January 16, 2026 01:56 PM IST First published on: Jan 16, 2026 at 01:56 PM ISTIn her 1993 poetry collection, Book of Light, American poet Lucille Clifton wrote, “won’t you celebrate with me/ what i have shaped into/ a kind of life? i had no model/ …both nonwhite and woman/ what did I see to be except myself?/ i made it up/ here on this bridge between/ starshine and clay,/ my one hand holding tight/ my other hand…”It is unknown if Bilkis Manzoor has had the opportunity to read Clifton, even if her journey echoes a similar arc of endurance. The act of self-creation Clifton wrote of is not romantic improvisation but slow, sustained labour. It takes years of preparation, emotional negotiations, often financial strain and rebellion. It took Manzoor two arduous attempts at cracking NEET to bridge the distance between Budgam in central Kashmir and the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Institute of Medical Excellence (SMVDIME) in Jammu’s Katra. Manzoor would have been the first doctor in her family, but like her batchmates, young men and women who had been admitted in September last year for the MBBS course, her dream stands deferred. Last week, the National Medical Commission withdrew the Letter of Permission granted to SMVDIME to run the MBBS course for the 2025-26 academic session, citing grave infrastructural deficits.AdvertisementFollowing the Pahalgam terror attack last year, SMVDIME had been at the centre of protests because of its Muslim-majority student status. Now, with the closure, its 50 students are to be accommodated in other government institutions within the Union Territory in supernumerary seats. The disruption already places their fragile ambitions at a disadvantage, but its costs are unevenly borne. Young women such as Manzoor, for whom it was their first real encounter with independence, often end up paying more: When intellectual aspirations are dismissed or disrupted, what remains is a narrower imagination of women’s presence in public life, one that reduces them to risks rather than possibilities, that makes their bodies the site of collective anxiety.Horrific instances of sexual assault — the December 2012 New Delhi gang rape, the 2024 RG Kar Medical College rape and murder, to name only a few — have taught India how to respond to that anxiety. Sexual violence provokes outrage, and rightly so; it is a violation that shatters lives and rends the social fabric, that abases and dehumanises. But when women are edged out of public life — through policy whimsy, institutional collapse, or politics — the response is often indifference. Violence by paperwork leaves no bruises, only erasures.Consider Karnataka’s hijab ban controversy in 2022, when religion became the central focus, and education the collateral. Scant attention was paid to what happens when girls stop attending school, when aspirations dissolve into domestic inevitability.AdvertisementThis is a blind spot in India’s gender politics. We deify women, invoke nari shakti, woo them as vote banks, but neglect their agency. We grieve after the fact but shrug at the conditions that make women vulnerable to begin with. Debates around women orbit to what they wear rather than what they can bring to the table. Protection is prioritised over participation — despite more women graduating from medical courses, for instance, studies show there hasn’t been a proportional increase in the number of practising women doctors — honour over autonomy. But women’s agency isn’t a neat binary. If anything, it is a tangled web. A woman barred from a classroom today is a woman impeded from independence tomorrow. Education is not an abstract good; it is the foundational infrastructure of freedom. Without it, legal rights become ornamental, economic independence elusive, physical safety fragile.Also Read | ‘No due process’: Vaishno Devi medical college got nod 4 months before NMC withdrew permissionThese consequences are not theoretical. Women occupy a sliver of political office, an even thinner slice of corporate power. India’s female labour force participation remains among the lowest in the world. When women are absent from decision-making tables, policies are made without them — and often against them. Think of the 2023 Wrestling Federation of India scandal, where women athletes toppled a predatory chief after months of agonising protest, only for his proxy to return to power soon afterwards.most readOutside India, the pattern is starker still. Mahsa Amini’s custodial death in Iran in 2022 for an alleged breach of the Islamic Republic’s dress code for women ignited a resistance demanding jin, jiyan, azadi — women, life, freedom — because control over women’s bodies is inseparable from control over their voices. In Afghanistan, in the years since the Taliban returned to power, women have been barred from education, employment and reproductive rights, even speech in public.What if public conscience extended beyond terrible acts of bodily violation? If it recognised that shutting down a medical college in a conflict-scarred region is not neutral governance but a political act with a gendered fallout? That fewer women doctors mean poorer healthcare access, poorer maternal health, fewer women professionals mean weaker representation, fewer women with incomes means fewer exits from abuse? Public institutions are not gender-agnostic terrains; who enters them matters. When women enter institutions in large numbers — hospitals, courts, universities, legislatures — they change what is possible.The story of SMVDIME’s students is disturbing on many registers, but the fate of its women students is particularly unsettling because it is this narrowing of possibilities that shapes their lives most decisively. A society that allows educational pathways to collapse without protest should not be surprised when inequalities harden elsewhere.The writer is senior associate editor, The Indian Express. paromita.chakrabarti@expressindia.com