[Yahoo] Is there more to ragging?

Link to report

By IE
Saturday July 21, 04:08 AM

The conclusions of two recent committees make an interesting study in contrast. The first was constituted by the Central government, under the chairman of the University Grant Commission (UGC), Professor S. Thorat, to inquire into the allegation of differential treatment being meted out to SC/ST students at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). The other was set up under the directions of the Supreme Court, and was headed by ex-director of CBI, R.K. Raghavan, to investigate into the prevailing practice of ragging in educational institutions and to suggest measures to stop it.

Both committees have recently submitted their voluminous reports to the concerned authorities. Both have been prepared on the basis of non-participant observations, but the conclusions drawn are poles apart. Surprisingly, what Thorat has portrayed glaringly was completely overlooked by Raghavan.The latter failed to notice that social prejudices were at work inside institutions of higher learning and prominently surfaced during ragging exercises. Raghavan underlined the cruel forms of ragging prevalent in Indian institutions which are rarely found elsewhere in the world.

The extensive Thorat report recorded that social prejudices were not only on display during ragging but even played a major role in the allotment of rooms in hostels and went to the extent of perpetrating a clear segregation of students in the dining halls. Its observations were based on the written complaints of many SC/ST students of AIIMS. The Thorat report gave details about how caste discrimination assumed ugly forms when an SC/ST student is subjected to ragging. In fact, discrimination comes into play from the very first day and is the practice all the year round. The report quoted from letters of complaints, including one from Ajay Soyal, an AIIMS student, who had elaborately described the gory caste-biased ragging he had been subjected to. The Thorat report also mentioned that upper caste students have even threatened many dalit students with physical torture.

It is not just in AIIMS that ragging and caste-based ragging appear to be common occurrences. IIT Chennai also reported several incidents of caste-based humiliation. Ragging is not new in India but it has, as reported by the Raghavan committee, got more cruel after the implementation of Mandal in the nineties. The reason for this is clear - upper caste students had come to perceive the Mandal report as a threat to their status. They came to regard students from the lower castes and rural areas as hurdles in the way of their upward mobility. The kind of ragging that the Raghavan committee had reported should actually be seen as a problem related to caste-biases within society at large. But the Raghavan report does not see it that way.

This is what makes the findings of the Thorat committee so significant. They captured the caste-based humiliations that SC/ST students in a prestigious institution routinely faced. It is a pity, therefore, that the mainstream media has chosen to overlook this important report.