Why ragging keeps raising its ugly head despite crackdowns

Stabbing someone with a divider is a criminal act anywhere. But when it happens in a hostel, it attains another dimension of maliciousness. It’s even more horrifying when the perpetrators are youngsters training to be nurses, in whose hands are supposed to rest the well-being of patients.Ragging is a beast we simply can’t seem to tame. Like at the Government Nursing College in Kerala’s Kottayam last month — where the brutalities included tying first-years to cots and hanging dumbbells from their genitals — it rears its ugly head time and again, despite stringent crackdowns, episodes of national outrage and interventions by the Supreme Court.In the same month, two students at Jindal Global University in Haryana filed ragging complaints. One of them, a BA (criminology) student, alleged he was hit on the head with a steel bottle and lashed with a belt by a senior.Last November, Anil Methaniya, a student at GMERS Medical College at Dharpur-Patan in Gujarat, collapsed after he was made to stand for hours as part of a ragging ritual and sustained head injuries. He later died in hospital.Two months before that, at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, a 17-year-old Bengali (Hons) student fell to his death from the second floor of the hostel. He had allegedly been humiliated by seniors who had also made him cut his hair.“We were told by our seniors to engage in humiliating acts like stripping down and performing sexual acts against a wall,” said an MBBS student from a college in Rajasthan, describing the torment his batch of first-year students went through at the hostel in their first few months. medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/4APTFXBhRhE?si=0DfZZuK_zYHcWxUTSC stepped in 24 years agoThe apex court defines ragging as “any disorderly conduct whether by words spoken or written or by an act which has the effect of teasing, treating or handling with rudeness any other student, indulging in rowdy or undisciplined activities which causes or is likely to cause annoyance, hardship or psychological harm or to raise fear or apprehension thereof in a fresher or a junior…”Although the definition came in 2001 — when the court was hearing a petition by the non-profit Vishwa Jagriti Mission on increasing ragging cases in colleges — it was only in 2009 that a seven-member committee, led by former CBI chief RK Raghavan, was appointed to suggest anti-ragging measures that campuses could uniformly adopt.The Centre acted after widespread anger that followed the death of medical student Aman Kachroo during a ragging incident at his college in Himachal Pradesh. Kachroo, then 19, succumbed to injuries after being beaten up by four seniors, triggering protests across the country and a demand for laws that sternly dealt with ragging.Sixteen years on, there’s a different generation in college. Students now are more aware of campus codes and their rights, but the baton of bullying has also been passed on. What was true in Kachroo’s time is still true: medical colleges (there are around 700 of them as against more than 8,000 engineering and tech colleges in India) remain fertile sites for the worst forms of bullying.3% of hostelers, 38% of ragging casesData from the anti-ragging helpline of the University Grants Commission (UGC) shows that since 2017, with the exception of the two pandemic years when campuses were largely shut, the number of complaints has averaged around 1,000 a year. This includes 51 complaints of deaths of students, of which 47 were by suicide.UGC chairperson M Jagadesh Kumar said the numbers partly reflect improved awareness. “The rise in complaints indicates greater awareness, trust and willingness among students to report incidents,” he pointed out, adding that UGC has strengthened its mechanisms to make more students aware of the helpline.However, anti-ragging activists say the UGC data doesn’t capture all incidents as the helpline does not register anonymous complaints. So, not all incidents of severe ragging that get reported in the media are captured on the helpline since students hesitate to reveal their identity for fear of being targeted.Data from Society Against Violence in Education (SAVE), an anti-ragging NGO, shows that medical colleges accounted for 38.6% of all ragging complaints during 2022-24 despite making up only 3.4% of total hostel students.“A total of 3,156 complaints were registered from 1,946 colleges. It is not correct to say that the whole of India registered just these many complaints in three years. These are merely the ones logged by the national anti-ragging helpline,” the SAVE report said.The NGO’s research suggests that a sizeable number of cases, especially the serious ones, went directly to college management or to the police instead of the helpline. medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/mDuYycYli3s?si=sq-IgNE8nxfp8VxXInsults, threats, slaps, ordersThe Rajasthan MBBS student said the college environment was unbearable in the first few weeks after he took admission last year. “We were made to strip, inflate condoms with our mouths, engage in mock sexual acts with walls, floors, batchmates,” he said.He said he tried to lodge multiple anonymous complaints on the UGC’s anti-ragging helpline. The college administration’s response made him feel vulnerable, he said. “The principal and vice-principal were angry with me and said they would complain to the cyber police about anonymous grievances. They told the entire batch that whoever was filing such complaints was ruining the college’s reputation and that if anyone had a real problem, they should approach them directly.”Numbers may be smaller, but ragging on engineering campuses can get vicious, too. A third-year engineering student at a Uttar Pradesh college was so traumatised that he transferred out after his first semester. “My seniors slapped me hard across the face whenever they saw me in the hostel. Once, I was slapped so badly that I temporarily lost hearing in one ear. I was too scared to complain