 The attack on GS cash started almost immediately after this new dispensation came to power. One of the earliest attacks started in that very year 2016. Gender sensitization committee that had been in existence in JNU for almost 19 years was dismantled overnight. The executive council really interfering in a particular case and when the GS cash resisted it over a period of a few months, after that they suddenly, when they failed in their efforts to really intervene in that case, interfere in that case in the way they wanted, that is when they dismantled it. And the dismantling was done through an executive council decision. It was like a fiat, a writ, like they just decided and then immediately the next day, the same day, one hour after the executive council was over, they came to confiscate the files. So it was almost like they were conquering a territory rather than any kind of institutional handover etc. I remember when this matter came up with the chairpersons meeting and all everybody said, but you know whatever the discrepancies between the 2008-13 sexual harassment act and the GS cash are, we can remove those difficulties but do not disband the entire structure of the GS cash but of course the vice chancellor didn't listen to us. This happened without any kind of warning to GS cash members. In fact enquiries were going on at the time when the security staff of the Jawaharlal Nairi University walked in along with the newly nominated members and there was an attempt to take over the entire office. We attempted to seal every single file, every single document and insisted that there be a proper handing and taking over process. That unfortunately did not materialize and the next day we found that the room had been double locked. Suddenly the administration decided that the GS cash rules were not in conformity with the act, the sexual prevention of sexual harassment act and so asked for conformity with the act even though just a year before, a few months before that the GS cash had finished a detailed revision of its rules to make it in conformity with the act and that was still, it had been passed by the GS cash, it was lying with the administration and it is interesting that the administration did pass those rules in a subsequent court meeting. So if the administration was accepting that the GS cash was in conformity with the act then there was no real reason to dismantle it. So when ICC was constituted the campus boycotted that election and there was parallel election conducted and after that there were multiple instances where complainants have approached GS cash but definitely since we don't have any quasi-judicial power anymore we could not have held enquiries but at the same time GS cash representatives, existing representatives both student and teacher, they have, we have done our best in whatever ways we can help out the complainants. It's very important to understand that GS cash is a body that came out of student movements. It was not something that was gifted to us by the administration, it came out of students movements and it's not just, it wasn't just a body that would address sexual harassment cases but it was also a body that was sensitized students. GS cash was quite unique because it basically was very democratic. The rules and the regulations were made in a very democratic way and it had elected representation of students, Karamcharis and teachers. It is something that has evolved over a period of time with inputs from many academics, many people involved in the gender discourse in the country. The GS cash rules and regulations were in fact the template on the basis of which subsequent sexual harassment laws were formulated. We came into existence long before this law even existed. If you now look at the present ICC in JNU, there are nine members and if you look at the previous GS cash, there were 24 members. So the members are more and if you have more complaints coming, definitely more people in the committee would be in a position to deal with them in a time-bound manner because in the law also you have to finish your enquiry within three months. And now if you have a crunch suddenly, then what is the outcome, what is happening? They are either not taking up cases or they are trying to set a precedence by where they are declaring the complaints as frivolous false complaints and trying to set a pattern where complainants get petrified, terrified and they don't approach the committee. And by the end of the year you can say see we have solved all the cases so quickly whereas the situation is actually complainants are not approaching the body. It's a totally nominated body and hence its accountability is only to those who have nominated them. They have no accountability to the JNU community. This set of nominations have been done in a way where there has been no effort to really involve people who understand gender. These are people who have no training in gender, no academic work in gender. What is also worse is perhaps the kind of punitive action that is being meted out to students who are supposedly making within inverted commas false complaints. Now the problem with this is that students are now feeling really afraid to come forward because it's really very difficult to within inverted commas prove a sexual harassment instance because quite often many of these things might happen in a laboratory when nobody else is around or on a street corner when it is dark and these are precisely the kind of things that cannot be witnessed by somebody. And if you start declaring everything a false complaint or you are suspicious of the complainant from the very beginning and declared it false