Eight years after the Supreme Court of India first banned ragging, Dande Devender Kumar has died of it. It is suspected he committed suicide by jumping onto the railway tracks, adding to the list of those who chose to die rather than live the humiliation of ragging. After hanging oneself on the ceiling fans, dying on the railway tracks is the second most favourite choice of ragging victims.Kumar also left a suicide note.

Kumar was a student of Vasavi Engineering College, Hyderabad, whose administration consoled his parents thus:

When his parents reported the matter to the college and threatened to file a police complaint, the college authorities allegedly begged them not to as it would spoil the careers of those involved. [CNN-IBN]

As for the parents:

“He had been complaining for long. We hoped that the college authorities would take note of it but it did not happen.” [The Hindu]

But what were the parents doing?

News reports: CNN-IBN, The Hindu, Times of India, Press Trust of India, The New Indian Express, ANI

…not all but some juniors are targeted, as they are perceived as weak, vulnerable and pliant maybe in terms of gender, religion, caste, class and ethnicity. In the case of Aman, it was between modernity and local conservatism. Aman was smart, good looking, having a charismatic personality (won many prizes in the college academic and cultural activities) and, above all, he used to speak English with a tinge of accent (he studied abroad for sometime). All these qualities, particularly the last one, made him vulnerable and weak in the eyes of local goon-students. Being modern and progressive, I realised during my discussion with the medicos there, has its own flip-side, so much so that it renders the putative ‘support structures’ of modern civilised society ‘attack-structures’ for those who dare to think and do things against the conservative mores, culture and lifestyles. [Link]

This time the defenders of ragging are silent. Who knows, maybe some of them have changed their views and are now lighting candles at Jantar Mantar. There are no TV debates calling ragging fun. This time no one is arguing that a murder case should not be used to defame the socially productive ‘tradition’ of ragging. This time nobody is asking how boys will become men unless they are ragged, and nobody is calling the victims sissies.

What has changed? Have the chickens come home to roost? DPS, Gurgaon, Kashmiri Pandit — have the defenders shut up because the victim was a ‘person like us’? Is that all it needed, the life of a metro-bred boy rather than a small-town loser? Has the debate, that should have been settled with the Supreme Court’s 2001 ban, finally been settled 8 years and two dozen deaths later?

It sounds crude but it’s true: Aman Kachroo was lucky to be murdered than forced to commit suicide like most others. Had he committed suicide, the world would have been blaming him rather than his seniors. Nine out of 10 ragging suicides are by freshers who hang themselves from the ceiling fan of their hostel room, rarely leaving a suicide note. In all these cases, the victim is blamed. Must be depression. Exams? Relationship? Family discord? But since Aman was literally lynched to death, the standard template can’t be used this time.

Ragging continues because society at large wants it to continue despite legal injunctures. In an essay where he recounts ragging in Delhi University, Amitav Ghosh writes, “There were nights when we slept in drainpipes around Pandara Park rather than go back to college to face our seniors.” The rest of the essay convinces you that had it not been for ragging he wouldn’t have become the writer that he is!

That’s the manner in which selective amnesia is applied. Such mythmaking is then reflected in TV debates, newspaper features, and in the portrayal of ragging in films such as Munnabhai MBBS. The images you get to see are not of young bodies hanging from fans, eyes bulging and tongues popping out, but those of day-scholars singing and dancing in the canteen.

The most important arena of legitimising ragging is the oral passing-on of stories of parents to children, from alumni to students. A practice that teaches you to submit, to be subjugated and humiliated rather than to refuse orders becomes a ritual.

And so it is that when a student commits suicide, the first response of many is that if hundreds of other students in their same hostel didn’t commit suicide, why did this one? The ensuing victim-blaming makes sure ragging survives. The media’s focus on ragging ‘cases’ rather than the everyday goings-on in hostels also makes sure that the cases are seen as exceptions. The student who drops out, or becomes mentally unstable, or is ostracised by his/her hostel community for complaining are not highlighted. Even the family and peers begin stereotyping them as ‘shy’ and ‘timid’.

