Student Alleges Attempted Gang-Rape at South Asian University; Campus Protests Demand Action

New Delhi: An undergraduate student at the South Asian University (SAU) has alleged that four men attempted to gang-rape her on campus on Sunday (October 12). However, an FIR was lodged only today, on Tuesday.

According to the survivor, four men, one of whom was allegedly a security guard posted at a gate on campus – located in the Maidan Garhi area of south Delhi – sexually assaulted her on Sunday.

The delay in the filing of the FIR has led to a full-blown agitation on campus, with students demanding that the hostel warden and a few other university employees be suspended.

In the FIR registered by the Maidan Garhi police station, the survivor narrated the alleged incident in great detail.

A few days before the incident, she claimed to have received an email from an unfamiliar ID. In it, she said, she was asked to be near the guest house on campus late at night.

The next day, she said, she received another email from the same ID, with the sender also allegedly mailing her obscene emojis and messages this time.

The survivor said the incident scared and stressed her, and that she discussed it with a few of her close friends.

“I informed a few friends about the emails that I had been receiving from an unknown email ID. A few of them went out to the said location that the sender of the email had asked me to come to around 11:27 pm. No one was present at that time,” the FIR quotes her as saying.

As the survivor didn't go to the said location, she received another email the next day, and this time it contained a morphed version of her email display picture.

“The sender had morphed my photo to make me appear nude. In the email, the sender claimed that if I didn’t listen to them, the morphed photo would be sent to all students,” she said.

The emails, she said, shocked her so much that she was unable to move. Later, she said, she mustered some courage and headed out to the busy side of the campus.

“At one point, I turned towards the convocation centre. This place is under construction, and by evening the construction work is halted,” the FIR quotes her as saying.

At the gate, one of the security guards, she alleged, asked her what she was doing at that hour. “I told him I am heading to the dining hall.” The security guard, she claimed, had then called someone on the phone, and a “middle-aged man” came to the spot. She said she was not able to hear their conversation. Within no time, two more men came running to the place.

By then, the survivor said, she was sitting on a staircase. “One of the men asked me why I am not leaving and sitting on a staircase instead. Right when I got up to leave, one of them held my shoulders and others attacked me,” she is quoted as saying in the FIR.

The woman further gave details of the attack and how she was pinned down on the floor. “One of them tried to place a pill under my tongue. I managed to spit it out,” she said.

A few minutes into the alleged ordeal, the survivor said, someone could be heard dragging a food trolley and approaching them. The men, she claimed, ran away from the scene of the crime. “Before leaving, one of them slapped me,” she said.

The FIR doesn’t say if the men who allegedly attacked her were also the same men who had emailed and asked her to come to the location.

In the FIR, the survivor has also named SAU staff who allegedly didn’t take the incident seriously and also prevented her from speaking to her mother. The hostel warden, the survivor said, blamed her and indicated that she had torn her own clothes. “You people have a lot of boyfriends,” the survivor quoted the warden as saying in the FIR.

The police, according to media reports, had initially considered filing a molestation case, but upon listening to her detailed narration, a case of attempt to gang-rape was registered under several sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.

Since Monday evening, students have gathered in large numbers and demanded that the university make the names of the alleged perpetrators public.

“The emails sent to the girls were from an official university ID. We have been demanding that the names of the accused persons be made public and the university also takes necessary action to identify the IP address used to send those emails,” one of the protesting students told The Wire.

One student also claimed that the university administration has neither shown seriousness nor sensitivity in handling the case. “They have been treating the allegation as a small matter and the survivor has been blamed for the incident,” one student claimed.

Following the incident, the university set up a committee. The initial body only had officials as its members, but after students intensified their agitation, a few student representatives were added to the committee.

“But the committee proceedings were not made available to us and the administration didn't allow the proceedings to be videographed either,” a student alleged.

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