College Expels Girl Student for Having Boyfriend in Hostel Room

A BTech final-year student at MMM Engineering College in Gorakhpur was rusticated in March 2011 for keeping her boyfriend in her hostel room overnight -- an incident that became a flashpoint in the debate over moral policing on Indian campuses.

According to the Times of India, which reported the story, the student -- a resident of the Saraswati Mahila Hostel -- brought her boyfriend, a student of IIT-Delhi, into her room on the night of March 7, when her roommate was away. He arrived dressed in women's clothes and left the same way the next morning. Fellow hostel residents complained to the warden; the principal set up a probe panel, which found the allegation true. The student herself confessed and named the boy. Both were from Agra district, both described as academically brilliant -- she had already secured a job through campus recruitment.

The punishment was swift and total: rustication for the girl. For the boy, the college merely wrote to IIT-Delhi asking it to "initiate action."

That asymmetry was the real story. Whatever one thinks of hostel rules -- and Indian colleges have long policed women's hostels with a zeal rarely applied to men's -- the two participants in the same act received wildly different consequences. She lost her degree in its final year, along with the job she had earned; he got a letter sent to his administration. The incident captured, in miniature, how institutional morality in India has historically been enforced: the woman's future as the price, the man's as an administrative footnote.

The college, for its part, tightened security in the girls' hostels afterward -- addressing, as usual, the symptom rather than the standard.