The DU Curfew: Trusted with the barricades, locked out by ten

‘Security.’

The magic word always deployed to end a conversation before it even begins.

Now what does security even look like? For a university student, they might envision better lighting, functioning CCTV, harassment reporting systems that work, safe transport systems after dark, staff on call and so on when they think of this word.

But security, as currently practiced at Dhaka University and many other institutions, looks like a lock and a ledger. One of these costs money, planning and follow-through. The other costs a padlock. Guess which one keeps getting chosen by DU.

There is a version of this story that takes us back in July 2024, when the country needed its women out of the halls, out of the gates, out past whatever hour anyone had ever bothered to write into a rulebook.

Nobody was checking ID cards at 10pm that summer. Nobody was asking the women of Rokeya Hall or Shamsun Nahar Hall to please be back by curfew before the tear gas started. They were wanted on the street, at the barricade, in the frame of the photograph.

Maybe a rebel, unlike a hall rulebook, does not observe visiting hours. And then, the rebel won. And the gates went back to closing at ten.

That is the joke sitting at the centre of this entire debate and it is not a very funny one. The same women whose presence outside the hall was, for a few weeks in 2024, treated as indispensable to the nation's future, are now told their presence outside the hall past ten o'clock is a threat to their own safety that only a locked gate can manage.

Since 31 July this year, a group of Dhaka University female students have been pointing this out more loudly, under the banner of ‘Oborodhbashini’. A name translated with the kind of irony only the besieged can afford to something like ‘women under blockade’.

The name is not a coincidence either. In 1931, Bengal's first great feminist Begum Rokeya, the woman who built a school for Muslim girls when the very idea scandalised her own relatives published a book called Oborodhbasini: The Secluded Ones.

It was a catalogue of small, absurd cruelties committed in the name of purdah. Women fainting or suffocating to death rather than being seen by a strange man, women hiding from their own courtyards at the sound of an unfamiliar female voice, entire lives spent negotiating the architecture of who was allowed to see whom and when.

Rokeya wrote it as an indictment. Ninety-five years later, a group of DU students borrowed her title for their protest platform, and the borrowing does exactly what good borrowing should. It refuses to let anyone pretend this is a new argument or a fringe one or even an imported Western fixation with no roots here.

The woman this university claims as one of its own intellectual ancestors, naming an entire residence hall after her name, already wrote the book on what a locked gate does to a life. Her descendants are simply asking why the university kept the plot.

These students spent a night painting the hall gates with a slogan that does heavy lifting in just a few words, ‘break the chains of time’.

The chains of time refer specifically to 10 PM, the exact minute the university stops trusting its own students to exist, having trusted them entirely when it needed something from them.

The administration has, to be fair, tried a gesture or two. Last year it declared a "July Women’s Day" and, in honour of it, let women stay outside past ten for exactly one night. Name something more dated, revocable exception to the rule, handed down like a coupon with an expiry stamp!

Many female students indeed protested it, correctly identifying a one-night amnesty as a reminder dressed as a gift, that the cage is still the cage. They are simply being let out of it on the administration's schedule rather than their own.

Even long before the 10 PM curfew debate, female students faced being routinely turned away from the university's central playground after dark, sometimes as early as 5 PM, enforced by nothing more than an unwritten rule and a guard at the gate, while male students walked through freely. Then the students staged a protest titled "Burn the Administration BBQ," handing the Proctor a modest five-point memorandum: fix the broken toilets at TSC, allow female students into any hall with an ID, revamp the dormant anti-sexual-harassment cell and let female family members inside. None of these are radical asks. But all of them remain pending.

Consider, for a moment, what the curfew actually asks a person to promise. That her body will never be sick after ten, that Dhaka's traffic will always defer politely to her hall's gate hours, that the bus from wherever she's coming from will never once be late, that grief and emergencies will schedule themselves around the rulebook.

A fever that spikes at midnight now requires a phone call, a signature, local guardian from miles away and a negotiation before it requires a doctor. A female student travelling back from an internship or a job, a family emergency, a wedding, a train delayed by an hour, finds herself punished by geography for a schedule she never controlled in the first place.

And then there is the plainest reason of all, the one that somehow always sounds the most radical when said out loud. Sometimes a person simply wants to walk her own campus at eleven at night, for no reason whatsoever, the way a male student does without anyone treating it as a referendum on his character.

A rule this brittle, that snaps the moment real life intrudes on it even slightly, was never built for the students it claims to protect. It was built for the administration's convenience and everyone involved has simply agreed, for years now, to call that safety instead.

None of this is original. Dhaka University inherited the locked gate, the way institutions the world over have inherited it, from a very old and very tired idea called in loco parentis. Latin for ‘in place of the parent.’

American universities ran on this exact fuel well into the 1960s. Women were confined to dorms at 10 p.m. on weekdays and midnight on weekends while male upperclassmen came and went as they liked, on the official theory that women needed protection and men needed nothing more than a decent bedtime.

The curfews clipped not just their social lives, their library hours, lab time, late study sessions, an entire evening's worth of ambition, systematically by design. It took Americans the better part of a decade of organizing to dismantle it.

India ran the same experiment more recently and more instructively. In 2015, a Delhi hostel's decision to cancel women's ‘night-outs’ sparked a movement called ‘Pinjra Tod’ meaning ‘Break the Cage’. It spread from one hostel to campuses across the country, on the same argument being made at DU's gates today that a 24-hour library is not actually a 24-hour library if half its members are locked out of it after dark. By 2018, Panjab University had abolished its women's curfew entirely.

24-hour access, no late fines, no gate to fear. The sky did not fall in because of it. It rarely does.

A curfew is nowhere near a safety plan, it's a liability plan. If nothing happens to a woman after 10pm, the university notices nothing. If something does happen, the first line of institutional defense is ‘she was out past hours’.

The rule doesn't prevent harm so much as pre-assign blame for it, quietly transferring risk from the people who run the campus onto the people who merely live on it. It is a strange kind of protection that only seems to activate the moment a woman becomes useful to someone else's cause, and switches off the moment she becomes merely herself, walking back to her own room a little later than a rulebook would prefer.

Nobody is asking that men be locked out after 10pm too, in some tit-for-tat gesture of misery-sharing. The actual demand is to stop being rationed by gender and start being rationed by choice. The women who were trusted with the country in July 2024 are asking to be trusted with their own front doors this August. It is, all things considered, a modest thing to still have to ask for.