because I feared things would get worse if it was found out. After the first semester, I changed my college,” he recalled.A medical college student in Tripura said he and his batchmates were subjected to online abuse that continued day and night, leaving them afraid to use their phone or attend classes. “We were all added to a WhatsApp group and told to perform certain tasks by our seniors. If we failed to respond, they threatened us with dire consequences,” the student noted.In another case, a master’s student at a social science college in Telangana was harassed online for her caste. Her classmates posted casteist slurs on a common WhatsApp group. She skipped classes for days, humiliated.Laws in force since 1990sIt’s been a quarter of a century since the Supreme Court defined what constitutes ragging but the evil continues unabated, pointing to obvious shortcomings in efforts to combat it. In fact, several state laws pre-date the court’s 2001 judgment. Tripura brought in an anti-ragging law in 1990 that prescribes a maximum punishment of four years. In 1997, Tamil Nadu became the first state to put a complete ban on ragging in educational institutions through an ordinance criminalising it that was later converted into the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Ragging Act, 1997.The law was enacted after a horrifying case of ragging that led to the murder of first-year MBBS student Pon Navarasu in his hostel room by his senior John David. Navarasu’s body was chopped into pieces and disposed of in different parts of the state. A police investigation later revealed that Navarsu was assaulted by David for refusing to strip down and lick shoes.Between 1997 and 2000, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Maharashtra and West Bengal passed their own anti-ragging laws that provide for fines, expulsion and imprisonment in serious cases.Tamil Nadu can claim to be among the better performers in enforcing the law. “The zero-tolerance policy, change in perception, and students’ resistance broke the chain of ragging in professional colleges,” said N Rajendran, former vice-chancellor of Alagappa University.Private institutions and deemed universities, too, have played a role, immediately expelling students involved in ragging. medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/hoaMSYJqg-8?si=e8wrsvRbcIYeHaEVIs a central law the answer?A counsellor at Delhi University told TOI about how ragging has transformed over the years. “Seniors no longer simply demand tasks from juniors in the old-fashioned way. Now, it tends to manifest itself as bullying and discrimination — class-based, caste-based and even anti-LGBTQ. Many do not register it as ragging as it does not fit the conventional definition,” she said.Supreme Court lawyer Meera Kaura Patel — who has handled several ragging cases — said India needs a central anti-ragging law that is uniformly implemented by states. The problem, she said, is the lack of a standard approach to ragging with police invoking sections under penal laws based on the nature of the complaint. “There are states that do not have anti-ragging laws while the others that do have laws may not impose adequate punishment,” she said. Typically, in state laws, an offence of ragging is punishable by a fine and 2-4 years of imprisonment.Patel explained that sections under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) — like causing wrongful or grievous hurt, abetment and even outraging of modesty, depending on the incident — can be invoked in ragging cases. “Ragging itself is not an offence under BNS. Right now, it’s up to different states to decide what constitutes ragging and what punishment should be handed down for it. There is no uniformity.”She said ragging needs to be categorised as a cognisable offence across all states regardless of the nature of ragging. “You cannot say that this much is acceptable and this much is not,” Patel said.Former Congress MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury had introduced The Prohibition and Eradication of Ragging Bill 2019 in Parliament that called for uniform laws against ragging in all colleges and universities. It has, however, not been passed.Guarantee needed against retaliationDheeraj Sanghi, vice-chancellor at JK Lakshmipat University in Jaipur who has previously worked at IIT-Kanpur and IIIT-Delhi, said what first-year students need is the right environment to report cases without fear of reprisal. “They are scared they will end up in the bad books of the very people they must spend years with,” he said.Gaurav Singhal, vice-president of SAVE, said proper enforcement of anti-ragging regulations has to begin at colleges. “UGC’s rule states that freshers should be placed in separate hostels. But many colleges do not fulfil this requirement. Another rule requires that an FIR be filed as soon as a complaint is received by the college. But only a few comply. We filed an RTI five years ago and discovered that only 5% of institutions follow this guideline,” he said.“Colleges avoid registering ragging complaints to protect their reputations. Some have even asked students to sign written declarations that they were never ragged,” he added.Raj Kachroo, who started the anti-ragging NGO Aman Movement, named after his son, told TOI that after Covid, the National Ragging Prevention Programme, of which the helpline is a part, stopped working effectively. “Before Covid, people from the helpline would make regular calls to colleges to check compliance and keep in touch with students’ parents. All that does not happen anymore,” said Kachroo.Singhal said no anti-ragging law will work properly without an effective reporting mechanism because the victim and the perpetrator have to live with each other for three-four years. “So, a victim is unsure about the outcome of the complaint or withdraws the complaint under pressure. The best way to stop this crime is to make the contact numbers of seniors’ parents available to juniors. Putting the fear of family would be the best way to deal with this,” he said.