“Home away from home” is the tagline adorned all across the cuboidal hostel buildings. The tagline written in vibrant colours stand out from the starkly white, monotone backgrounds of the hostels.
What is home? Moral policing in extremes. These are the phrases the students often hear: “Sit properly”, “Don’t hug here”, “Sit away from each other, they’re watching”, “Open your suitcase, we need to check everything”, “Open your laundry bag, we need to check”, “Open your food delivery box, we need to check what is there”. You would think these are extreme surveillance and controlling measures that would most likely be the rule in a prison space, but MoneyPal Academy of Higher Education (name changed for protection) proves otherwise. Every vertex is laden with CCTV cameras, and while the university would argue it is for security, at what point does it become an outright surveillance mechanism?
The campus has stringent rules about PDA, Public Display of Affection, which they have recently placed, with a fine of Rs. 5,000 and a suspension of students for a week from both academics and the hostel premises, meaning, they have to go back home, no matter which state or country they are from. The PDA rules are incredibly vague, meaning anything from a small peck on the cheek to hugging a little too tightly to making out can fall under this rule. Students lose attendance, academics, and a place to stay, all because they showed affection to another. This applies primarily to heterosexual couples because of how the conservative gaze of administrators recognises romantic relationships. Apart from surveillance via CCTV cameras, there’s scrutiny through being a parental figure which most perceive as authority and power over the ‘children’. Students are made to feel ashamed about being in love, whether it be their sexuality or their orientation, the taboo surrounding the idea of love has imbibed itself in most Indian households. When students come to college hoping to go into the adult world of freedom, freedom to express and be themselves, MoneyPal diligently restricts them. The chance to find one’s own personality, preferences, desires, views and beliefs is the time of college, when the birds fly from the coop of potential indoctrination and restrictions for the first time. What happens when the birds end up in bigger cages after that?
There are instances of sniffer dogs being brought to rooms for “surprise room checking” to check for drugs, alcohol and prohibited electrical appliances (kettles, hair dryers, etc.). The wardens pop into rooms randomly, sometimes with no knocks (or consent) and check everything, including underwear drawers and cloth piles. Students’ bags are checked every time they enter the hostel, including their designated laundry bags. There is a biometric attendance and a curfew time beyond which a fee of Rs. 500 must be paid. Everything comes at a cost, literally.
The security guards walk with batons asking students to refrain from PDA, and they are forced to check every bag as the students enter the campus. They have expressed clear disinterest in doing this job. They usually get calls on their walkie-talkies from the Chief student officers and their staff who watch the CCTVS like hawks asking the guards to make people maintain distance. When seated with legs spread around a chair, students are asked to sit “properly” by the campus patrol. Yes, there is a car titled “Campus Patrol” that goes around the campus surveilling different activities. That is the moral policing of MoneyPal hostels.There are Liberal Arts, Law and Art and Design institutes affiliated with and situated inside the MoneyPal campus. They pride themselves on teaching diverse, innovative, and grounded practices to open up students’ minds. These suggest a practice placed in an environment that allows free thought. It is a culture of students who usually consider themselves to be either “apolitical” or ignorant of the events around the world. This is also a byproduct of a culture of not engaging with one of the most primitive aspects of law, the humanities and the arts, the need to respond to the world. They are victims of privatisation. A victim of being merged into a university with a capitalistic, profit-driven aim. How do you learn if you can’t think?
Students and couples on this campus are afraid of cameras. People are afraid to speak up against extreme surveillance. People are afraid to think and love. Freedom of speech, thought and love are the cornerstones of a satisfactory existence and learning environment. How does that get fostered when moral policing and active restriction of political thought are the foundations this institute chooses? How do we break the walls that imprison freedom in what is supposed to hone unbridled creativity and comfort? How can the birds fly when put in bigger cuboidal cages?
