Pinjra Tod (Break the Cage) is a collective of women students and alumni of colleges from across Delhi, India, that seeks to make regulations for hostel and paying guest (PG) accommodation less restrictive for women students. They aim to counter a perceived official narrative that women need to be protected. Challenging what they consider to be the CCTV-driven police-security complex, Pinjra Tod demands that concepts of safety and security not be used to silence women's right to mobility and liberation.
The main goals of Pinjra Tod are to end the imposition of curfews on women, to provide affordable accommodation for women, to regularise the situation for paying guests, and to obtain the formation of elected Internal Complaint Committees for prevention, prohibition and redress of sexual harassment in universities.
Background
In 2015, when Delhi's universities reopened after the summer break, Jamia Millia Islamia issued a notice stating that the female students of the college could no longer request permission to stay out later than 8 pm. The Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) challenged this, asking why the college administration thought it necessary to impose such a restriction.
A group of women students identified the reaction of DCW as an opening to make interventions at other universities in Delhi, rather than just Jamia. They decided to circulate a petition to extend the discourse sparked by the Jamia incident, questioning the exclusive and exclusionary treatment that they believe applies in university spaces. Pinjra Tod mobilised people around several issues faced by female residents of hostels and PGs such as curfews, policies that apply to only women, moral policing, higher prices for women's hostels, among others. It is also focused on ensuring that universities establish a sexual harassment committee, as mandated by University Grant Commission (UGC) guidelines in 2006.
Since then, the movement has seen participation from students of several colleges, especially from Delhi University, such as Jamia Milia Islamia, Miranda House, Ambedkar University Delhi, Hindu College, Lady Shriram College for Women, St. Stephen's College, and Delhi Technical University. The movement has garnered momentum across the country, with students from several colleges, such as NIT Calicut, IIT-Roorkee, Punjabi University, RMNLU Lucknow, using the Pinjra Tod to challenge patriarchal policies women face in their campuses.
Activities
The petition organised by Pinjra Tod was submitted to the DCW on 10 October 2015 and was preceded on 8 October by a protest march in the North Campus of Delhi University to symbolically reclaim the night.
Reacting to a claim by Smriti Irani, the Minister of Human Resource Development who had said "women in India are not told what to wear, whom to meet and where to go", on 24 October 2015, Pinjra Tod called for a protest at her ministry offices. Titled "FYI Smriti Irani", it saw the minister presented with copies of rule-books from various hostels.
On 16 December 2015, Pinjra Tod organised a multi-city protest called , three years after the 2012 Delhi gang rape. The idea was to use public transport at night and reconfigure public spaces which are always already assumed to be posing a danger to women. The initiative challenged the patriarchal ideology which imagines women only in terms of violence in the discourse of violation of security. Parallel demonstrations took place in Allahabad, Kolkata, Pune, Bangalore, Delhi, Darjeeling, Chandigarh and Patiala. Similar protests were repeated in December 2016, where women were seen in the heart of the capital, Connaught Place, New Delhi.
In February 2016, the group released a statement after charges of sedition were slapped against Jawaharlal Nehru University students. The statement was called, "No Nation for Women," and it addressed the question of nationalism—unpacking the "anti-national/national" binary and how the very idea of nationalism is built on layers of exclusion of minorities. The group answered the calls to , with , with the end to prove how hyper-masculinity often masquerades as patriotism.