Engineering campuses are a very interesting space. There’s a ton of people here with lots of different opinions. It’s an interesting set of events that led to what happened on 20th November. I’m laying down my opinions here.

For an actual account of events, check out this amazing article by my friend. (TW: Sexual Assault)

What is the CSA?

The literal answer to this is that it’s the Council of Student Affairs.

A more nuanced answer is that it’s a student body, defined by BITS Goa’s constitution. It’s supposed to be the representatives of the student body of BITS Goa. The CSA acts as a crucial link between the college administration and its student body. This is however on paper, de jure. What happens on the ground is different.

The CSA is supposed to hold general body meetings twice every semester. It doesn’t do that. It’s not supposed to help drunk students get into campus without getting caught. It does that.

The constitution is not a useful framework that we should use when we try to look at what the CSA is.

Our major parties that affect the functioning of the CSA are the administration and the well-connected members of the student body. Poeple who call the shots on important stuff. This obviously goes both ways, the CSA also has a considerable influence on the decisions of these parties.

While we discuss the details of whatever happens next, we should keep in our mind that the CSA isn’t a strictly constitutional body. There’s a difference between what is and what’s ought to be.

Weaponization of the Constitution

One of the major events that happened before and during the protest was the circulation of a petition to impeach the Treasurer. This was the first attempt at organising the student body’s dissent towards the CSA. It was the first time we got to see the actual scale of how much distrust we had in the Treasurer elect.

This data of disapproval was then used in the procedure for impeaching the Treasurer under Article 24a of the constitution.

Getting a two-thirds majority no-confidence vote from the general body after 1 a.m. was genuinely amazing. If you were there you’d know it was a surreal experience. All of this was in no small part due to the amazing people in the Election Commission

I noticed one hitch that came up in this procedure. I don’t know who said it first – the admin, the CSA or the EC itself – but according to them it wasn’t possible to impeach the treasurer until he had become the treasurer. “Our treasurer elect hasn’t been sworn in yet. So we can’t impeach him.” This is the argument that came up.

Who follows the Constitution?

The answer is that everyone does – to a certain extent and when it is convenient for them to do so.

The constitution only has power if someone decides to enforce it. And I doubt anyone cares about it enough in this college to enforce it all of the time.

Does this mean the legitimacy of the CSA is derived directly from this one document we find on the corner of our SWD website, that some seniors made maybe a decade ago?

Absolutely not! The CSA is legitimate because we have trust in it. The constitution itself might define the CSA but it’s the enforcement of the constitution by the institute’s admin, the procedure of the election and the trust1 of the student body that legitimise the CSA.

So why do we care about the constitution at all? Should we consider it a valid issue when someone says that the treasurer cannot be impeached without being sworn in?

Obviously not, and that’s what happened in the audi too. The trez was impeached without being sworn in.

The question we should ask ourselves is would the treasurer be legitimate if the impeachment didn’t happen as it did? Without this written document, would the treasurer be a valid member of the CSA?

The answer to this is easy. This document matters as much as waiting for swearing-in before impeaching the treasurer. To me it’s obvious that no one would want to work with a treasurer who is an alleged SA perpetrator.

You might be wondering what I really want to say with all of this weird argumentation.

My point is that the institutions of our general body2 exist because we believe in them. Once the general body stop believing in and trusting these institutions, they are worth nothing.

But wait! The admin!

The nerds who have read the constitution might now be jumping out of their seat to tell me that the Director is the Chairman of the CSA.

Yes, that’s true. The general body can’t just start saying that the Director is illegitimate. That’s out of scope of this post. What the general body can still do is make their concerns known to the Director and make sure that they understand that the general body has lost faith in the other members of the CSA.

I think this was the point of the protest.

Why a protest?

Protests happen when the general body has no other options left. No one likes protests, it’s a huge pain for those being protested against (protests are meant to be disruptive, after all), and it’s a huge pain to the protestors who have to organise it, often under the risk of getting a punishment3.

These are not due to individual actions, protests happen due to the context of the society that we live in. People do not take extreme actions just because they can, they take extreme actions when they are left with no other choice.

The protest on November 20 happened not because some people decided it was going to happen, it happened because the general body believed that their concerns could not be heard through the means provided by the system in place.

Admin response, club involvement

The first thing admin did when they got to know about a gathering of students at B-Dome was ask them to disperse.

It’s understandable, no one wants an angry crowd on their hands.

The interesting part is how the crowd was asked to disperse. Since the admin lacks any kind of direct, real-time means of reaching out to the general body4, they asked the club coordinators to spread the message.

This happened at a closed-doors meeting between the CSA, the Dean, and the club coordinators5.

Let’s get a few things straight:

  • Clubs coming together to tell the admin that they do not accept the treasurer appointment was amazing.
  • This happening behind closed doors – not publicly – is interesting.
  • That some clubs followed admin’s instructions to get the protesters to disperse is ridiculous.

A closed doors meeting with administration has its issues. It’s a brazen lack of transparency in a case that has become very important to the general body. But it’s also understandable if admin is unwilling to meet these club representatives publicly.

There’s no polite way to put this but I believe that club representatives do not have any mandate over the decision of the general body to gather and protest.

The fact that some of these club representatives thought they should listen to admin and try to disperse the protests so that they didn’t lose the “goodwill” of the admin after the closed doors meeting is purely self-aggrandising behaviour.

If the protesting general body is asking for an address on stage by the Dean, then I don’t think the club coordinators should side with the administration on the issue. It’s a simple question of solidarity, and standing with your fellow student.

Conclusion? The aftermath?

Despite everything that happened, it was great to see people unite for justice. It was even better to see some justice served6.

The events leading to and following this protest have changed my opinions of engineering students a lot. I genuinely did not think that in a male-dominated college we’d have so much support for a female victim of SA. I also didn’t think certain people involved in the case would engage in gross violation of other people’s privacy.

The class of engineering students ultimately suffers from a lack of a proper humanities education7. An education that primes them for dissent in the real world, an education that allows them to recognise their place in society and change it for the better.

I keep wondering if things would have gone differently in case we had an organised and more informed crowd for the protest.

Footnotes

  1. By trust I mean the support of the student body. The average BITSian recognizes the CSA because it does its job, not because it’s defined in the constitution. I doubt that the average BITSian has ever read the constitution. ↩

  2. I just mean the CSA here. ↩

  3. Some of the people who organised the famous Maggi revolution got hit with DisCos. ↩

  4. There’s email, but who checks email during a protest man. ↩

  5. I’m not sure if Dean SWD and Chief Warden were present, but it doesn’t matter for the thing I’m about to say ↩

  6. Some justice, impeachment was the lowest bar, the ICC investigation will hopefully yield more results. ↩

  7. I’m not saying I’m any better either, I’m stupid. But I do try to read as much as I can. ↩

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