Opinion Express View on IIT-BHU incident | A crime on campus

The student was taking a walk near her hostel with a friend when three men waylaid and sexually assaulted her, all the while documenting the crime on their phones. The incident, which took place on November 1 on the IIT-BHU campus, once again brought to centrestage the spectre of sexual violence that haunts many women, on college campuses, at workplaces, on the daily commute. That the three accused in the IIT-BHU case were arrested on December 30, nearly two months after the assault, offers hope that in this case, justice may be served. That the police investigation has linked the men to three previous cases of molestation at IIT-BHU underlines that it must be served without fear or favour.

A political row has broken out over the affiliation of the three accused with the BJP’s IT cell — the association ended in November, according to the BJP Varanasi (Mahanagar) president. It is of utmost importance that the police conduct its investigation professionally. This would help reassure citizens that crimes against women are taken seriously by the authorities and that culprits, regardless of their political connections, will be brought to book. The rise in women’s mobility, their growing visibility in public spaces and contribution to the economy and increased participation in all fields, from politics to sports to entrepreneurship, has been a remarkable feature of Indian life in the 21st century. But the picture is often marred by persisting questions about how safe women really are as they step out in a society that remains patriarchal in many ways. The echoes of past crimes that drew the nation’s attention — the December 2012 gang rape in a moving bus in Delhi, the gang rape of a photographer in 2013 in Mumbai’s Shakti Mills, the 2019 rape and murder of a vet on her way home after work in Hyderabad — have still not faded.

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Making women’s safety a priority helps the larger cause of enabling them to claim their rightful place, whether it’s at work, on the streets and in public parks or in Parliament. It is for the government at every level to ensure that women’s safety does not come at the cost of their hard-won freedoms — which means rejecting the impulse to impose dress codes, curfews and other restrictions. This requires a different imagination of what women’s safety and freedom means, and it can no longer be postponed.