Dalit, OBC, Muslim or working class women. Nor does it

imply that we aren’t invested in the struggle against caste, Islamophobia or

exclusion of women from non-elite classes in educational spaces. ​There is

also the charge that the movement has remained “stagnant on abolition

of curfews and demand for cheaper hostels”. In fact, along with these

demands, we have simultaneously invested in a host of issues faced by

women on campus such as the need for basic infrastructure, against

discrimination based on caste, religion, race and region in university

and private accommodation, implementation of reservations and

redressal of sexual harassment. Many of these have been part of the

very first charter of ​demands​ submitted by the movement to the DCW in

2015, and various university administrations over the years.

We continue to organise around these demands and beyond, as part of a

larger uprising on these issues across campuses in the country. Even if these

demands seem frivolous, petty, and meagre, these are demands towards

which women students are organising themselves through their own initiative,

contributing to the politicisation of women as well as society on the whole. ​It is

also worth thinking why movements remain ‘stagnant’ on their

demands? ​Why do workers continue to raise the ‘stagnant’ demand of a

dignified, living wage or limited working hours? Why do farmers keep

demanding minimum support prices and policy change? Why do women keep

raising the ‘stagnant’ demand against sexual harassment? ​We believe it is

because these demands call out the farce of accommodation within the
system of these sections and cannot be completely resolved unless the

entire status quo changes. ​The demand for non-discriminatory rules and

accommodation for all women have occupied a similar place in our struggle.

​3. Building a Mass Movement Against Brahmanism, Neoliberalism and

Patriarchy

An important part of the social and political relevance of the movement

comes from the fact that through consistent struggle on immediate demands,

it has marked a point of entry into the political space for a lot of women not

already engaged in or exposed to political organising. ​The question of the

relationship between the expression of spontaneous outrage, and a

more ideologically informed organisational process has confronted us

through out the struggle. ​Most students participating in a protest for the first

time, while angry and fighting out on the streets, also come in having given

little thought to issues beyond their immediate outrage and carrying all the

contradictions ​that society carries within itself. How does one engage with a

‘mass’ of women, ready to identify with the movement in a moment of

spontaneous outpouring, and yet still very far from being active participants of

the everyday collectivity, discussions and experiences which pave the way for

greater political reflection. ​Who among them constitute Pinjra Tod?​ ​What

is the significance of such mass agitations by women on streets and

campuses which have for a long time not witnessed such protests?
Should progressive groups engage with such moments or distance

themselves from them on the basis of their obvious political limitations?

What is the role of activists within a movement, and what are the

burdens put on them by spontaneous movements, partly of their own

making but beyond their control?

The process of engagement and politicisation is an important part of shifting

the commonsensical consensus away from the status quo and towards the

fulfillment of our demands. Despite the wide resonance enjoyed by the

struggle against curfews, the demand continues to be faced with much

apprehension and fairly high stakes for those coming out on the streets for it.

A vote against the curfew fetched merely 6 supporters in a GBM called by

LSR hostellers in 2015, a massive protest of over 500 women organised again

by the LSR team in September 2016 prefered to stick to PG areas and not

directly confront the Principal, because of the high-handedness of the

administration. This had significantly shifted by the second round of LSR

protests in Nov 2018, when women students jammed the road for hours and

faced ​police action​ to force the Principal and the administration to address

them on their demands. ​Prior to the protest,​ the administration tried to placate

the students by announcing some changes in hostel rules. ​As Pinjra Tod we

rejected these ‘piecemeal’ changes, and decided to go ahead with the

protest ​demanding​accountability on our full Charter which included

removal of curfew, implementation of OBC Reservation, PwD

accessibility, removal of local guardians and interview system for hostel

allocation, non-merit based hostel allocation & other demands.​ The final

negotiations saw the administration quashing all demands with the threat of a

massive fee increase and disciplinary action against protestors.

Reading any of these moments as freeze-frames instead of locating them in a

history of organising over years in particular contexts, will be

counterproductive, as it has been in the Statement, where a single person

voicing a concern about “the impracticability of implementing OBC

reservations” has been extended to the entire movement compromising on

that demand. ​This is even more unfortunate as the movement in LSR in

2018 was much stronger and politically sharper than it has been before,

and succeeded in establishing OBC reservations as a basic demand of

the movement, continuing to mobilise and campaign despite the

pressure of not only the administration, but also a sizeable section of

the student body, particularly many inside the hostel, who actively

campaigned against the demands and protests, calling them the

handiwork of “outsiders.”​.

That our classrooms are divided on lines of caste and class, that privilege is

deeply entrenched in our educational institutions and that even political

organising in society functions on these existing structures of association

constitute the very reality that we are struggling against. It is important for the

movement to create space for women students across locations to hold a

stake in and frame the demands and nature of this space. Decisions such as

speaking in Hindi in meetings, having meetings in central locations, rotational

allocation of responsibility have been attempts in this direction which have

emerged through concerns raised by various members active at different

points of time, across the spread of the movement. Among the numerous

instances of tensions and divergences encountered in this process of coming

together, one has also seen people grow and change through such struggles.