In 2002, Anoop Kumar committed suicide in a Lucknow college because his parents won’t let him drop out and return home to Kanpur. He had told his parents that he couldn’t even tell them what he was being subjected to. It was the shame of sexual abuse. It’s amazing that a society that does not approve of homosexuality looks the other way at sexual ragging. His parents regretted their stubbornness just as Aman’s parents regretted not taking their sons protestations seriously.

The regret of Aman’s parents is just as well the regret of the defenders. For the first time, contempt notices have been issued to principals and the University Grants Commission is pretending to wake up. The evidence is so strong that the four seniors could make history by being the first to be convicted of ragging death. Most of all, when a new government comes to power, it will hopefully look into the Raghavan Committee’s 50 recommendations and, at the very least, amend the Indian Penal Code to make ragging an offence.

(An edited, shorter version of this article by me appeared this past Sunday in the Hindustan Times.)

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Update: Additional Solicitor General Gopal Subramaniam, who is I think the amicus curae in the ongoing case, says he will ask the Supreme Court to take note of the case and charge the Principal and Vice-Chancellor with “contempt, inaction, negligence and failure.” But who will charge whom for lack of implementation of the SC orders on ragging?And Himachal Pradesh has an anti-ragging ordinance too. (The ordinance had expired in 1998, I gather, as it had nott been turned into a law within six months)

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I don’t know why this report does not use the word lynching, because that is what seems to have happened at the Dr Rajendra Prasad Medical College, Tanda.

I hope I am not committing contempt of court here by mentioning that the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India had first banned ragging in May 2001. Eight years and two Supreme Court-appointed committees later, the celebrated Public Interest Litigation method of reforming India did not come to the rescue of Aman Satya Kachroo. (It is not clear whether he spelled his surname as Kachroo or Kachru.)

What the Supreme Court process did do, instead, was to make the state governments and the HRD Ministry lazy; they gave up passing and implementing anti-ragging laws. The few states that did, most of them, as the Raghavan committee shockingly found, have not notified them!

The Union HRD Ministry has also not taken any steps to either pass a national anti-ragging law or amend the Indian Penal Code to make the “ragging” a punishable offence.

The problem, as always, is that of implementation. The SC’s 2001 order, based on the Unnikrishnan committee report (.pdf here) had said that it is the responsibility of college principals and directors to check ragging. That’s where the buck stops. But the order had not specified what it would mean to not follow that responsibility! What happens to a principal in a case like this, where he was clearly and deliberately negligent? Under what law do you charge him?

Secondly, the order had said that it would be the responsibility of affiliating/funding agencies to make sure colleges affilaited to or funded by them are following anti-ragging measures. Even today there arev colleges, even in Delhi University, who do not follow the details of the 2001 SC order, such as forming an anti-ragging committee in college and making it accessible in person or through phone at any time of day and night. You can read what seems like an excellent order here; the loophole here is that since the measures mentioned sounded illustrative they weren’t taken seriously. Most importantly, nobody ever asked UGC et al as to what they had done to implement the order.

But these affiliating and/or funding agencies – mainly three: UGC (University Grants Council), AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) and the MCI (Medical Council of India)- didn’t do much apart from notifying the institutions under them about the SC order. Many secretaries came and went, students kept dying of ragging, some cases of rape and alleged murder even, and finally in 2007 the Supreme Court again took suo moto notice of the fact that ragging was still on!

This time the SC set-up a committee headed by former CBI chief RK Raghavan. In the second meeting of the committee, they invited me along with a few people to make presentations, and subsequently hired some of us as consultants. I remember going on and on in my presentation that the problem was implementation, and if only the first committee’s recommendations and the ensuing SC order of 2001 were implemented in letter and spirit, there wouldn’t be the need for this committee. I remember the first question I was asked after my presentation was about the need of an all-India anti-ragging law to be passed by the Parliament. I said absolutely. This was the single-most important thing that was needed. Everyone agreed. Although everything that makes for ragging is covered by the Indian Penal Code, the police does not think this way.

The committee submitted its report in May 2007 (.pdf here). The illiterate Delhi media took a copy of the recommendations chapter of the report and hyped it as though it had already become the law of the land. The problem that the illiterate media faced was that there were 50 recommendations! The committee had put in almost everything they had been suggested. So every paper/TV channel highlighted some of the recommendations. Some missed out the most crucial one – that the IPC should be amended and ragging made a cognisable offence. This would mean that a fresher like Kachroo can go to a police station and be taken seriously about a ragging complaint – if you know what Indian police is like you can imagine how they tell freshers not to fear, everyone gets ragged, it is okay.

