“We want to rear up women who will combine the best characteristics of the women of the past like Savitri and Maitreyi and of the present like the brave fighter Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi, and who will be qualified by their education and training to play their full part in building up the new India of the future.” These were the words of Mahamana Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya at the Banaras Hindu University’s 12th convocation address. It was with this vision that Malaviyaji established the esteemed Banaras Hindu University in 1916, but in a sad state of affairs, this vision seems to be lost in the dust that has accumulated over the hundred years since the university’s establishing.

The Banaras Hindu University, which is also called “The Capital of Knowledge”, today sadly also seems to have become “The Capital of Patriarchal Thought”. I state this not only in the light of the recent incidents that took place in the university, where after the molestation of a woman student and complete inaction on the part of the administration, a mass protest was launched, but on the basis of the experiences that I have had in the university in my stay of the last five years.

The molestation that happened on September 21 was not an isolated event. “Eve-teasing” is a part of everyday life for girls here, so much so that it does not even occur to us that it is something to be complained about. We have always been ‘The Good Girls’. The girls who listened to everybody, right from the eve-teaser, to our hostel wardens and even our gatekeepers, who feel it is their full right to look at us with eyebrows raised if we are even a minute late after the curfew time. We are girls who never reply. We are adult citizens of this country, who can never leave their hostels for a night out, unless we are heading straight home and not  without our wardens first giving a call to our parents and, in case of the married hostel inmates, to our in-laws.

But one day, enough was enough.

When  a friend of ours was molested at 6 pm when it was not even after curfew timings, when she was coming back not from a night of wild partying, but after a long hard day of study at her faculty, when she was wearing kurti leggings and not even tight jeans, in short, when she was molested even after being  ‘The Good Girl’ , and even then when our wardens, instead of standing behind our friend stood at the hostel gate discussing how the curfew timings now needed to be reduced  from 7 pm to 6 pm, and how girls need not stay out after dark, we decided we were done with being ‘Good Girls’.

It is not like we had never tried to take up issues with the administration before. On countless occasions, we had written applications and received empty promises. Just two years back, when another friend was harassed, we spent the entire night standing in front of the Vice-Chancellor’s Lodge, waiting for the head of our institution to grant us an audience but to no avail. We were fooled into believing their empty assurances that night, but we decided not to, this time. As word of mouth spread, we sat down in solidarity demanding not only justice for our friend, but also security for ourselves for many a times we too have almost been in her place and do not wish to be there again.

Our vice-chancellor, who constantly keeps telling the media that the mayhem in the university was caused by outside elements, is probably saying what he really believes to be true. The presence of us girls in this university has been so inconspicuous; we have been such invisible beings that one day when we decided to make ourselves heard, our voices must have surely sounded like those of outsiders to him. If only he had bothered to converse with these voices before, neither our sounds nor our demands would have been so unfamiliar to him.

But that did not happen, and so now we are ‘The Not So Good Girls’. We are girls from the remote areas of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, who have now discovered what nights taste like. We have discovered that we have throats, tongues and voices, and opinions.

And they are scared of us, so they will tell you it was AISA and ABVP and NSUI because accepting that it was only us girls of BHU will mean accepting that their institutions of patriarchy have begun to topple.

But let me tell you, and let me tell them, it was only us all along, and now that we have tasted rebellion, we can never go back to being “The Good Girls of BHU” again.