Not only do people gain the strength of challenging their disprivilege through

collective strength, they also come to re-evaluate their privileges in the light of

the stakes imposed on them as students, as those speaking up against the

administration, as people with different social and political identities. ​This has

brought women, from varied backgrounds to do politics much beyond

their immediate struggles on campuses and looking towards a much

wider horizon of social and self transformation.

​A facilitation of unity does not foreclose struggle within the movement.

Neither does a movement bringing together women from different social

backgrounds automatically become a “homogenous” one, as asserted by the

signatories. ​Collective struggles re-articulate our individual identities. It

allows us a new subject location, based not just on the predetermined

social location we are born into, but a politics that we put into practice

together. ​As the journey unfolds for each of us, we realise that if hostel rules

change, fees rise; when struggles for reservations succeed, institutions get

privatised; when ICC committees are constituted, governmental intervention in

college matters buttress the impunity of those in power; when women go out

in the world and choose who they shall love, a heightening of religious and

caste antagonisms threaten their dreams, punish their desires; women fight to

wear what they want and then find that freedom turning into shackles of

beauty standards dictated by the market. ​One struggle leads to another,

and each one demands a wider set of solidarities, a further rethinking of

who we are and want to be.

In looking through our own struggles, and trying to learn from the rich legacy

of the women’s, anti-caste, workers’, land rights and other progressive

movements’, we have found ourselves coming to a conclusion that the

present political dispensation requires an ever expansive mobilisation of all

those at the receiving end of its oppression. The political imagination of

Savitribai and Fatima Sheikh who sought the right to education for women

across castes, has left an important example for us to learn from. They

campaigned convincing parents to send their daughters to the school, while

people opposed them and threw mud and cow dung at Savitribai as she went

to teach. Jyotiba and Savitribai also organised a barber’s strike as a means of

enforcing reforms for ‘upper caste’ widows, and maintained active connections

with the emerging trade union militancy of the Bombay mill workers among

their many different engagements. It is indeed their political imagination that

we find deeply relevant for our own political project and seek to build upon.

Neither was the struggle against Caste divorced from the struggle against

Patriarchy for Ambedkar, who while laying out the political programme for

annihilation of caste, speaks also of the struggle against the regulation of

sexuality of caste Hindu women, even resigning from the Constituent

Assembly on account of the Hindu Code Bill. Does the fact that we learn from

Ambedkar, Savitribai and Fatima Sheikh amount to ‘appropriating’ their

struggle? We do not think so, and find that such an outlook does disservice

not only to them, but countless people, named and unnamed, who have

propelled history forward, whose legacy we bear and are accountable to.

​4. Contesting Political Imaginations of the Struggle over Public

Institutions and Spaces

The movement has developed in conversation and contestation with other

political discourses influential in the students’ and women’s movement. ​The

dominant discourse around gender has been of a neo-liberal

individualised ‘my choice’ variety of feminism pushing women to seek

upward mobility and a limited freedom from patriarchy for their own self,

without taking a stake in challenging other forms of oppression, or even

condoning their participation in those structures on the basis of them

being women. ​The hype around women CEOs & entrepreneurs, military

commanders, or even around an unqualified assertion of ‘choice’ reflects such

an approach. While these assertions are a reflection of changing gender

dynamics in society, the movement has from its very initial period strongly

contested this as a sign of success, or a tenable ‘objective’ for a progressive

women’s movement actually invested in dismantling patriarchy as a whole.

Such a discourse has percolated into our college spaces, endorsed by the

administration and the state, through WDCs collaborating with NGOised

networks like One Billion Rising, or the selection of UGC ‘Gender Champions’

in colleges, besides being propagated by popular ‘​desi intersectional’​ feminist

portals.

​This discourse has actively tried to co-opt whatever movements and

initiatives have developed from among women students themselves and

has also constantly tried to club Pinjra Tod in its framework, even as the

movement has consciously maintained a distance from and challenged

these kind of discourses.​ We have repeatedly, over the years, refused

numerous invites for ‘collaborations’, panel discussions, talks, meetings,

conferences, awards, photo-shoots etc from corporate-funded NGOs and

media platforms, from international organisations such as the United Nations

etc. Pinjra Tod has enjoyed much, yet selective, media coverage. This
coverage has primarily represented the movement as raising questions of

mobility for women disconnected from our other demands which could not fit

easily into the ‘choice’ and ‘parity with men’ framework being promoted by the

media-state-corporate nexus. Therefore,​ such a foregrounding by the

media is not always a reflection of Pinjra Tod’s ‘priorities’, but instead of

how the dominant discourse seeks to fit the movement into its own

agendas.​ So, while a march organised in LSR in 2016 witnessed tremendous

media coverage given that a prominent women’s college was involved, many

other initiatives, say such as a protest called by Pinjra Tod in ​April 2017 ​after

the suicide of a Dalit woman student in SOL, or the PG Surveys through

2016-17 and consequent Jan Sunwai, or the struggle against the removal of 8

dalit women sanitation workers in Undergraduate Hostel for Women(DU) in

2016, protests against rise in hostel fees in Jamia in 2017 & 2018 — barely

saw any media coverage at all.

