[IE] Kanpur boy ragged, beaten up, left for dead near railway station

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ASHUMENDRA ROY HAD GOT ADMISSION IN KOLKATA’S INDIAN INSTITUTE OF HOTEL MANAGEMENT; NOW IN HOSPITAL, INCOHERENT AND CRITICAL

Rao Jaswant Singh

Kanpur/Kolkata, July 09: Prone on his bed with a broken leg and extensive head injuries, 19-year-old Ashumendra Pratap Singh has trouble recognising his family and friends. After a serious bout of ragging, this fresher from Kolkata’s Indian Institute of Hotel Management (IIHM), has ended up in a Kanpur nursing home.

Doctors at the Chandrakanta Nursing Home at Civil Lines, where he is admitted, say the head injuries have left him mentally disturbed. His family, whose pleas have gone unheard at the institution, now want action against the guilty

A resident of Fatehpur, Ashumendra had got admission at the Indian Institute of Hotel Management (IIHM), Kolkata and joined the college on June 13. “The ragging started soon after,” said his mother Kusum Singh.

Her son even complained to the college authorities, but all in vain. The management took no action, she said.

Matters came to a head on June 25, when senior students tried to force Ashumendra to consume alcohol and non-vegetarian food. When he refused, he was thrashed black and blue. “He sustained serious injuries on head, legs and abdomen,” she said. The miscreants then took the youth and left him on the railway tracks near Sealdah railway station.

Accusing the institute authorities of negligence, she said, “they informed us two days later, on June 27.” Moreover, all they said on telephone was that Ashumendra was “missing from the institute”.

Ashumendra’s uncle IB Singh and another relative, SS Chauhan, left immediately for Kolkata. Chauhan told Newsline that they reached the Vidhan Nagar police station on June 30 and registered a missing report.

That very day, someone called Ashumendra’s home and informed the family that he was at the Sealdah railway station. That was where Chauhan found him. He was injured, disoriented and had apparently been there since the incident, asking for help. No one had come to his aid. He had been stripped naked and people took him for a lunatic, Chauhan said, “when I saw him, he was crying in pain and was unable to recognise me.”

The family brought him to Kanpur and got him admitted to Bhargava Nursing Home and later shifted him to Chandrakanta Nursing Home. “He has undergone some operations but his condition is still critical,” said Chauhan.

Unable to speak properly, Ashumendra starts screaming if someone mentions his college.”Get them punished with a death sentence,” he keeps saying. “All I want now is that those people should get back what they did to me.”

The family tried to contact the institute authorities thereafter, said Chauhan, but they were not allowed to meet the Dean or anyone else.

Chauhan told Newsline that they have registered a complaint against the IIHM management at the Vidhan Nagar Police Station, holding it responsible for the incident and furnishing wrong information to the family. “The FIR number is 86/7 at the Vidhan Nagar police station,” he said. The youth has named Saurabh Singh, Amit, and Shahbaz Afreen, who were involved in the incident. All three have been named in the FIR.

If action is not taken against the guilty, the family would take up the isuue with the UP Police too, Chauhan said.

The Sub divisional Police Officer, Bidhannagar (Salt Lake), Prasun Banerjee said: “A special police team is looking into the complaint. The investigating officers met the victim in the hospital before he had left Kolkata.” Prima facie, it has been established that the student was indeed, ragged. “We are awaiting for some more evidence. Once we get them, the culprits would be booked,” he said. No one from the Indian Institute of Hotel Management, said to be located at Salt Lake, could be contacted. No one received the telephone calls despite repeated attempts.