The corridors of Jadavpur University are replete with posters asserting a woman’s right to choose what she wants to wear and that if a woman is “uncomfortable” with someone staring at her or taking her photographs, it does not make her “psychologically disturbed”.
It has been more than two months since a group of male and female students of a JU department have come forward to register a complaint against a teacher’s alleged inappropriate behaviour towards women in the department.
The department and other pockets of the campus have witnessed the silent protest in the form of posters that speak about their struggle and right to say “No”.
“She shouldn’t have to think of what to wear to class because of your behaviour. It’s you, not Her,” reads one of the posters outside the room of the accused teacher.
Students have written to the police mentioning how uncomfortable they feel during classes held by the accused teacher.
“There have been uninvited comments about our looks, figures, dress and social life.... We have unfortunately seen him outright staring at a female student.... We feel conscious about the way we dress in case it invites unwanted attention,” reads the complaint letter that has been signed by 35 students and submitted to Jadavpur police station.
The general diary entry, based on the complaint, at the police station on October 18 accused the teacher of taking photographs of a woman student without her consent and alleged that when she confronted him with a request to delete the pictures, he had allegedly called her “psychologically disturbed”.
Another poster on the JU campus reads: “She felt uncomfortable. Just because she raised her voice, she isn’t psychologically disturbed. It’s you, not Her.”
The posters referred to alleged multiple incidents that happened in the department over the past few months, one of which apparently snowballed into a formal complaint to the university authorities and the police.
Several students said they wanted to “inform everyone” about “what was happening in the department”.
“We are doing everything we can to stop this nonsense which has been going on for years. Postering is our way of silent protest. He (the accused teacher) had been taking advantage of the fact that most of his victims remain silent fearing academic and professional backlash,” said a male student who had actively participated in writing and pasting posters across the campus.
A former Presidency University student who had been abused and assaulted by a group of men because she had been wearing shorts and smoking while walking a friend to the bus stop on the night of April 14, 2016, in Kolkata, said higher education institutions “cannot endorse the toxic assumptions of society”.
The woman, who did her master’s from JU and is now pursuing PhD at IIT Kharagpur, told The Telegraph on Monday: “Higher education institutions cannot endorse the toxic assumptions of society. It is almost criminally negligent towards the aspirations and growth of the human being as a personality. Isolating a female student in a manner that is irrelevant to the subject of education but rather pertains to moralising and ‘genderising’ in a fashion that takes us back 200 years is hardly something expected from a teacher of such esteemed institutions.”
A JU student who is pursuing MPhil and completed her undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Presidency said it was “unfortunate” that on a “progressive campus like Jadavpur University”, students have to put up posters to assert that how a student should dress cannot be the concern of a teacher.
Based on the students’ complaints, the internal complaints committee of Jadavpur University is conducting a probe.
One of the women students is to depose on Tuesday afternoon.
The accused teacher, who has alleged that he is a victim of a conspiracy, has been barred from taking classes. There is, however, no bar on him entering the campus and discharging his administrative duties, officials at the university said.