On the other hand, certain tendencies within ‘Bahujan’ politics influential in

academic institutions have not only disconnected the specific struggles of

marginalised women from other demands of the students’ movement, but

have placed them in opposition. ​The recognition of the particularity of a

person’s social location has been extended to understand social identity

as directly and singularly defining a person’s politics. ​The significance of

the struggle for marginalised women to enter and survive these toxic
Brahmanical and Islamophobic universities is directly connected to the

structural transformation of these spaces, which is a necessary condition for

such survival along with people’s well being, dignity and security. This would

include many shared concerns such as that against autonomy and

privatisation, basic struggles for making institutions accessible for the widest

set of people, against fund/seat cuts, against fee hikes, against restrictive

hostel rules, demands for affordable accommodation, public transport and

mobility etc. Through hierarchizing struggles, and seeing the specificity of

social location in a deterministic way, such tendencies have argued that the

priorities of marginalised women are inherently and always different from, if

not opposed to, that of the rest of the women students.

This logic has also confronted us in our meetings and campus spaces, and

even during internal correspondence and discussions with the LSR

signatories back in 2017 through claims such as: the immediate struggle for

marginalised women is against the savarna class/room-mate rather than

against the administration or landlord or that the demand against curfew is

inherently ‘a savarna demand’ because it puts at risk the entry of bahujan

women into the university as families might be reluctant to send them to a

hostel with ‘no rules’. It was also argued that bahujan women have always

occupied public space, and so the struggle for access to public space and

resources is not relevant for them or that the ​struggle against ABVP​ on
campuses (such as the ​Ramjas incident​, Feb 2017) is a ‘tussle for hegemony

between Savarna right and Savarna left’ holding no significance for the lives

of marginalised students. When asserted in this manner, it creates an

impossibility of dialogue. Any political difference or contestation then runs the

risk of being seen as disregarding social experience. However, in articulating

a political position, a collective must take into account a variety of

experiences, where each experience is both enriched by its location and also

limited by it; besides also being ideologically informed.​ The wide resonance

of the movement has manifested in struggles of women students from

multiple social locations and identities, in Delhi and numerous towns

and cities ​across the country​. Women students associating in different

ways with the movement, have led struggles against hostel rules and fee

hikes, against securitisation, against Hindutva violence, for public

space/resources, for futures other than compulsory

(heterosexual-endogamous) marriage, simultaneously challenging

administration, society & family — throwing open political imaginations

and ideological possibilities that contest such formulations​.

When unfolding in the university, these different logics also produce ​a new

common sense of an individualised way of dealing with structural

questions. ​The long history of struggle for inclusion is most readily accepted

in the form of arguments such as ‘pass the mic’ (and perhaps only palatable
as that?), which while raising important concerns, ignores the fact that

inclusivity and intersectionality can be paid lip service to, while other questions

about corporate funding of conferences can be left unchallenged. This has

reduced the stake in social transformation to a performance of guilt, or ‘calling

out’ while keeping social difference and the impunity of those in power intact.

A similar contradiction was seen playing out in the debate on the ‘List of

Sexual Harassers in Academia’ by Raya Sarkar which while being inspired by

the #metoo moment in the West, made a very specific intervention in the

Indian context. The issue of Sexual Harassment has a long history within the

women’s movement and the very recognition that the normalisation of sexual

(mis)conduct must end and be recognised as ‘harassment’ requiring legal

redressal is owed to the active struggle of feminists around the world. Yet,

with the low ebb of the women’s movement the agenda of Sexual Harassment

got increasingly disconnected with struggles for employment and dignified

working conditions and limited to the institutional workings of Anti Sexual

Harassment Committees. This isolation resulted in institutional mechanisms

themselves becoming ineffective and leaving the problem intact, if not

aggravated by greater precarity of work as a whole.

In such a context, the ‘List of Sexual Harassers in Academia’ responded to a

widely encountered experience of women students and academics in top

universities. The debate within some sections of the women’s movement after
the list created a polarisation between ‘naming and shaming’ v/s ‘due

process’. Most damagingly, this ​shut down spaces for recognising the

limitation that the women’s movement had suffered in failing to keep the

system under pressure and keeping the mechanisms working and

effective.​ On the other hand, those propagating the list contributed to the

erasure of the long history of struggles behind addressing sexual harassment

by adopting and further pushing such a false dichotomy by branding

institutional mechanisms as means of scuttling ‘justice’ — even as the women

movement has critically engaged with the necessary limitation of law, and

known that law is not justice. Posed in such dichotomous terms, the basic

requirements of relief for the complainant, and institutional action against the

harasser were summarily dismissed on the account of the difficulty of

engaging with institutional mechanisms. In Sarkar’s own words the list was

“not prepared with institutional action in mind, but as a cautionary list for

students” assuming “harassers will continue to hold their positions of power.”