The Supreme Court has not said anything about this particular recommendation so far, and those against law-by-PIL would say that it should not. The HRD ministry, and state governments, are mum on the question of outlawing ragging and implenting and monitoring anti-ragging measures because they hink that the Supreme Court, like god, is taking care of it. Why increase our work?

So what the Supreme Court has done this time round is issue this order:

(1) The punishment to be meted out has to be exemplary and justifiably harsh to act as a deterrent against recurrence of such incidents.

(2) Every single incident of ragging where the victim or his parent/guardian or the Head of institution is not satisfied with the institutional arrangement for action, a First Information Report must be filed without exception by the institutional authorities with the local police authorities. Any failure on the part of the institutional authority or negligence or deliberate delay in lodging the FIR with the local police shall be construed to be an act of culpable negligence on the part of the institutional authority. If any victim or his parent / guardian of ragging intends to file FIR directly with the police, that will not absolve the institutional authority from the requirement of filing the FIR.

(3) Courts should make an effort to ensure that cases involving ragging are taken up on a priority basis to send the correct message that ragging is not only to be discourages but also to be dealt with sternness.

(4) In addition, we direct that the possibility of introducing in the educational curriculum a subject relating to ragging shall be explored by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and the respective State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT). This aspect can be included in the teaching of the subjects “Human Rights”.

(5) In the prospectus to be issued for admission by educational institutions, it shall be clearly stipulated that in case the applicant for admission is found to have indulged in ragging in the past or if it is noticed later that he has indulged in ragging, admission may be refused or he shall be expelled from the educational institution.

(6) The Central Government and the State Governments shall launch a programme giving wide publicity to the menace of ragging and the consequences which follow in case any student is detected to have been involved in ragging.

(7) It shall be the collective responsibility of the authorities and functionaries of the concerned institution, and their role shall also be open to scrutiny for the purpose of finding out whether they have taken effective steps for preventing ragging and in case of their failure, action can be taken; for example, denial of any grant-in-aid or assistance from the State Governments.

(8) Anti-ragging committees and squads shall be forthwith formed by the institutions and it shall be the job of the committee or the squad, as the case may be, to see that the Committee’s recommendations, more for particularly those noted above, are observed without exception and if it is noticed that there is any deviation, the same shall be forthwith brought to the notice of this Court.

(9) The Committee constituted pursuant to the order of this Court shall continue to monitor the functioning of the anti-ragging committees and the squads to be formed. They shall also monitor the implementation of the recommendations to which reference has been made above.

[The full interm order is here.]

This was in an interim order of the Court in May 2007, nearly 2 years ago. That has not been able to prevent Kachroo’s murder. I have no doubt that more ragging deaths will take place. You can read here a critique of the interim order by me.

If only Aman Kachroo had been able to call a helpline number or email somebody, anonymously, and write that this kind of ragging was going on, and a fact-finding team had immediately visited his college, not only could the death have been prevented but also possibly Kachroo could have enjoyed his college life without even the mandatory ostracisation that freshers who speak up against ragging have to face in their college and hostel. The setting up of such a helpine on the model of Childline was one of the recommendations of the Raghavan committee. But can the Supreme Court set up something like that? Surely, that is the domain of the executive and not the judiciary. An HRD Joint Secretary is Member Secretary of the Raghavan Committee, but the HRD won’t do anything because, well, the SC is looking into it.

To model the helpline around Childline was suggested by HRD Joint Secretary Sunil Kumar himself, but that would need identifying and funding NGO’s to do that. The Coalition to Uproot Ragging from Education is ready, but the HRD forgot about this and the SC had no comment.

So two things needed to prevent ragging: a law and a helpline. Simple.

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So what should Kachroo’s family do, to get justice for his death and also to contribute to the larger anti-ragging cause to prevent such deaths?

