Ragging in Universities — The Underlying Causes

I was staying in Calcutta for the last few weeks and the headline story that gripped the entire city was a murder case at Jadavpur University. The University is renowned for its academic excellence and political ideology. The students often are seen leading protests against various crucial social and political issues, and they are known to voice the masses.

The University has hostels allotted for the students, and it is no old news that the newly admitted students find it difficult to get a room in the hostel, even though their names are on the list of eligible candidates. A few weeks back news flashed that a boy of merely 18 years had been found lying naked in the campus. He was taken to the hospital and very soon he was declared dead.

The police started an immediate investigation and in no time this was the headline in all the news channels in Calcutta. Shortly afterwards, the cause of this tragic death became public knowledge as the police revealed that the young man had fallen victim to severe mental stress due to a hazing ragging by the seniors and the ex-students of the University. People all over the state were shocked to the core. What kind of ragging could possibly compel a boy to jump off a hostel room balcony while naked?

The police did not take much time to arrest the accusations, and it became a central theme of many panel discussions in the media channels. Soon after that, the news of two more students committing suicide from IIT and a medical college was in the news.

But what could possibly be the reason for such violence at such a young age? I think the society where we live has forced us to believe that we need to apply our power this way. Power is that elusive possession we all desire. It is omnipresent, and it will always be. The famous philosopher Michelle Foucault has said that power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. So we can’t really run away from it, and if we resist it, we will have to forge a battle. I think we need to learn to work around it.

The boys who have been accused of such severe ragging have a very illusory idea of power, eagerly grasping at any means to attain a semblance of control, no matter how disillusioned it is. The more powerful the centre becomes, the peripheries become increasingly marginalized. The education system should focus on the roots of such behaviour, which they are very far from addressing. This same power works between men and women, upper caste and lower caste, white and black people, et al the same power that dictates the superiority of one over another on baseless grounds.

The illusory pursuit of power has been a source of many wars, and battles — big and small throughout history. The ones that have made big headlines on Tv, and the ones that have started and gone through severe traumatic experiences in the minds of the people and stayed at home and within families. This unresolved fight for power at home doctrine such poisonous ideas and desires among the children, who then manifest them on innocents.

So, no matter how many panel discussions happen, and how many showcases the universities receive, the problem will remain until it is recognized, acknowledged and seriously worked upon, not only as a state institution but in smaller groups like family.