What was meant as an attack on “Brahmin patriarchy and Brahmin

hegemony” operating to a particular effect in the very particular context of

research in elite universities was transplanted into all university spaces and

upheld as an epitome of the new wave of struggle against sexual harassment.

As it gained commonsensical social media approval and in such circulation

got further disconnected from any anti-caste or anti-patriarchal politics as

such, proposals of numerous similar lists started popping up across colleges,

unleashing the full implication of the valorization of “naming and shaming” and

of ostracization as a strategy for dealing with the play of everyday power

dynamics. ​The call for public shaming of anyone named on these lists

ignored the fact that the self appointed executors of such sentences,

employers, peers etc will not always act out of a collective power of the

oppressed, but by the power invested in them by the caste and class

advantage they may have compared to those being named and shamed,

thereby reproducing oppression along those lines — this being similar

to what legal systems of redressal also regularly enact.​ The dismissal of

institutional mechanisms also threw into the bin nuances of how caste, class,

sexual orientation and personal histories burden spaces of interaction in the

university. At the same time, dubbing the method as a ‘bahujan’ strategy

further mapped the debate on to caste identity completely disconnected with

issues of political framing or context, whereas in fact, many ‘savarna’ women

were active supporters of the list and that critique of strategies of ostracisation

have been an important part of interventions made by Dalit feminists for a long

time. Not taking into account these contestations, anything apart from an

absolutely uncritical celebration of the List was seen as ‘savarna rape

apologia’.
As a movement, we had continuously engaged in mobilising against sexual

harassment in the university for at least three years before the “list” came out,

and had been doing support work in different such cases while pushing for the

formation and functioning of institutional mechanisms. As such, we, had a first

hand experience of both the difficulty of putting such mechanisms in place,

where there were none to begin with, and getting them to deliver relief, as well

as significant concerns about the limitations of Lists as an alternate strategy

for dealing with sexual harassment. When the first List was published on

Facebook in October 2017, an open meeting was called in DU for students to

share their opinions on the moment and to reach out to anyone who needed

support, with elaborate discussions continuing parallely on the WhatsApp

groups as well. These processes were not bound by the vested concerns of

any individual to protect their friends as has been claimed in the statement,

but were collective processes of debate and deliberation, open for all to see

and engage with, which some of the signatories were not only privy to but also

participated in. Debates raged, yet could find no consensus, till the time of the

second list naming activists from the Dalit, OBC and marginalised

communities came out and was received by a paralysis on the part of many of

those propagating such lists, demonstrating its contradictions and limitations.

We know how difficult it is for women to even register complaints or testify or

even come to terms with violence in a system which makes them question

their own experiences – we understand the need for exploring all means

possible against such a system – individually, movementally, legally. ​It is in

this spirit that we maintain that the limits of the law will only be pushed

by an active women’s movement coexisting with feminist jurisprudence.

That having a collective too is a source of strength and emotional and

material support.​ As such, during that period in late 2017, it was clear to us

that the task of the movement was not to simply participate by locating itself

somewhere on the polarised binaries being created in online discourses, but

to continue to organise and collectivise to confront the questions of sexual

harassment in different ways – often outside of legal framework, through

collective intervention, confrontation, mediation, and not overly relying on

police. Placing it in a simultaneous continuity of the struggle towards

questioning the repression and regulation of desire, of securitisation of

womens’ bodies, which contributes in creating the ground for threat to

violence.

As a movement located primarily in educational institutions, these contesting

approaches towards institution and the kind of political intervention required in

their context have been subject of extensive conversation amongst us over

the years.​ We find that educational institutions are designed to

accommodate only a few and leave out the majority. Today most

regressive changes to the education system are being legitimised on

account of equal numbers of men and women or the rising numbers of

marginalised students on campuses.​ ​These numbers however conceal

the increasing precarity on which this access is premised.​ We have seen

how the State has systematically cut down funding from public education,

imposed 10% reservation for EWS under the General category students,

discounting the need and misrepresenting the very logic of caste-based

reservation. In such a context, ​the structural limits of greater bargaining

power facilitated by recognition, representation and social mobility for

marginalised communities cannot be fought without fighting the

institutions that set the unjust terms of such an inclusion. This does not

mean an abandoning or not prioritizing of the demand for inclusion or

representation, but that it be articulated in greater connection with the

struggles for restructuring institutions and access to public resources.

This struggle, while embedded in the particularities of different

locations, becomes not the burden of one section of women to fight

alone but a shared political project.

