Sexual harassment and its vicissitudes: Jadavpur University, 2014-17

ABSTRACT

The paper chronicles three fallouts of sexual harassment cases in Jadavpur University (JU) in Kolkata, West Bengal, India, using media reports, activists’ responses to those events, and their reflections. It highlights the differential trajectories that political praxis around sexual harassment and social media takes on the ground. By chronicling three different cases of sexual harassment from Hokkolorob (2014–15) to two other cases till 2017, the paper brings to light the enmeshed nature of on-ground institutions that deal with sexual harassment and social media and the disposition of actors towards them.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual harassment
• Jadavpur University
• student politics
• #MeToo
• LoSHA

Acknowledgments

We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments which has helped the paper take the shape that it has today.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This is in reference to the list of sexual harassers in academia (LoSHA) published by a law student in California named Raya Sarkar on Facebook on October 24 2017. It named 60 reputed Indian male academics (including names of JU faculty) and accused them of sexual harassment.

2. Double quotes, when not cited, are quotations from the respondents interviewed.

3. JU is a public, state university in Kolkata, West Bengal which traces its history to the early 20^th century. It was founded in its present form in 1956. It has had a vibrant history of student politics over the decades. This is not a place to retell the history of student politics in JU but it’s sufficient to note that the campus has witnessed varied shades of left-leaning politics, from the militant far-left to left-parliamentarians, left-liberals, to centrists and the right. Electorally, JU is divided into three student unions for each of the faculties, arts, engineering, and sciences. The paper is skewed towards the arts faculty in the cases discussed and the people interviewed. The other two faculties and the dynamics of their student politics deserve a different space.

4. Hokkolorob (“Let there be noise”) was a student movement that originated from JU after a case of sexual harassment surfaced on the campus. The movement lasted from September 2014 to January 2015. See Supriya Chaudhuri 2019 for a detailed account.

5. Gender Sensitization Committee against Sexual Harassment (GSCASH), was an internal complaints committee of Jawahar Lal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi constituted in 1999. It was the first such committee to be established on university campuses.

6. Following the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, JNU’s GSCASH body was disbanded and replaced by the ICC as the ICC was simultaneously constituted in other university campuses in India.

7. Another state university in the city of Kolkata.

8. The Hindustani phrase “Tala Tod” translates to “break the lock”.

9. The USDF is now a defunct organization that in its current form exists as the Revolutionary Students’ Front.

10. Scheduled Tribes (ST) and OBC (Other Backward Class) are two of the several official classifications used by the Government of India to classify disadvantaged groups.

11. See Saradindu Uddipan 2017 for a “Dalit Bahujan” response to the incident post the accused’s disappearance.

12. Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989.

Additional information

Funding

The fieldwork conducted for the paper was funded through Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai from a grant made by the Ford Foundation for the project An Exploratory Study of Discriminations based on Non-Normative Genders and Sexualities; [486613330];

Notes on contributors

Cheshta Arora

Cheshta Arora is a doctoral candidate at the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. E-mail: [email protected]

Debarun Sarkar

Debarun Sarkar is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Sociology, University of Mumbai, E-mail: [email protected]