Students Enraged as Jamia Rolls Back Curfew Time For Women Hostels

Barely three months after agreeing to extend the curfew, Jamia has issued another diktat.

Jamia students protest over curfew timings in hostel in March, 2018.

(Photo Courtesy: Facebook/Pinjra Tod)  

Video Editor: Abhishek Sharma

Barely three months after the administration agreed to female students’ demands and extended the curfew timings for the hostels to 10:30 pm, Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University has again restricted the entry and exit of hostellers to 9 pm.

In the new prospectus put up on the university’s website, the administration has announced, “No resident would be allowed to go out of hostel premises after 9 pm.” The prospectus also adds if a students protest against hostel rules, regulations or timings their “accommodation in the hostel can be cancelled immediately.”

(Source: jmi.ac.in)

(Source: jmi.ac.in)

“The curfew timings are changed again which is unacceptable. The administration agreed to our demands in March and even signed the memorandum,” Sumaiya Mohammed Ahmad, a third year BA LLB student at Jamia, told The Quint.

The institution’s Provost, Azra Khursheed, who had issued the notice and signed the memorandum in March extending the curfew time to 10:30 pm, claimed that the authorities rolled back the curfew timings due to “utter chaos” in the past two months.

“We had to agree to their demands because the protests were spiralling out of control,” Khursheed told The Quint.

She added:

Students think that they are above 18, so everything should be allowed, but they are still immature and we can’t run the university if we agree to all their demands.

Asked about the provision restricting students to protest against hostel rules, she said, “The way students protested was undemocratic, they were adamant. We did a trial-run of two months and decided to roll back the decision.”

Students feel the university chose the holiday period to roll back the curfew to 9 pm to avoid resistance.

“It is a clear violation to our right to mobility. We cannot attend seminars, public meetings and even move around the campus,” said Sumaiya Mohammed Ahmad, a third year BA LLB student at Jamia.

Ahmad added that this is an attempt to avoid pushback like earlier this year.

However, members of the ‘Pinjra Tod’ campaign who spearheaded the campaign earlier said that women students are planning a protest as soon as hostel re-opens.

“This is in complete violation of our fundamental rights to dissent and protest, and an outright against the protests last semester,” a statement from Pinjra Tod said.

It added that woman students cannot move from one hostel to another after 11:30 pm as per the new guidelines. “It needs to be mentioned here that no such restrictions exist for male hostelers.”