even before the complaint has been registered then the student is not really going to come forward. In such a case, if an institution goes out and says that the people who are lodging false complaints would be punished, how would a woman even feel secure to go out there and to register her complaint in the first place? Because they are also aware that a progressive body like GS cash is not there they have actually, especially this administration has actually tried to enforce policies like 8pm or 11pm curfew in women's hostels women are now supposed to sign every time they enter boys hostel there are also very strict rules about entering men's hostel earlier it was much more like women were free to enter inside boys hostels but now there are much more strict policies and they have also proposed this idea of CCTV cameras putting installing CCTV cameras at the hostel gates which was actually rejected by student union and students in general but there are such rules as well and in fact right after the year, right after the GS cash was dismantled I remember a lot of cases were coming where the harassment cases had increased women were feeling threatened to walk alone maybe coming out, so library is also 24-7 so maybe returning at late during the life from library and there are few parking areas or so to say public areas around the Dhaba basically a lot of harassment cases had increased where we did not know who are those men but I myself was harassed at one time near the Sabarmati Dhaba where I did not know who these men were also there is another situation where complainants are not approaching to the ICC rather they are going to the police so that number is also increasing in JNU many complainants they don't feel any confidence and therefore they are directly approaching the police often this pursuit of justice through the courts and the police makes people sort of exposed to even more trauma in addition to the trauma that they might have gone through and so in that way it is a very difficult situation for women definitely but also for all genders because GS cash was not supposed to be only for women GS cash took cases which had to do with men GS cash had complainants who were men GS cash had complainants who were other gender so it was not just a question of women but obviously women have been very adversely affected by the continuation of the ICC and if the GS cash is not restored over time this campus is going to turn into a very unsafe place and in some ways that will also change its political culture and maybe that is what the administration wants that you cannot only have an inquiry committee there has to be a mechanism of sensitization which will take place round the year now GS cash whenever a new batch of students used to come GS cash used to conduct sensitization programs for all the schools and participation for students and teachers were mandatory now ICC has conducted only one workshop or whatever they call it and the person who was invited as a chief guest has an allegation of sexual harassment against himself so this is the situation and this is the context in which ICC is operating and we can very well understand what sort of impact it will have on the participation of female students in institutions of higher learning in future when there is a breach of trust of the norms of social interaction there is necessity for a body which would be able to intervene autonomously without siding with anyone and the ICC's problem is that because it is not autonomous because it is totally beholden to the administration and the administration today you look at the composition of the administration today the gender representation question has been thrown out of the window it's very stark it's all male administration that we have at present one of the problems has always been that there has always been an effort to sensitize students members of the administration and teachers have always been resistant to being sensitized but patriarchy because it's a manifestation of power so people who are in powerful positions are the very people who perpetuate these patriarchal practices and now with the ICC what we have is almost institutionalization of those patriarchal practices rather than any kind of departures or questioning of it so in that sense the ICC is really not the kind of body that a diverse campus like JNU needs and we don't just have students we have teachers we have staff there are people living on campus who are family members because it's a partly residential campus so to cater to the needs of this very diverse community you needed a far more representational and democratic structure and the absence of that is making its presence felt I think GS cash cannot replace any other body so GS cash has to come back and ICC must go not because that ICC students are not trusting because ICC is very regressive and it is just regressive and it is not inclusive not democratic and very biased in that sense some 1500 students have appealed to the president of India to bring back GS cash some faculty members have also moved court I'm not part of the court case but they have moved court against the illegal dismantling of GS cash so this is being heard in the Supreme Court of India I on my own part have intervened by writing multiple times to the vice chancellor on the illegalities involved in the dismantling of GS cash this is all on record and besides that on our own we are continuing to conduct workshops on gender sensitization because this is really the space to educate ourselves and that includes everyone who is part of the university community GNUT wants the GS cash back any sane person would want the GS cash back