​5.Contributing to the Struggle Against Brahmanism from the Location

of a Women Students’ Movement

The struggle for annihilation of caste is a basic pillar of the struggle for the

end of patriarchy and has been an important dimension of all our work. We

have also learned much from anti-caste struggles as they have asserted

themselves over the past few years in the country, both within the university

and beyond. Pinjratod actively mobilised among women students to

participate in programs taken by the movement for land reforms sparked off

by the protest against atrocities of 6 dalit youth in Una, Gujarat. A team was

put together at short notice to visit Shabbirpur in response to a call for

solidarity by the Bhim Army. These have all been instances of important

solidarities and conversations building up across separate struggles, and also

opening the possibility of an overlap of these struggles, across differences of

particularised experience and nature of oppression – based on a political

horizon emerging out of a shared objective — that of an equal and oppression

free world.

​The basic demand of the movement against the imposition of curfew

has also, from the beginning, understood it as an institutionalisation of

brahmanical patriarchy, the regulation of interaction between people of

different social locations through the reinforcement of parental and

social control (embedded in caste, class and religion based hierarchy)

over women’s sexuality through the university.​ The different degrees of

access that different sections of women have to public spaces brings to light

the systems’ unity of interest in variously exploiting women from different

backgrounds. Even as marginalised women may occupy public space in

greater numbers, it becomes important to interrogate the nature of this

occupation, which has itself been marked by histories of violence, humiliation

and dispossession. Take for instance, the fact that women students continue

to be locked up under a ‘curfew’, while on the other hand, labour laws are now

being ‘reformed’ to ‘allow’ working class women to work night shifts in

factories. It illustrates how the system in protecting its Brahmanical

-Neoliberal-Patriarchal interest, needs to simultaneously make certain

women’s bodies available in the public sphere for exploitation while protecting

others to maintain the ‘purity’ of its class and caste structures.​ The struggle

to access public space in a way that they are not only nominally

‘reclaimed’ by some, but become secure for all is premised on breaking

this distinction between the ‘good woman’ and the ‘bad woman’, the

‘protected women’ and the ‘available women’, and can only finally

succeed though contingent unity across these divisions. Understanding

how caste, class and heterosexuality frame our lifeworlds as also our

struggles – can lead to affinities across our immediate identities in a

world where one structure of oppression not only ‘intersects’ another,

but constitute each other in forming the present

brahmanical-patriarchal-neoliberal system of oppression.

Pinjratod has raised the demand for abolition of curfew in conjunction with

that of construction of affordable hostels for all students, strict implementation

of reservation, against fees hike, non-merit based allocation of hostel seats,

demanding street light, affordable public transport, regularisation of rent in

PGs, implementation of PwD reservations, against CCTV and biometric

surveillance, and others. Situating this demand in a wider political framework,

and distinguishing it from a ‘choice based’ articulation of the same, we have

vehemently opposed any idea of freedom which can only ensure ‘safe’ and

equal access to the public sphere to select few women who are able to afford

private transport, cabs etc. at any hour of the day. The movement has

therefore fought for formal freedom of mobility through the removal of curfew,

while simultaneously raising demands of having better lit streets, while

denouncing police patrolling as the solution, and also affordable and

accessible public transport in order to ensure a substantive freedom of

movement for women from different sections of society.

The movement has also tried to build a discourse towards a more holistic

understanding of university and public spaces. Many efforts have been taken

in this direction, like PG surveys exploring issues of restricted access to

secure accommodation through high rents and recognising the differential

treatment of students on account of their regional, religious, caste identities or

non-normative lifestyles; engagement with public sites in residential areas

around campus through ​Jan Sunwai,​ and ​Hamara Mohalla m

​ eetings and film

screenings. This has also helped build a community of support that women

students can immediately draw upon when faced with discrimination or

harassment by either their landlord or a fellow roommate, friend, partner,

family, etc.

6. Engagement on questions of Religion and Belief

In the present context of the rise of Hindutva forces in the country and the

consequently increasing religious polarisation, debates around how a

movement engages with religion has become a pertinent question. In such a

context the movement has stood against against the persecution of minority

communities and the communalisation of society, and the various detrimental

ways in which such a shift impacts women across communities. The

Statement has also expressed concern about ‘atheistic anxieties’ within

Pinjratod. The criticism mirrors the remarks made by some groups that we

have not upheld Hadiya’s right to conversion, which as a matter of fact, ​we

always have!​ ​The actual point of contention, however, was that we had,

while speaking of her conversion, not valorised her embracing of Islam,

as spiritually emancipatory and as the epitome of liberatory defiance

against Hindutva & Brahminism. Pertinent questions remain as to how

such a logic invisiblises the heterogeneous and contesting practices

and experiences of Islam — a complex history which is being

increasingly homogenised across the world in an organised manner.

