Recently, at a dinner after a wonderful conference, I witnessed what initially looked like a heart-warming sight. The senior-most and junior-most of academics who had spoken at the conference seemed to be sharing a pleasant moment outside the dining room, smoking cigarettes and chatting. Not unexpectedly at all, the senior was a man, a world-famous scholar, and the junior, a young female academic working at her first job at an undergraduate college in a metropolitan university in India. I felt warm inside because the man is someone I had learned a great deal from, and the woman, the daughter of a dear friend, someone I had known since she was a little girl. Their happy chatting looked like a harmonious coming-together of the generations, an easing of hierarchies. A friend, an actor, who was looking on, noticed my fascination: in which other profession can you see this, even occasionally, she asked.

But this did not last long. Less than 10 minutes had passed when the young woman returned to the dining room visibly disturbed. Apparently, the conversation had turned unpleasant. The senior scholar had begun to fret and fulminate about the anti-sexual harassment machinery on campuses, claiming that it destroyed the organic bonding between and among teachers and students. This came as a rude shock to the young woman, who was getting ready to pursue higher education in a US university, and who had been actively involved in gender justice activism in India. Clearly, I had projected my wishful thinking on to the moments they had shared. As a woman, a feminist, a scholar of the middle generation, I knew why she was appalled. Only too frequently had her generation and mine fought together, often vainly, to ensure gender justice on campus. Only too frequently were we thwarted, sometimes by other women who saw personal advantage in siding with patriarchy, sometimes by colleagues who whispered in our ears that we were right but refused to speak up at the right moment, and sometimes by authorities who proclaimed their commitment to gender justice, but then raised trivial formalities to block it. Indeed, the oppressor is only the tail end of a vast machine that keeps women down on campus, inflicting daily humiliations that soon appeared normal to all concerned.

I sank inwardly when I remembered that her move to a US Ivy League university would not save her. I generally am apprehensive of global governance feminism that imagines patriarchy as a worldwide war on women, the same everywhere. But watching the 2015 documentary The Hunting Ground , I am partially persuaded. For it appears that the strategies used by the US universities — champions of liberalism and gender justice, each and every one of them — to deny justice to both female and male victims of sexual assault appear scarily close to the many instances of injustice perpetrated by authorities in a number of cases I have come across in India. In each, the victim is hounded, heckled, subjected to unnecessary procedures, and pressurised to withdraw, while the offender is protected, the offence is projected as trivial, and the matter suppressed in the end. The woman ends up being more wounded, with no prospect of healing at all.

Of course, the reasons why this happens may be different in the two country contexts. As many commentators remark in The Hunting Ground , US universities seeking to protect funding, prestige, and rating would rather suppress sexual assaults. In India, the sheer dominance of the upper strata crowded with historically privileged senior men renders any effort to seek justice very, very costly for the victims. More recently, attacks by the Hindu right-wing on India’s relatively more liberal universities forebode ill for women students. This is quite likely to urge even progressive authorities to stay silent when young women complain. This is why the AISA’s recent decision not to protect a senior member accused of sexual harassment at JNU is so brave — and contrary to right-wing expectations, this commendable decision did not undermine AISA’s fortunes in the JNUSU elections.

Perhaps The Hunting Ground should also spark introspection in the budding private liberal universities. Many of these have demonstrated that they mean business when they announced a zero-tolerance policy regarding sexual harassment. But pressures for funding, rating, and prestige will soon arrive here too. And of course, they cannot be immune to the vicious hierarchies that structure the field of knowledge in India, something evident in the atrocious record of technical colleges and universities in the private sector. The liberal universities in the private sector seem more serious about their claim to liberalism. One hopes that feminists in these spaces will not remain complacent, however. And that the authorities will recognise that gender violence causes wounds and scars that are hard to heal, and therefore it deserves to be punished.

J Devikais a historian and critic based in Thiruvananthapuram

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