Facebook asked me recently, as it does every day, “What’s on your mind?”
What is on my mind? I am a JNUite. How a young man went berserk, attacked a girl, and then took his own life? How much he must have planned this, how his frustration must have ruled his life, how his life had no other mission than this — get the girl one way or another. How he must have thought and convinced himself that his life had no purpose without her, and how she couldn’t have a life without him.
How a young woman must have tried to cope with a classmate obsessed with her, who could not take no for an answer, who would not be rebuffed, who had taken possession of her in his mind and could not accept that she could exist independent of his imagination, who most probably was advised not to (or never encouraged to) complain to the forum set up exactly to help people like her and, believe it or not, people like him. Any sane person can see that he needed counseling, which would have been provided to him, if only the girl had been encouraged to complain about his behaviour.
What’s on my mind? How we failed two young people, both of who had many productive, perhaps happy, years ahead. How no one noticed how his life was going into a tailspin, not his friends, nor his teachers.
What’s on my mind? How many people and some of the media immediately turned this into a security issue. How they said students needed more assurances of safety, how the security system had failed. How people wanted more surveillance, more rules, and more moral policing. We need to have curfew, they said. If girls were shut up in their hostels, and boys and girls were not allowed to be seen together in the night, if we fined them more for being in each other’s company, the campus would be so much safer. The girl was hit in broad daylight.
How some pseudo-sociologists or psychologists immediately pointed out that this is what a relatively free campus does to people from small towns, people who have never questioned their inherited value systems till they arrived in this big bad city campus. What can boys from small towns do? The boy had actually not questioned the “honour” code he had imbibed from his environment; for if he had, he would not have acted in the way he did.
What’s on my mind? How the campus culture had not made any impact at all on the boy. How a campus where a bus would be stopped and a boy who whistled at a girl would be lectured about behaviour till he apologised to the girl, and then patted on the back, where people from all over India shed inherited patterns of behaviour and transformed into attractive individuals with their own minds, has now turned into one where violence has seeped in.
What’s on my mind? How people say India has changed, how can JNU not? How we once said JNU would change India and believed it.