These concerns were also part of many debates in Pinjratod. Such a position

also borrows and tries to standardize a politics seeking to challenge

Islamophobia in the context of the US and in parts of Europe, applying it

directly to the ‘South Asian’ context in this political moment in time. ​This has

made various struggles on the ground even more difficult for many

Muslim women engaged in a fight against Hindutva forces while also

fighting patriarchal control within communities, and are debates very

much alive within Muslim women’s movements.

It is suggested in the Statement that we act in ‘Secular-Savarna’ fashion by

making spaces unconducive for Muslim women’s participation, placing the

burden to “turn down their Muslim-ness”, and present themselves as “good

Muslims”, who must constantly reaffirm their “progressiveness” by “distancing

themselves from Islam to appear palatable to the Savarna Hindu gaze.” We

are not unaware of how religious expression can be drawn upon for a political

assertion in the face of heightened vulnerability of minority communities. ​We

only differ in valourising of such an expression as the ​only​ form of

resistance for people from these communities.​ Women in the US and

parts of Europe are fighting the regulation of their religiosity in public spaces in

the face of bans and persecution of Muslims as part of the bogus ‘War on

Terror’ while women are fighting the state in Iran, where an imposition of

dress code is enforced in public spaces. Women’s struggles in the domain of

religion have and continue to be varied.

It has simultaneously been implied that we have an ‘attachment’ with

Hinduism. Therefore the charge is made that the women who are fighting

against the figure of Bharat Mata ‘are also those who themselves participate

in the celebration of Hindu cultures, which precisely worships those idealised

bodies.’ Such a reading of ritual practices and festivities wilfully ignores and

precludes the possibility of negotiations and contestations that individuals may

be having within their homes. That individuals work from within contradictions

that are also larger than them but also from the specificity of their families and

homes that cannot be wished away. However, their ability to fight against

them can only be​ bolstered​ through their participation and learning in

collective struggles which must support them while understanding their

locations and positions in the society. ​A shared collectivity is important to

fall back upon for strength, through these ‘personal’ battles with family,

religion and wider community structures.​ Actually this individuation of

struggles, of proving one’s ‘wokeness’, and taking the ‘right’ positions, instead

of a vision of social transformation that imagines a collective puncturing of

dominant discourses, is peculiar to a neoliberal order — wherein freedom

from patriarchy, from gender looks complete, looks easy, looks buyable and

within reach. ​While individual transgressions are important, they are not

necessarily always subversive.

As a collective and through our politics, Pinjra Tod in its anti-Holi protest or

during the protest against Virgin tree sloganeered, “​Puja Nahi Karenge,

Pitrisatta Se Ladenge​,” “​Holika Dahan Nahi Sahenge,” “Tyohaar Nahi Hinsa

Hai, Jaativaad Ka Hissaa Hai.”​ We marched through the streets of Vijaynagar,

where the particular experience of the loss of control over the spaces women

inhabit is exacerbated on the day of Holi, where children and men, who are

often landlords or their family members make women students’ bodies the

target of balloons and harassment, with full impunity as a reminder of their

‘place’ in society, and almost of ‘ownership’. ​This was not just a fight

against ‘hooliganism’ as depicted by the media, but also an attempted

intervention in the public life of Hinduism​ which percolates into the streets

– through symbols, signs, shaadi-baraats, Hindutva rallies, jagraatas – that is

drawn upon by Hindutva-Nationalist politics. Further, we shout “​Hum Bharat Ki

Mata Nahi Banenge;” “​Bharat Ki Beti Nahi​ Banenge”​ not because we identify

with the imagery of Bharat Mata, but precisely as a rejection of this gendered

embodiment of the nation which is used to legitimise, cover up, and erase the

brutal history​ of violence by the state and society that has been ​waging war​ on
the bodies of women, particularly those from the non-mainland and from

marginalised communities.

​7. Stories from Jamia

The story of Pinjratod in Jamia actually needs to be told from the beginning,

since Pinjratod originated from Jamia Millia Islamia. A powerful ​open letter

written by a hosteller in 2015, who came in conversation with some others

resulted in a coming together as Pinjra Tod. It was addressed to the Jamia

VC, and the response from DCW signalled to some of us that there was a

greater receptiveness to this question than before. We came together to draft

a petition. The DCW petition as it was drafted, also sought to challenge the

reporting on media portals in which Jamia was exceptionalised, as a minority

institution, on account of Islamophobia, for imposing regressive rules and

regulations on women students, whereas this was and continues to be the

state of affair in every educational institution in the country.

From organising movie screenings, to guerilla postering, to sliding parchas

anonymously late night – the group of people in Jamia organising as Pinjratod

were taking incredible risks & finding ways to organise & challenge the

administration. It was not until late 2017 that a public program could be held in

Jamia as Pinjratod, despite the movement being active inside the hostel, for

fear of identification of its members by the administration.

