Ragging at Tibia Medical College

August 07, 2005:
In their written complaint to the police, the two freshers, Abhishek Tiwari from Patna and Riyaz from Madhya Pradesh have recounted in detail how, on Thursday night they were confronted by a group of seniors. They were forced to strip, dance and masturbate on mobile camera and then asked to parade to the girls' hostel. On Friday, they filed a complaint and the area police have detained the three accused for questioning. The mood at the hostel is tense, the very names of some of the alleged perpetrators of the crime — Tangen Wangchuk, Wasim and Shahabuddin — all second-year students, eliciting terror. One of their classmates had just started talking to this correspondent about Thursday night's outrage when a bike revved inside the hostel gates. One glance at the bike and the student fled. Old-timers and present hostel inmates recall the countless times they have been asked to enact copulation with a fellow student, the only difference with the present controversy being there were no phone cameras to capture their sense of horror and embarrassment. And they were usually fully-clothed, or at worst, shirtless. A French kiss with another guy is something almost all of them have been through. The mildest varieties of ragging at the Tibbia hostel are when a student is ordered to confront a female classmate with questions about her figure or the make of her undergarments. There are those who have chosen to drop out, students for whom the "breaking in" had proved too much to endure. Speaking on conditions of anonymity, an ex-student, who had left in his second year said: "On my second or third day, I was made to stand with my face towards a wall, and asked to write my name on it with my urine. Unless fairly senior, one always has to watch out for homosexual assaults." College principal B N Sinha, however, rubbishes the allegations. His explanation: "Now that something like this has happened, students are probably telling these stories to make (such incidents) sound commonplace and to hush the thing up. Such incidents are impossible because we have a proper six member diciplinary committee in place.