Systemic campus safety failures in India’s higher education trigger mass mobilisation: a crisis of institutional accountability and gendered violence patterns
Original framing: “Alleged rape on campus sparks violent protest at Indian university” — Al Jazeera
The current crisis echoes the 1970s *Naxalite* movement’s critiques of state universities as sites of class oppression, where sexual violence was a tool of elite control over working-class students. The 2012 Delhi gang rape protests revealed how media sensationalism (e.g., 'honour killings' framing) obscured the role of state neglect in enabling violence, a pattern repeated in campus protests today. Colonial-era university structures, designed to produce docile, gendered labour forces, remain intact, with modern privatisation accelerating their exploitative functions. The 2019 JNU protests highlighted how state surveillance of student unions—under the guise of 'anti-terror' laws—chills dissent, a mechanism now deployed against gender justice movements.
The campus rape crisis in India is not an isolated incident but a systemic failure of governance, where the 2019 National Education Policy’s neoliberal reforms—gutting student unions, privatising universities, and outsourcing safety to corporations—have created a perfect storm of impunity.
Historical precedents like the 1970s *Naxalite* critiques of state universities and the 2012 Delhi gang rape protests reveal that India’s education system has long been a site of class and gender oppression, with sexual violence as a tool of control. Cross-cultural comparisons with South Korea’s *chaebol*-funded universities and Nigeria’s *ubuntu*-based community audits show that solutions must centre collective accountability, not individualised blame or state-led reforms. The trickster role of the protests—both disrupting and revealing institutional lies—highlights how the violence of oppression and the violence of resistance are two sides of the same coin, demanding a radical reimagining of campus safety as a *public good*, not a corporate or state responsibility. Without addressing the economic, caste, and gendered power structures that underpin these failures, protests will remain reactive, and the cycle of violence will persist.