1) I think it is important that they hire a good criminal lawyer and sue the Principal, Suresh Sankhayan, on criminal charges. In at least one case that I know, the director of the educational institution was arrested. Don’t know what happened thereafter. It is important that negligent Principals be put behind bars; it will drive home the point to principals and institute directors that even if they personally think ragging is okay, the law does not think so.

2) Another party to be sued in this matter is the Medical Council of India, whose responsibility it is under the Supreme Court orders (both 2001 and 2007) to disaffiliate institutionsthat are unable to curb ragging. This implies that they have to go around checking, and they haven’t done that.

3) It is obvious that the seniors who lynched Kachroo to death have to be given exemplary punishment. But it reminds me of the case of Pon Navrasu of Annamalai University in 1996. The then Vice Chancellor’s son, his body was hacked into many pieces by a senior named John David. Given 36 years’ jail by a sessions court, he was freed by the High Court for want of evidence. Evidence is a big problem in ragging cases, and the only conviction we know of was a ragging-rape case recently. This was achieved after a lot of hardship, and six were even then acquitted. That’s why it’s important to have a good lawyer and to collect evidence pronto.

4) In the Kerala case, controversies over which led to the SC taking notice of the prevalence of ragging despite the 2001 ban, the Kerala Nursing Council had de-recognised the School of Medical Education, where the rape had taken place after an exam in the name of ragging. This is the only example of de-affiliation. This is important, and Kachroo’s parents should push for this in the case of Dr Rajendra Prasad Medical College, Tanda. Students who are studying there and are not involved in ragging should be accomadated in other medical colleges. This is a price that institutions must pay for not being able to curb ragging. They must be dissolved altogether, as is the case with hazing in the US where fraternities and sororities unable to end hazing are just shut down.

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Apart from this legalistic discussion, I have to say that part of the blame goes to Aman Kachroo’s family itself, even if this is the wrong time to say this, because like typical Indian parents they didn’t take his ragging complaints seriously. If even a ragging victim’s family does not take the issue seriously until he dies, you can imagine how seriously society at large thinks of ragging as a problem. Let it also be said that they are not the first parents who will always rue their indiscretion, and perhaps not the last.

(Cross-posted at Kafila.)

A fresher at MNREC (now known as the Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology), Allahabad is asked to ride a buffalo. The seniors gleefully look on as a visibly tense boy mounts the buffalo. The buffalo, not willing to be a part of the act, shrugs and the young boy falls on his head and dies of haemorrhage. That’s how fatal ragging can become. And often it is too late to realise that ragging is not fun anymore.

I was a part of the same institution from 1988 to 1992 as a student of mechanical engineering. MNREC had a very ‘strong tradition’ of ragging. It all started on day one – with boys wearing white shirts, white trousers and black shoes. The sheer ‘maturity’ of this tradition can be seen in the details – the third button, from the top, of the white shirt was red so that a fresher always looked at it, walking or talking. A forced mark of respect! The girls wore white salwar kameez and black shoes. Their well oiled hair adored red ribbons. And all of this for three long months – of endless days and nights! And in this entire period whenever we met a senior, anywhere, we had to bend down at 90 degrees as a mark of respect. Not doing so conveyed that we were being rude and were rewarded with slaps and kicks. Throughout this period ragging continued, day in and night out. Walking towards the classes or returning back was always a terrifying experience.

Our regional, caste and class affiliations added another dimension to the ragging saga. A year before I joined college, the boys from the hills had some conflict with the folks from the Meerut region. I belonged to the hills so any senior from Meerut who walked past me simply slapped me as a chore. This happened with most of us from the hills. Likewise, the hill seniors bashed juniors from Meerut. Boys from lower caste, tribals and minorities too got a raw deal. This was my first encounter with ‘India’ that I was not exposed too. For me, caste and class till then had existed only in the textbooks.

Stripping, enacting vulgar postures, dirty talks about female members of one’s family, slapping, kicking, beating… it was all so commonplace and I hated every moment of it. But I did not know that the worse was yet to come.

The end of this obscene three months period was marked by something called ‘mass ragging’. On a chosen day, the second year students, all masked, would suddenly raid the junior hostel with iron rods and hockey sticks. In the riot that followed, they would randomly bang the doors and kick them open and then beat up the juniors black and blue. It was not so random though as selective targets were mercilessly assaulted. Seniors from our hometown had forewarned us about this event, so we struggled tooth and nail to keep the door closed. Many others did the same but not all were so lucky.