The statement paints Pinjratod as antagonistic to the women students of

Jamia, as always being ‘outsiders.’ ​It has been of great importance for

women to build cross-college alliances, especially when the

administration is in a position to target students. In fact, it is this that

has effectively pressurised the admin to not be able to target women

students.​ ​Pinjratod has operated the same way in Jamia as in any other

college/university, which is to say that the decision making and

everyday coordination has exclusively taken place in open meetings

held on Jamia campus and in the Jamia whatsapp group.​ Further, the

statement claims that the binary constructed between Jamia and non- Jamia

students was dismissed as false to “silence any criticisms from the margins.”

However, what one of the signatories had questioned was the very need to

organise as Pinjratod in Jamia, presuming a binary between Pinjra Tod and

Pinjra Tod in Jamia, as non-Muslim ‘outsiders’ vs Muslim women in Jamia.

Such a formulation finds it’s basis in establishing that Pinjratod is always

already Savarna and external to Jamia, we find such a critique is rather

gendered for there are many organisations and movements which function

across campuses. It is clear that we are not ‘saving Muslims women from

Muslim patriarchy’ but rather, are united in a struggle against patriarchy,

capitalism and Hindu fascism.

Pinjra Tod was not external to the ‘spontaneous’ protests against curfew

as has been claimed in the statement. Rather, the curfew protests of

March 2018 should be understood in the context of three years of

organised efforts by the movement to mobilize in Jamia hostel and

campus against hostel timings, arbitrary night-out rules, hostel fee

hikes, and sexual harassment among other issues.​ It was in a Pinjratod

Jamia meeting on March 16th, 2018 that the decision to conduct a hostel

GBM and mobilise for an agitational protest on the 19th was taken by the

Jamia Pinjratod members, including one of the signatories. Intensive

campaigning, meetings and poster making sessions took place in the hostel

through the efforts of Jamia Pinjratod members, following which the protests

defying the curfew timing of 8:00 pm took place. ​Recognising this moment

of spontaneity as emerging from a historically organised process, we

are disconcerted at the undermining of three and a half years of

organised political activity in Jamia in which several women, primarily

Jamia students, have played an important role.

In March 2016, after the administration refused permission for a march to be

held on campus for International Working Women’s Day, women students

were further frustrated upon finding posters plastered all around the campus,

prescribing virtues of chastity and promoting homophobia using verses from

Quran. Some Pinjratod people, including one of the signatories, put up

posters reading ‘Jamia loves gays’, ‘Jamia mein love karo’ etc. It is untrue that

the posters of the Prophet were desecrated during this, as has been claimed

by another one of the signatories in a separate Facebook post. Slandering on

account of these posters continues to this day, to the effect that Pinjratod is a

group of women existing to simply promote ‘free sex.’

​Despite such a widely held sentiment about Pinjra Tod, members from

Jamia continued to put up an inspiring struggle to transform the campus

space. ​Among others, these have included a successful struggle for council

elections in the women’s hostel, till then council elections were only held in the

men’s hostels. Women students have had to challenge the pressure to

participate in weekly ‘​salad making​’ competition and such like within the

hostel, to demonstrate to the warden their good character and disposition.

They put up a challenge when the women’s hostel was asked to put up one

stall at the Talimi Mela, only for applying Mehendi, while the men’s hostel

published a magazine to sell at the Mela along with setting up a number of

stalls. Women, in 2015, went and occupied the library each night for a whole

week, which becomes inaccessible to women students after certain hours on

account of there not being many women. These are demands and ​struggles

that reflect the skewed nature of access to public university resources for

women students.
We continue to stand against the ongoing ​Haya Campaign,​ which places the

blame of sexual harassment on the lack of chastity, modesty and haya of

women, as was asserted strongly in their recent public programs and parchas

on campus. Similarly, we challenged the hypocritical manner in which the

rhetoric of ‘Jamia’s tehzeeb’ was invoked to de-legitimise and ‘shame’ women

hostellers who had danced at the victory rally that had taken place the night

after the ​protests​against the curfew in March 2018. ​To name such

resistance simply as Islamophobia is to invisibilize political

contestations​.​ We oppose the selective invocation of women’s agency on

accounts where it further solidifies community’s control over women’s bodies.

The page ‘Jamia Women Fight’ was created by Pinjratod in the ​context​ of the

administration sending mails to parents of Jamia women hostellers seeking

their opinion on extension of hostel timings, in the summer break of 2018. It

was created in order to reach out to the larger student body of Jamia in the

context of a possible backtracking of changes in hostel rules secured after the

protest. ​The page has been run by Pinjratod members who are students

or ex- students of Jamia as well as non- Jamia students who have been

involved in the process of organising in Jamia.​ Far from it being run by

non-Jamia people alone, some of the Jamia members (not the signatories)

who have left Pinjratod, and are part of another student organisation, continue

to run it till date.

