This is the final part of the three-part series on ‘pride in campus spaces and queer collectivisation as a part of the Justicemakers’ Writer’s Training Program, run in partnership with Agami and Ashoka’s Law For All Initiative. The first and second parts can be found here and here.
Following the rise of sexual violence against women, the University Grants Commission (UGC) set up a task force to recommend enhancing women’s safety and gender sensitisation on university campuses.
It led to the “Saksham” guidelines that ensure women’s safety and programmes for gender sensitisation on campuses. On the women’s safety front, little has improved.
The task force also identified problems of policing women students through their protection. And while it works to solve the problem of protectionism, it has done little in reality. As per Ayesha Kidwai, surveillance still rules it.
Saksham Guidelines: Their Tokenism And Protectionism
The document also cites ‘UGC’s commitment towards Gender Justice, Equity and Access on all campuses’ and highlights the lack of gender sensitivity as the weakest aspect of our educational institutions.
In its understanding of sexual harassment, there is no mention of members of the LGBTQIA+ communities. Moreover, it doesn’t even define the term ‘woman.’
One cannot deny that female students still face these issues. There is a need for a reframing and better implementation of the Saksham guidelines; UGC also needs to extend these provisions, especially the administrative support it provides to women’s development cells (which are already underfunded) to student-led queer collectivisations on-campus spaces.
Queer Collectives are also spaces of gender sensitisation. Though they can be exclusive at times, due to the specificity of language, they’re still an open avenue for queer students to engage with on their campuses.
One of my primary reasons for joining TISS was also the presence of a queer collective that will be an affirmative space on the campus. It took me more than a year to find the TISS Queer Collective, primarily due to the online nature of education.
The collective, which mainly worked on-campus space, found it difficult to survive through the pandemic. If there was administrative support for the collective, it could have been a support group for people like me, even in an online space.
In the UGC Saksham Guidelines, there’s a section on Gender Sensitisation mandating a course on the same.
As per definition, “Gender Sensitization implies accepting the basic rights associated with Gender equality among all persons and non-discrimination towards those whose gender identity places them in a situation of disadvantage or vulnerability.”
Although it’s mentioned that the course is not limited to women alone, there is no discussion around gender identities, sexualities, and sexual orientation.
The course sections are citizenship, power and inequalities, violence, understanding and combating sexual harassment, and equality and freedom. In the masculinity workshop, gay, transgender, and homosexual identities are only mentioned once, seemingly tokenistic.
UGC also released guidelines for ‘Gender Champions’ in 2015.
The notice read, Gender Champions are envisaged as responsible leaders who will facilitate an enabling environment with their schools/colleges/academic institutions where girls are treated with dignity and respect. They will strengthen the potential of young girls and boys to advocate for gender equality and monitor progress towards gender justice.”
While they also mention the Gender Champions Club, organising a fest on gender equity, create blogs on extraordinary men and women who changed the lives of girls and boys, there is no emphasis beyond binary identities. While it also mentions demonstrating knowledge of significant court rulings, it has not considered NALSA or Section 377 judgement in its implementation yet, mainly failing.
Moreover, classes have been primarily online for two years, but there have been no guidelines for safety within online classes.
There is zero regulation regarding how the spaces can be safer for queer students. Neither Gender Champions nor Gender Sensitisation found their way in online classes.
Moving Beyond Binary
Student campuses are not composed of only male and female students. Even the definition of gender is more fluid and more than being a social construct. Campus spaces are crucial for queer collectivisation, which is helpful for students belonging to the LGBTQIA+ community. UGC guidelines regarding campus spaces cannot be limited to male and female students.
Many colleges and universities have unique queer collectives that are doing great work. Still, few of them have administrative support in terms of resources, funds, or even a designated space within their campus to hold discussions or meetings for a support group or a designated space for a gender-neutral washroom.
These spaces can also be utilised for gender sensitisation activities mentioned in the Saksham guidelines. There is a need to provide administrative to women’s development cells and queer collectives that work towards issues faced by members of the LGBTQIA+ community in campus spaces.
One can also use the intersectional feminist policy analysis framework provided by Beverly McPhail. According to this framework, policies should involve overall rework of the space while addressing multiple identities that lie along various axes. This would also mean sensitisation training should differentiate sexuality, gender identity, and gender expression.
Along with this, there should be a clear definition of what constitutes discrimination and when it can be a safeguard/redressal mechanism against it.
Taking Cues From Legal Judgments And Indradhanu
Campus spaces can be sexist, homophobic, and sites of unequal power hierarchies, especially if the administration thinks of the policies objectively or naturally. The NCERT manual ‘Inclusion of Transgender Children in School Education: Concerns and Roadmap’ discusses gender-sensitive and trans-inclusive approaches to education.
While this was limited to schools, UGC can formulate similar guidelines for college campuses that insist on a more informed curriculum regarding the progressive understanding of gender and sexuality, including NALSA Judgement and Section 377 Judgement Yogyakarta Principles.
We need to ask more critical questions about institutional policies that impact our campus lives, especially of the power dynamics between the administration and the students. On the one hand, the procedure for women’s safety has loopholes and cannot stop incidents of mass sexual harassment like the one at Gargi college in 2020.
On the other hand, student-led initiatives of queer collectivisations are dying out, primarily due to the pandemic as the campus space is endemic to their functioning. Such initiatives and queer collectives are safe spaces, protest sites, and support groups for queer students, and they should receive administrative support from UGC.
Recently, Indradhanu, the Sexuality & Gender Diversity Support Group of IIT Delhi, was formally recognised as a student body under the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. These are ways to celebrate diversity on campus and make it inclusive for people from all gender identities.
As mentioned in one of the posts that made this announcement, Justice DY Chandrachud in the Navtej Singh Johar Judgement, 2018, said, “Our constitution, above all, is an essay in the acceptance of diversity. It is founded on the vision of an inclusive society which accommodates plural ways of lives.”
It only exemplifies how each collective can be unique in its ways and become more effective with more outreach through administrative support and ensured futurity in adverse times. Dhiren Borisa, a Dalit queer sexual geographer, says on student-led queer collectivisations, “More than a social bubble…It’s a policy framework, a student-run group that’s autonomous and is able to question the administration if it fails to live up to its work.”