Understanding ragging
Tanvir Aeijaz
| Ragging is a social fact of an environment where there is persistent fear, threat of violence and a complete subordination and power over ‘juniors’ by seniors. |
STOP THE MENACE: Activists protest against the death of Aman Kachroo, a medical student in Himachal Pradesh. Beneath every reported case of ragging lies an unimaginable pile of cases — unheard, unattended and unsolved.
Love thy juniors. Quite a simple precept. But when it comes to practice it fades out as a mere rhetoric and takes the shape of ragging in educational institutions. Interestingly, there exists an entrapping conundrum in the ragging discourse that ‘now virtually everyone rejects the idea of defending ragging, but it is practised virtually everywhere with burgeoning impunity.’ Beneath every reported incident of ragging lies an unimaginable pile of cases — unheard, unattended and unsolved.
Ragging is seemingly one of the worst forms of human rights abuse that takes socially and legally unacceptable patterns of physical, sexual and mental torture and drug abuse. In some cases, the brutality is so severe that either the victim commits suicide or it results in death. For instance, Aman Kachroo, who died due to ragging at the Tanda medical college, was continuously beaten up and tortured for almost two-and-a-half hours. Though ragging conjures up an image of teasing, as it literally means, it is a social fact of an environment where there is persistent fear, threat of violence and eventually a complete subordination and power over the ‘juniors’ by the seniors.
Educational institutions, universities and colleges, being the active agents of social transformation, are at the core of the dynamics of institutional interactional processes of civil society. And civil society, which is not a homogeneous society, is a stage where the dialectics between the social and the political, domination and resistance and oppression and emancipation is played out. Therefore, 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.
Educational institutions are a very significant part of the larger public sphere. Even colleges in remote areas are connected with the socio-cultural milieu of the metropolis and vice versa, thanks to the Internet and communication revolution. So these colleges cannot escape the psycho-social values prevalent in our society. Particularly two aspects of the value system, among many, need to be taken serious cognisance of: the idea of ‘masculinity’ as it ‘is’ practised and as it ‘ought to be’ and secondly, the notion of ‘institutional democracy’ as a lasting solution for the scourge of ragging.
Those who indulge in ragging in educational institutions are a bunch of hoodlums, mostly male, who have their own shared sense of masculinity. For them, it is the way to attract girl students first and then the rest by exhibiting force, domination, hegemony, sadomasochism and, of course, body (a la Salman Khan) to establish themselves as superior beings just because they were born one or two years before the tormented. Perhaps, one can link these ideas of masculinity being reproduced as ‘rites of passage’ in colleges with ‘patriarchy’ and ‘gerontocracy’ that promote and sustain the kind of masculinity which is aggressive, violent, intolerant, non-consensual and sexually charged. Instead, masculinity ought to mean men being gentlemen, tolerant, sober, consensual, creative by using mind and not floundering body and, above all, trustworthy.
Students, like citizens, have equal claims to utilise the college space and facility because a) they pay for their habitat and studies in the college almost equally, b) they receive knowledge and wisdom together from the same teacher and c) all are bound in a shared small world by a sense of commitment to do good to society. In order to have legitimacy of the claim of ‘equal citizen’ at the college level, what is needed is ‘institutional democracy’ wherein the students as major stakeholders in social transformation can learn to participate in the mainstream institutional processes. Most of the professional institutes, including defence training academies, where ragging is the severest, do not have elected student bodies and wherever they have the post-holders are nominated. Post-Aman’s death, the college pledged a draft copy of anti-ragging measures to be taken was given to us — to abandon nominations for student bodies and to conduct elections on the pattern of Lyngdoh Committee recommendations. General body meetings between teachers and students, affirmative action programmes such as ‘extra-classes’ for marginalised and weaker sections, gender sensitising programmes, improving information access facility for students, and constituting clubs and societies with recreational facilities would go in a long way in promoting democratic and students human rights culture and perhaps eradicating the menace of ragging.
No comments:
Post a Comment