Time passed and we were soon second year students. The first decision we made was not to mass rag, thankfully! As we did not do it to our juniors, they in turn did not do the same to their juniors. But when we were in our final year, we had a surprise in store for us. The then second year students, out of the blue, had decided to reinstate the horrifying tradition of mass ragging. A small group of 15-20 students stormed the junior hostel. Caught unawares, and completely blank about this legendary MNREC tradition, the juniors panicked. They had no idea where these masked men descended from. While some were getting beaten up ruthlessly, others ran for cover. In this chaos, few of them jumped from the first floor and broke their bones. The saddest case was that of a boy from Assam who jumped from the second floor and broke his neck.

The guys who conducted the inhuman raid, unaware of injuries, collected all the juniors, got them to strip and walked them over to the main hostel area. In the silence of the night we were alarmed by the sound of hundreds of hesitant and scared footsteps, as they passed by the final year hostel. We were aghast. Shocked, we ran for rescue. Meanwhile, some sane second year students rushed towards the junior hostel to calm down the panicking juniors only to find this guy with a broken neck. While some took the boy to the hospital, others started searching for the guys responsible for this incident. We had a tough time but eventually we caught hold of a lot of them, except for perhaps the kingpin and some smart ones who had good friends to help them wriggle out of this mess.

The criminal night was followed by sickening and pathetic arguments of the college professors who wanted to sweep the incident under the carpet. ‘Lets save the college reputation’ was their one line argument. I wonder if they would have toed the same line if the victim was their own. But this was their habit perhaps as I saw a similar reaction from them when a police cop tried to rape a college student. The faculty simply refused to act. And to top it all, they virtually defended the act by saying something as stupid and derogatory as – “The ants will come where there is sugar.” The enraged students had then taken the law in their own hands and forced the college and the police to take action. In fact few radical ones had even planned to eliminate the principal who was supposedly close to the family of the culprit.

The boy who broke his neck in mass ragging died after a few days. His devastated parents stood, with folded hands, thanking us students for helping them out at the hospital. It was a shocking moment of truth and no one knew how to react. Meanwhile, after pressure from the students, the college authorities had hesitatingly initiated disciplinary action and lodged an FIR with the police. One boy was expelled from college while two others were rusticated for two years. Some five more were thrown out from the hostel. But that’s about it! A murder was committed and the murderers virtually walked away free, without any punishment from the law.

I guess the rusticated students would have joined some other college, finished graduation and may be working somewhere now – as government officials, businessmen or private sector executives. The irony would be to find one of them serving as a cop! Forget feeling guilty about it, I wonder if they still remember this. Or they, in their drunken spell, wear the memories of this incident as some sort of war decoration!

While a slap in a metropolitan college gets reported in the media, murders in smaller cities go unnoticed. I have heard of numerous such incidents in the engineering colleges spread across the country.

To look back is not easy and to forget, impossible! The ghosts linger on. As a first year student I had vowed never to rag anyone. As a second year student, I avoided ragging in general. I sat with few freshers and quizzed them for half an hour or so, only to befriend them. I guess I was acting more as a helping hand.

But it is rightly said – power corrupts!

I was quizzing a young boy from my native area and found him slow in his responses. My biased perspective of good, right and smart slowly rode over my sanity and before I could realise, my hand landed on his cheeks. Suddenly I was cold to the sound of the slap which I had hated as a ‘victim’. As a tormentor, I did not feel the pain. I thought I was right thing because I had a reason. And I felt the same, a few times more. But little did I know that a murder with a reason still remains a murder.

Before I could realise and tie the up the loose ends of my sanity, the ragging period was over. An irreparable ridge had been created which I too did not try to bridge, mainly because of my own feeling of guilt. I hardly interacted with the boys in question and later in life, got to know that they disliked me and also cherished a dream of bashing me up. I don’t know if it’s too late to say sorry! I don’t know if the ‘sorry’ makes any sense now. ‘Better late than never’ somehow does not seem to be fitting in and I sit wondering – what if we met again!