Shock and mourning greeted the news of the untimely death of seven students of the Assam Engineering College and injuries in six others. Three of the six were students. A Scorpio-Neo car driven by the students had collided with a stationary vehicle at Guwahati in Assam.
While a committee has been formed to investigate the circumstances that led to the accident, most news channels report that it was a case of drunken driving. The ten boys had exited the college campus in the middle of the night, somehow accommodated themselves in a seven-seater car and taken a ride in it. As was predictable, a hullabaloo ensued about these students having been able to leave the campus at such an hour. The institution was criticised for failing in its role as a custodian.
Would the incident prompt changes in the regulatory role of Assam’s universities and colleges, many wondered.
The university, sure enough, came out with a notice declaring stringent guidelines to be followed by hostel residents. Other higher educational institutions in Assam could soon follow this blueprint. While emotion might lead one to believe these steps are justified, or even necessary, it is essential to remind oneself of the broader underlying pattern and see the socio-cultural factors more closely.
The public approval of such guidelines and the pressure contributing towards their formulation, driven by grief and disappointment at this perceived breach of the Indian parenting-guardianship model, says a lot. This model, internalised by many Indians is restrictive and built upon the suffocating overprotection of students, even though they are adults.
Thus most young adults do not go through necessary experiences to learn the importance of individual responsibility towards themselves and their surroundings.
Also read: Indian Science Institutes’ Curious Penchant for Gendered Hostels
It is therefore important to find out what it is that led these 10 college students, all adults, to be in a psychological state where the only thing stopping them from getting into a car, and then crashing it in a drunken state, was college surveillance and a closed gate.
As Michel Focault emphasises, we have had a shift from control through force towards control through surveillance. The guidelines, in their latest form, are alarming. They go beyond just keeping track of students’ whereabouts, invoking the concept of a “permission letter” to stay outside the campus beyond permitted hours, and go as far as involving the police and empowering it to “pick up” any boarder found outside premises during such hours without a permission slip.
Along with warnings about expulsion and reflection of conduct in pass certificates, the notice declares a blanket ban on the parking of any sort of motor vehicles within hostel premises by the boarders.
While the guidelines might seem reformative on the surface, in truth they damage more than they rectify. Such a demand for the students’ safety presupposes the conflict between individual liberty of such adults, and their safety.
Instead of holding the broader societal structure itself accountable for not cultivating people who can hold on to rationality and self-control within liberty, we push towards a place where liberty itself is disposable, and quickly sacrificed for safety’s sake.
We must look at the dangers of pitting against each other the harmonious facets of the right to life and personal liberty in the most literal sense of Article 21 of the constitution.
While the potential harm here is infinite, specific damages too come to mind; one being that adults becoming constant subjects to surveillance (the metaphorical Benthamite Panopticon, as Focault might have put it), implies a shift from individual responsibility and accountability within the realms of liberty.
In a Pavlovian manner, accountability for risking human life ceases to be voluntary amidst such restrictions, and becomes a chore, readily breached at a breach in the restrictions themselves. The young adult is drained of rational thinking, and shall live by fear.
Furthermore, the unfettered power of college authorities to surveil the private realm of students’ lives inevitably implies moral policing and a curtailment of individualities. An especially concerning facet here is that in light of this isolated incident and the consequent metamorphosis of institutional roles, one cannot help but be apprehensive of these guidelines eventually taking up a gendered colour and exacerbating an already gender-biased hostel culture in Assam’s universities and colleges.
Also read: Safety or Moral Policing? The Unapologetic Gender Bias of Indian Hostels
Empowering the police to “pick up” hostel residents for simply being outside the campus without “a permission letter” is the most horrifying part of this notice and a brazen display of societal and institutional hooliganism repugnant to constitutionally guaranteed liberties.
The incident and its aftermath serve as a stark reminder to not just guardians, but to society itself, about how mere academic education without inculcating reasonableness in young adults represents a flawed system to which these young boys have fallen victim.
It is a reminder of deep-rooted flaws within the Indian guardianship model which pits against each other the ideally harmonious human needs of liberty and safety. What should essentially be free and liberated spaces of learning are turned into Orwellian dystopias. What came before and after these guidelines reveal how none of the concerned players are interested in such analyses, and only need something cosmetic to blame.
Ayaan Halder is a Masters in Law (LLM) student at the Department of Law, Gauhati University, Guwahati, Assam.
