Women students marched at midnight on a Tuesday in the “Reclaim the Night” campaign organised by Students’ Federation of India (SFI), reacting to the alleged gangrape of a 16-year-old girl on a bus in Greater Noida.

Delhi University’s women have long fought for safety without waiting for permission. Their latest protest began in the dark of night.

Women are usually advised to be home by dusk, but students midnight march rejected this advice.

SFI released a Women Students’ Manifesto before the Delhi University Students’ Union (DUSU) elections, with safety, representation and gender justice as core issues .

The manifesto promises to make voting rights for all women’s colleges a reality in DUSU elections and 50 per cent reservation for women in union office-bearer positions.

Many of DU’s women’s colleges have historically had no say in the student body meant to represent the whole university, so the request goes beyond just symbolic representation.

The Manifesto’s Practical Demands Deserve Attention Too.

Its demands for safe and affordable women’s hostels, without discriminatory curfews, functional Internal Complaints Committees with student representation and accessible menstrual hygiene facilities.

It also demands women police personnel on campuses and an end to moral policing, and regular independent safety audits across the DU campuses, are all demands that most universities would do well to heed.

A Long Tradition of Protest

The midnight march continues a long tradition of women’s organising at DU. In 2013, women students marched to the Ministry of Human Resource Development against rising hostel fees and demanded more funding for women’s hostels.

Previously, the curfews were central to “Pinjra Tod,” the autonomous women’s collective whose name means “break the cage.”

In October 2018, hundreds of women, led by Pinjra Tod, blocked one of Delhi’s busiest roads in front of the Vishwavidyalaya Metro Station for hours, demanding an end to curfew timings.

Hostels in colleges are setting up effective Internal Complaints Committees to address the issue. One protester put it succinctly, pointing out the irony that women are treated as adults when electing a prime minister, but not when they want to go out for chaat.

Smaller protests show how petty the restrictions can get. In 2017, a hostel warden at Ambedkar Ganguly Hostel reportedly changed the entry time from 10pm to 9pm unilaterally, prompting protests.

Students were caught in an unfair dilemma of demanding to be treated as adults in their accommodation.

Earlier, over 200 students of the Undergraduate Hostel for Girls protested a two-month water outage, and some of their parents later received letters from the hostel administration, which the students called a “witch-hunt.”

The Logic of Protection

Institutions answer women’s vulnerability by restricting women: earlier curfews, guardian requirements, parental letters, to name a few.

The students argue that this gets it backwards. A woman locked inside by 9pm is not safe. The danger, whether on a bus, street or campus, has simply been left unaddressed, and she pays the cost.

The bus incident that triggered the latest march demonstrates the point. The victim was a teenager on public transport, not someone who had broken a hostel rule.

No curfew would have protected her. Better lighting, safer transport, more responsive policing and accountable complaint mechanisms might have.

What Comes Next

With DUSU elections looming, the manifesto puts forward demands that can hold candidates and administrators to account.

Whether these proposals survive the campaign season will be seen. Reservation for women in union posts and voting rights for women’s colleges would change how power is distributed on campus.

The marchers’ message is that safety is not a favour to be granted in exchange for obedience. It is a condition of equal citizenship.

Until universities and cities treat it that way, women will keep reclaiming the night, one march at a time.