The patriarchal mindset of the Indian society has always discriminated between men and women. The double standard is such that while boys are allowed to hang out wherever and whenever they want, girls are imposed with restrictions related to time and place. These bizarre ideas stemming from the patriarchy shackle the young women of our nation and are downright regressive.
What's disturbing that the moral police is not just limited to houses, it has also spread its force to schools, colleges, and workplaces
And the latest target of this moral police was the National Institute of Calicut administration.
The institute went to the extent of issuing an atrocious circular addressing the female students in campus hostels in which it threatened them with "severe action" like suspension and expulsion from the hostel if they were founding roaming around with the opposite gender.
The circular went something like ", "Inmates of Ladies Hostel and Mega ladies hostel are strictly instructed not to roam with students inside residential campus. We get a lot of complaints in this regard. If any girl found along with boy student inside residential campus, severe action will be taken against her including suspension and expulsion from hostel [sic]."
NIT alumnus Abhimanyu Mongandh tweeted the following along with a photo of the circular "NIT Calicut is going back in time instead of forward. Threat of suspension from hostel if a girl is found with roaming with a boy."
The professor also gave a statement to IndiaToday where he said ", "NIT Calicut was never really a liberal space like IIT Kanpur where I have studied. There was a 7 PM curfew for girls to enter the hostel even in 2011, the year I graduated. Few professors had issues with girls and boys interacting outside academics and more so if they were perceived to be in a romantic relationship."
One of the members of the student affair council said, "The matter has already been discussed with the concerned warden. The notice didn't turn out the way they wanted to, was the answer," in a Facebook comment. He also added that "This was put up in a hurry due to some events that took place in that area. Hopefully they will take down the notice very soon."
A similar incident had occurred last year when Chennai's Sri Sairam Engineering College has put up a circular titled'Special Instructions For Girls' which had a list of 22 regressive rules for the girls of the college
The frequency of these shocking incidents bring to light that no matter how much we are trying to promote gender equality in our nation there are still elements of our society which need to be policed to let go of their dogmatic prejudices
