According to reports, on April 15, 2026, the Vice-Chancellor stated at a class representative meeting at the Tamil Nadu National Law University that female students wearing shorts “invite sexual harassment” and “distract” both faculty and fellow students. The language is familiar, almost rehearsed. It is reminiscent of remarks attributed to him a decade earlier at the National Law School in Bengaluru – remarks that sparked student protests at the time and an eventual apology. What is striking now is not just the repetition, but also the persistence: the position is not withdrawn, but rather reaffirmed, even made proud of. This is not a misjudgment. It is the persistence of a way of knowing.
What “distraction” really does
Saying that women’s clothing is “distracting” is not a neutral observation. It is an epistemic claim about causality, responsibility and the body. It suggests that the problem lies not in the gaze, which sexualizes, but in the body, which is seen; not in the failure of self-regulation, but in the presence of the other. When an institutional authority invokes “distraction,” it does more than describe a reaction—it normalizes it. The statement implicitly shifts the burden of discipline: from the faculty member who is “distracted” to the student whose clothing is intended to cause that distraction. In doing so, it transforms a personal failure of restraint into a general rule for regulating others.
Saying that women’s clothing is “distracting” is not a neutral observation. It is an epistemic claim about causality, responsibility and the body. It suggests that the problem lies not in the gaze, which sexualizes, but in the body, which is seen.
Feminist scholarship has long questioned this argument. As Sandra Harding and others have argued, those who experience structures of vulnerability—in this case, women coping with the threat of sexual harassment—are not merely passive subjects but are aware of these structures. From this perspective, the claim that clothing “invites” harassment is not only empirically false; it is a denial of lived knowledge. But what we see in statements like these is not simply a refusal to listen – what Miranda Fricker would call testimonial injustice. There is something more forceful at work: an institutional assertion that replaces lived knowledge with an authoritative fiction and propagates that fiction as common sense. It is this deeper damage that can be described as an epistemic injury.
Although the claim about “distraction” seems at first glance to refer to women, its logic goes far beyond that. I remember an incident from my days as a student at the National Law School, Bengaluru, when the same faculty member was teaching labor law. What I’m left with is not a dramatic confrontation, but something calmer and more revealing. A classmate – male and widely viewed as gender non-conforming in his behavior – occasionally wore tight, spandex-like shorts a few inches above the knee. There was no formal dress code prohibiting such clothing. Nevertheless, his clothing caused great discomfort among a group of male students in the dormitory.
FII
This discomfort did not remain informal. It acquired the language of decency and discipline. The matter was discussed, escalated and ultimately forwarded to the hostel management. What is striking is not only that a student’s clothing became the subject of an investigation, but also that this happened in a context in which the usual justification framework – protecting women from harassment – was completely missing. No such risk was claimed; Such a claim could not be made plausible. And yet the urge to regulate remained. Clothing once again became a problem that needed to be solved.
Not about security, but about normativity
This shows the limits of the Vice Chancellor’s claim. If “diversion” were actually about preventing harm to women, the logic would not venture into areas where such harm is not even alleged. What the hostel incident makes clear is that regulation is not about safety but about normativity. Certain bodies and certain ways of inhabiting them become unacceptable not because they cause harm, but because they disrupt established expectations about gender. The language of distraction is less a description of experience than an enforcement mechanism—it marks the point at which discomfort becomes the rule.
Seen in this light, statements like these do more than just misattribute the causes of sexual harassment. They reorganize the area of responsibility. By locating the source of “distraction” in women’s clothing, they create a world in which men’s failure to regulate themselves is preemptively excused, even legitimized. In other words, what is presented as a general concern about institutional decency is in reality a projection of individual discomfort—something that is then universalized and enforced as the norm.
This shows the limits of the Vice Chancellor’s claim. If “diversion” were actually about preventing harm to women, the logic would not venture into areas where such harm is not even alleged.
This has consequences that go beyond rhetoric. Universities now have formal mechanisms to prevent and combat sexual harassment – internal complaints committees, codes of conduct and awareness processes. These mechanisms are based on a basic principle: responsibility lies with the perpetrator, not the victim. When institutional authorities publicly point out that clothing “invites harassment,” they are not just expressing an opinion. They dilute from within the very norms these mechanisms are designed to uphold and risk legitimizing the very impunity they are designed to counteract.
What is at stake
So to get back to the epistemological violation: It’s not just about whether women or gender non-conforming students are heard or believed. The issue is whether their experiences can count as knowledge at all in the face of institutional claims that they know better. When authority speaks in this way, it does not simply ignore lived reality – it replaces it with a narrative that redistributes blame and reshapes what can be known.
In this sense, the controversy is not about a single comment or even a single person. It’s about how universities, as places of knowledge production, shape knowledge about bodies, gender and harm. When this knowledge is associated with discomfort rather than with justice, with the enforcement of norms rather than with lived experience, the harm it produces is not merely social or moral. It is fundamentally epistemological in nature.
Dr. Sumit Baudh is a graduate of the National Law School, India University, Bengaluru and is currently a Professor of Law at OP Jindal Global University. Views are personal.
Professor Dr. Sumit Baudh (she or he) teaches constitutional law, critical race theory, caste law and representation, and intersectionality. The author posts on X @BaudhSumit