The raids started at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University hostels last month, made salacious headlines – “many girls found in boys’ rooms” – and were soon carried out at University of Hyderabad (UoH, known as HCU). It was on October 26 that a group of security personnel led by two hostel wardens entered the rooms of male students at HCU.

The administration issued a showcause notice to me the next day, seeking an explanation for two “crimes” that I had committed 1) “a lady was found in my room”, and 2) why did I shout at the warden?

First of all, the very language of the official notice is denigrating women. You “found a lady” in the room, as if you find a bottle or a knife or a heater, or any lifeless object. And this sense of negation of an active woman subject in your language was not an accident because one of the wardens silenced the woman when she intervened in the conversation. In a smooth invisibilisation, the warden said: “Madam, you are not supposed to talk!”

I understand that such a notice has been sent to me on the ground that entry of women to the quarters of male students is against the hostel rulebook. Whenever students have raised the issue of free mobility within the campus, you refer back to the “holy rulebook” to defend your restrictions. And I find it difficult to understand the rationale behind the rule because of a number of discrepancies and ironies.

1) How does the rulebook define hostel space? Is it a public space or a private space? If it is a public space, free access to any public space by the citizen is laid down in the Constitution. I believe your hostel rulebook cannot bypass the Constitution. If the space is a private one, then the infiltration of authority into the private space of students is a blatant violation of our fundamental right to privacy. In that case, the surprise raids – without prior intimation to students – are nothing but barging into students’ privacy and are unconstitutional.

2) Is it about security of women? Then the rule certainly presupposes the patriarchal-Brahmanical notion that women are naturally weak/meek creatures who should be controlled and protected (by the men folk consisting of father, husband, son, wardens, etc.)

The second question is, how do you determine what a woman’s security is? In what all places and circumstances do you consider women to be insecure? In my case, my female friend and classmate, whom you “found” in the room during the raid, was sick and I was about to take her to hospital. I am the closest friend of hers on campus and obviously she felt more comfortable and secure around me than anyone else, especially when she was in need of care. For her to feel safe at the moment was to be in that room with me, which your rule of “security” would call a crime!

So it is clear that it is not really about the security of anyone, rather your “security” is rather a tool for control and oppression. It’s then your surprise raids with a bunch of staffers and security personnel and threatening of students through different means – sometimes violent words and absurd notices (as in my case) or through direct harassment (as happened two months ago in K hostel) – that is the real security threat for women inside the boys’ hostel.

Harassment, violence, or any sort of breach of a woman’s bodily integrity can happen in any place inside the campus other than the hostels, such as classrooms, labs, libraries, auditoriums, on their way to and way back from classrooms, etc.

What if the logic of your project of “security” – that is to restrict or deny women access to “potential places of threat” – is extended to all possible places of threat? To what extent will you go? Stop women from going to the gym, night canteens, the sports complex, libraries, labs, classes too, and then lock them up in hostel rooms?

3) Is this restriction in the name of morality and culture? If this rule is grounded in the “great” Indian morality and culture, you are contradicting your own terms. The irony is that in this same university, Tagore International House has a common residential arrangement for male and female students, while women’s entry into hostels for men is criminalised for Indian students.

What message are you trying to convey through these different rules? Is it that Indian men, the product of our culture, are potential abusers and not the foreigners? Such thinking seems to be the remnant of the colonial mentality that western culture is more civilised and superior to Indian culture?

Or is the attempt here calculated to preserve the regressive heterosexual bourgeois norm in the name of saving “Indian culture”? But it can be historically seen that the very rule which tries to preserve the heterosexual norm breaks it apart.

For example, the rules through which you are trying to create a wall between men and women, by giving them less and less space to interact with each other, in the name of preserving “Indian culture”, will create a condition where men will start treating women not as friends, classmates or partners in their life and work, but as mere objects of sexual desire, which will make this campus more unsafe for women.

Banaras Hindu University (BHU), the champion of Indian morality and culture where such rules are implemented more strictly, is a perfect example of a place where women are harassed on a daily basis. So are you trying to implement that culture of harassment in our university also? Haven’t you learnt a lesson from what happened in BHU a few months ago?

I will now explain why I shouted at the warden, and ask you: why are you silencing us?

Shouting is an expression of anger. Anger is a product of the mental trauma that we are going through daily because of the food, maintenance and health crisis on campus. Events which have taken place in the last two months are proof that you and other authorities are not interested in resolving these issues at all.

Two months ago, spontaneously more than 50 students of J&K hostels besieged you and started expressing anger over different complaints and issues, and you harassed some of the residents of K hostel and humiliated them by passing sexist comments and clicking pictures of the undergarments of their female friends during your raids. When they demanded a written explanation from you for the same or resignation from your post, you ran away.

Now you are back again with raids, circulars, showcause notices, fines etc., and have started using them as tools for a witch-hunt and to create an environment of fear so that you can silence us. Why are you silencing us? Is there some hidden agenda or interest of yours which you are trying to protect and execute through these acts? I know you will attempt to target and hunt me down, which has always been your way to suppress the loud and assertive. But my voice is just one of many voices that echo the anger and agitation of the whole student community. I believe you cannot silence us all.