[Hindu] Ragging is never fun

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The Supreme Court orders on ragging should not only curb the practice but also generate awareness.

AKHILA SIVADAS

Photo: R.V. Moorthy

HEALTHY EQUATIONS: Motivate students to discover other ways of welcoming new entrants.

COME June and all of us get into the annual ritual of celebrating exam results, checking out new courses, rating universities, getting involved as a family and community in the “rites of passage” from school to college and debating endles sly the many ethical and material concerns that this process throws up. This year would have been no different but for the slew of directives that the apex court has issued to check ragging on campuses across the country.

On May 16, the Supreme Court declared that ragging and any form of abetment to ragging, causing injury or subjecting anyone to forceful confinement, physical and sexual assault, would now be treated as a criminal offence. And as in the case of Section 498 A, dealing with cruelty towards women, since the burden of proof would be on the accused rather than the victims of ragging, the court has empowered victims and their families to get the FIR registered.
Issue and its ramifications

The question that needs to be asked is whether all the stakeholders — students, parents and guardians, faculty and administrators — understand the full implications of the law and are ready to confront the issue with all its ramifications.

Dr. Kavita Sharma, Principal of a leading college in Delhi University, stated that while they have been consistently addressing the ragging issue over the last few years and even evolved a graded response to the problem — from fining students to taking extreme steps of easing them out of the hostel to even rusticating some — the challenge today is to go beyond managing and arbitrating on the issue and get on with the business of legally enforcing the ban on ragging. With the Supreme Court determined to crack down on it, she was clear that “it is not the form of ragging” but how the fresher perceives the ordeal that would determine the issue.

“We have been telling students that there is no distinction between harmless or normal ragging where you get the juniors to sing and dance versus ragging that takes on more a virulent form. At the end of the day, even mild forms of ragging could prove to be hard on some young people and could lead to a demand for legal redress,” she added.

Therefore, the major challenge before the academic community, she emphasised, is not only to make sure that the “law acts as a deterrent and prevents all excesses but also motivates the students to search for alternatives, discover other ways of welcoming the new entrants, bring freshers into the college mainstream and establish a more healthy equation with them.”

In fact, for a majority of students who are day scholars, much of the ragging was “harmless interaction where juniors get introduced to the seniors and the latter in turn discovered the talents of the juniors,” said Samil Ahmed from Jamia Millia University, New Delhi.

Photo: K.R. Deepak


Law as deterrent: Create an awareness about the penalties.

In some instances, students agree that the seniors even “pulled their leg” and sent them scurrying to a classroom in the opposite direction. But even while defending the practice of “healthy ragging”, Nida (a first-year student from Jamia Millia) felt that there is a thin line of distinction between such healthy ragging and the not-so-healthy forms. For students the first few days are “days of terror” and the court order will come as a relief to many. “At least this year the freshers will feel relaxed and know what to do if faced with an unbearable situation,” she added.

Clearly, the crux of the problem lies in the selective engagement with the issue. One such convenient spin is that the court is not in any way questioning the convention or tradition of ragging. What it is seeking to do is to prevent the excesses and distortions that have over the years crept into the body politic of the campus and is particularly vicious in the professional colleges and more so in the many new-found campuses, where money and muscle power have combined to create an altogether new culture of acquiring knowledge.

Undoubtedly, there has been some clinching as well as disturbing evidence on how vicious the whole problem has become. Those who have been through the most harrowing experiences have not only spoken up but also decided to take on the menace headlong and not rest till the heinous practice is appropriately dealt with and weeded out altogether.

Yet, anti-ragging advocates like Shivam Vij, editor of the website stopragging, have consistently maintained that there is nothing like “mild ragging” and that criminalisation is inherent in the whole process and that what we are witnessing today is nothing short of gross human rights violation. People like him have no patience with those who take a “politically correct” position on ragging and “despite all the horror stories… lecture on how good ragging can be,” or about how one needs to distinguish between the many ice-breakers that seniors use to draw the freshers out of their shell and make them “bold and get exposed to the world” and the exceptional instances when they “cross the limit and inflict the worst kind of brutalities”.

Many such independent groups have collaborated with the Raghavan Committee, set up by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, to find ways to curb the practice of ragging in schools and colleges.
Anguish and trauma

It does not take too much to understand where this anguish and the “enough-is-enough” position stem from. Sharing her experience, one parent observed that three years ago, when she found her son traumatised by the ragging, she decided to shift him to another college and get him to move on with his life, she realised that she was fortunate in being able to “act decisively and nip the issue in its bud.” At that point of time, when she considered the possibility of seeking redress, she was discouraged by the fear of reprisal.

So while welcoming the court directives on the grounds that it will definitely discourage ragging, she wonders whether, if the option to register an FIR had been available to her three years ago, she would have exercised it or not. One gets the feeling that not everyone feels confident of seeking police intervention. With most campuses anxious to maintain their autonomy and prevent undue intrusion by the police, this may discourage victims of ragging and their families to seek legal redress.

Most stakeholders agree that a strong legal response was inevitable and the recent developments warranted it. Even while many constructive methods were devised to check the practice, there is a feeling that these measures only succeeded in driving the practice underground, or more precisely behind closed doors. Many victims have reported how a façade of self-regulation has been maintained to keep administrators happy and reassure them that the situation was under control. In fact, one fall-out has been hardening of such malpractices and the court, by empowering the victim, is trying to nail this persistent offender and perpetrator.

So the unanimous opinion is that the pendulum has swung in favour of the much-needed legal deterrents and the university authorities are wasting no time in swinging into action. The University Grants Commission has issued instructions to all universities to implement the court orders in the strictest possible manner. The Secretary of the UGC, T.R. Kenn, has been quoted in the media as calling on all universities “to implement the directives of the Supreme Court in letter and spirit.”
Gearing up

Meanwhile, the authorities across colleges, universities and professional institutions such as IITs, are gearing up to implement the court’s orders. According to Rajendra Singh, Registrar, IIT, Delhi, they “are taking every possible step to implement the court’s directives in toto.” This involves setting up a common mechanism across the IITs to enforce the law and monitor the situation, provide students with mobile numbers of all faculty members associated with the anti-ragging panel and strengthen students’ access to services such as helplines.

Speaking about the measures taken by the colleges affiliated to Delhi University, Dr. Kavita Sharma said that “apart from incorporating the court’s orders in the prospectus and ensuring that they are prominently displayed in different parts of the colleges, we are also orienting the students on the issue and their responsibilities and obligations and strengthening the self-regulation processes that the college has developed over the years.”

Clearly the challenge is twofold: First to deal with the many horrific incidents of the past; to collectively introspect, reflect and face the issue squarely and address the bitterness and sense of estrangement that it has generated among people who have experienced it at close quarters. Second, to ensure that under the fear of the law the authorities do not respond in a knee-jerk fashion and quite unintentionally contribute to the miscarriage of justice.

Some unsuspecting young people should not get caught in the crossfire, used to either to settle scores or get victimised by peremptory legal processes. Enough checks have to be created to ensure that we make a new beginning and use the law to not only curb the practice but to generate public awareness on the issue and have an informed engagement with it.