Also, Pinjratod has operated inside Jamia under various other names. At

many points, members have decided to use a different name on parchas

(such as Bazm-e-Khawateen), or printed parchas without a name, in the face

of ​repression by administration​ and slandering by other organisations on

campus. This does not amount to ‘saviour savarna women’ trying to

masquerade their real identity and ‘patronising’ Muslim women of Jamia, but

these decisions, made by Jamia students, reflect and address the everyday

negotiations of the people in the movement. This is a retrospective reading,

especially in the case of Jamia. This attempt by the signatories to construct

Pinjra Tod as always ‘external’ to Jamia is deeply unfair to the movement

because it not only obscures the recent shifts in their ideological outlook, but

also does not acknowledge the history of their own political participation,

initiatives and role played in the defining of Pinjrotod’s politics and perception

in Jamia, having been the primary organisers of the movement.

8. ​Some Final Reflections

As a petition turning into a movement, moving from a spontaneous,

amorphous form towards the building of a more stable collective, ​the primary

political insight that has emerged from and informed our journey has

been the need for organising better, and the centrality of politics in

achieving the aim of an oppression free world.​ We function in a period

when progressive politics itself occupies a marginal position in society, where

a history of organising, within the women’s movement as well as on the left

and in the anti-caste movements has witnessed significant setbacks,

compromises with the system, bureaucratisation and discrediting before their

own constituencies — of dalit, OBC, Muslim communities, workers, peasants,

women and students. Right wing forces are on the rise in the country and

globally, keeping people away from progressive politics by the full force of

both muscle and money power. Social insecurities are escalating on one hand

in a frenzy of violence, and on the other in greater individual competition.

Working in such a scenario, our limited experience of struggle has repeatedly

brought us to the hope of a greater and more politically rigorous organising as

being an important answer to many of our questions. Organising, which builds

unities not by silencing struggles against the operation of social power within

the collective, but which pushes people to change their own social location as

part of changing society as a whole. However far we have gone on this

journey, our experience has strengthened the belief that by learning from

history and other movements and our own practices, formulating them more

politically, building wider solidarities with other struggles, and building better

structures of support, most if not all women, shall find this struggle one worth

fighting for.

We do not see ourselves placed in any antagonism to any other progressive

movement or organisation working to fight the existing structures of

oppression. Many of us in Pinjratod have also been active in various kinds of

other organisations and movements throughout its journey.​We do not believe

that a ‘true’ fight against patriarchy mandates that women only organise

‘as women’, or as women from particular social backgrounds, that we

organise only along any one axis of our identity. ​We feel that as the

struggle against patriarchy creates the need for women to organise

autonomously, the struggle against Brahmanism creates a need for the dalit

community to organise itself, and the specific nature of oppression that

dalit-bahujan women face creates the need to build independent dalit bahujan

women’s collectives. The particular nature of violence and discrimination

faced by the Muslim community in this country today can form the basis of

specific initiatives to organise the community against such persecution. Yet,

much like how patriarchy cannot be vanquished in isolation while systems of

caste and class oppression remain, and women cannot dismantle patriarchy

by themselves without parallel struggles for the demolition of other structures

of oppression, nor can the annihilation of caste succeed as a project divorced

from the struggle against patriarchy and class based oppression. This

necessitates not only the building of ‘solidarities’ across separate struggles,

but also the overlap of such organisational processes and struggles, across

differences of particularised experience and nature of oppression – based on

a political ‘unity’, emerging out of a shared objective — that of an equal and

oppression free world.

While one may feel that this was too long drawn out, and that it takes too

much to organise and keep organising for this long on a question like ‘curfew’,

what we have found in doing so is as central to us as the fulfilment of our

demands themselves: a collectivity and a political imagination. Finally, is this

movement only about “going out?” Will our struggle end if the curfew were to

be abolished? What we do and what world we step into having defied the

curfew or any of the cages that lock us in, has been a defining question for the

movement. That on the first night of curfew extension, women students of

Miranda House Hostel in their Victory Rally on 13th Feb’19, marched to the

gates of Hindu College to protest against Virgin-Tree puja, where two women,

while men aggressively screamed ‘bharat mata ki jai’ on the other side,

climbed the gates to unfurl a banner that read “End Neoliberal Patriarchal

Brahminical Culture”. ​The very success of any movement presupposes

that it shall one day not be required anymore, that someday women will

not have to fight battles as “petty” and unfortunate as the ones we are

engaged in today, that someday, firmer, more politically evolved unities

and struggles will be built by collectives of greater political strength and

understanding than ours. We look forward to those struggles and such

collectivities, and hope to do our bit in creating the ground for their
emergence.​ The fact that even as we write this, women in at least three

campuses across the country are out in protest against their college

administrations is evidence to the fact that much remains to be done even for

the most meagre aims that this movement has set for itself. Together, in this

long journey as a movement, we dream of a future that breaks free of the

​ f Brahmanism, Capitalism, Patriarchy, and the Neo-liberal-Hindutva

pinjras o

State. Calling for the liberation of one, the liberation of all, the liberation of

women — Live Long! This is the horizon we work towards – even if that be a

‘revolutionary fantasy.’