By a student
Picture this: there is a practice that the Supreme Court, Central and state governments have outlawed as a "cognisable criminal offence" and your daily newspaper promotes this practice on page one. Can the media get more insensitive and irresponsible than this?
The crime in question is ragging, and the newspaper coverage of this crime in Delhi University raises a few pointers on the state of local reporting in the national capital.
I am a student of a prominent North campus college and stay in its hostel. Ragging "in any form" is banned under a Delhi University (DU) ordinance, which reads thus:
Ragging for the purposes of this Ordinance, ordinarily means any act, conduct or practice by which dominant power or status of senior students is brought to bear on students freshly enrolled or students who are in all way considered junior or inferior by other students; and includes individual or collective acts or practices which
* involve physical assault or threat or use of physical force;
* violate the status dignity and honour of women students;
* violate the status, dignity and honour of students belonging to the scheduled caste and tribes.
* expose students to ridicule and contempt and affect their self-steem;
* entail verbal abuse and aggression, indecent gestures and obscene behaviour.
Whichever way you read this, ragging in any form means that even the mildest ragging is banned.
Delivering the order in a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by an organisation named the Vishwa Jagriti Mission, the Supreme Court had observed in 2001, "Ragging can be stopped by creating an awareness amongst students, teachers and parents that it is a reprehensible act which does no good to any one, and by simultaneously generating an atmosphere of discipline by sending a clear message that no act of ragging shall be tolerated and any act of ragging shall not go unnoticed and unpunished." Further, the Court has said put the onus of curbing ragging on the colleges. If an institution is unable to curb ragging, the UGC (University Grants Commission) or other funding agencies any stop in part or whole the grants and aids to these institutions. They can also be disaffiliated.
Ragging in DU no doubt has declined substantially, but instead of assisting it to a peaceful demise why are the papers promoting it? Why is The Hindu saying in an article, "Ragging can be fun, if played in the right spirit"?
Delhi University opened for the academic session 2003-4 on July 16 and this was the first day of ragging, reports about which appeared the next day. The most glaring incident of promotion of ragging was in the Hindustan Times. The lead story on page one was "Freshers complain Day 1 was too goody goody", accompanied with a three column photograph that showed a girl dancing in Kirori Mal College. The photograph was prominently headlined, in block capital letters, "HOW ABOUT A LITTLE RAGGING?" The tone of the jointly bylined story is ironical in its irresponsibility: "First day, first show of college was a flop for most freshers at Delhi University. They went expecting to get ragged bare, but went home disappointed and bored." The article said that ragging isn’t what it used to be, which is true, but why did it mourn this? The article quoted only those first year students who said they were disappointed at not being ragged much. This indeed may be a viewpoint of some students, but as an insider I can tell you that there are quite a few students who don’t see any point in ragging. In any case, even if a student wants to get ragged it’s against the law.
The Times of India, not to one be outdone, also had a similar picture on P1 with a P3 report: ‘Day 1: Fun for freshers, seniors’. The report gave a more realistic picture of the ragging scene than most other papers, but it still called it ‘fun’.
The Indian Express in its Newsline supplement was also very similar in its portrayal of the whole issue as a light tamasha. ‘A rather quiet New Year on the Campus,’ said The Hindu. The Statesman seemed very sensible when it asked on Page One, ‘Lull before ragging storm in Campus?’ It also reported how DU colleges "created history" by beginning their classes on the very first day. And all the papers saying ragging is fun seemed to suggest that students go to college for fun, not for studying. This is in line with these papers’ policy of dumbing down in order ‘to give readers what they want’.
The HT article said: "Being asked to sing and dance to ‘Kaanta laga’ seems to have been the most daring thing freshers were made to do on Friday." I know of a case in a North Campus college where a (Delhi) girl was asked by male seniors to bring them a condom from the nearby market of Kamla Nagar. She did this with some hesitation, but just imagine how would a reserved girl from a conservative small town family have responded? It is very likely that she, and perhaps even the Delhi girl, would have liked to avoid this situation.
The papers have been saying that ragging this year has been very mild, but ‘mild ragging’ is a subjective term. For someone it may be fun, but for someone else it may be immensely embarrassing. A student who is shy or completely unexposed to sexuality can be traumatised in such cases. Why then is the media projecting ragging as ‘fun’, as though it is part of a Channel [V] ‘Popstars’ contest? This undue emphasis on ragging being ‘fun’, or mourning that ragging has declined, is almost a message to seniors: ‘Why don’t you rag, it’s fun!’ The justification of mild ragging is like saying that anti-Semitic jokes don’t amount to spreading hatred against Jews or condoning the Holocaust. But surely, small evils can escalate into big ones?
If only the reporters would have cared to look deeper they would have found something fishy in the hostels. Quite a lot of not-so-mild ragging has been and is still going on in the hostels of prominent North Campus colleges such as SRCC (Sri Ram College of Commerce), St. Stephen’s, Kirori Mal, Hindu and Hans Raj. The media coverage of this issue concentrated so much on day scholars dancing and singing as though the hostels don’t matter. This is the kind of ragging going on in these hostels: stripping, making freshers wear formals all day, making them carry luggage and clean rooms, and sending them on errands to the water cooler or the nearby markets. Besides this there are ‘recreational’ activities such as vulgar songs that freshers have to learn and sing. Is this fun? Not to me. Everyone knows that the real ragging always takes place in the hostels, so why didn’t the papers care to investigate what’s going on in there? That would have been too much of hard work.
Is hostel ragging really ‘fun’? Is it fun to work like a slave for your seniors, just because they were born a year before you? Is it fun to live with the constant fear that your sleep is going to be disturbed by a senior wanting to see your body? Is it ‘fun’ to live with the constant fear that if you go to the mess tonight for dinner, somebody will catch you and won’t let you sleep till two o’clock? Is it fun to actually understand what Kafkaesque fear is?
In ragging lingo a newcomer is called ‘fachch’, and the deployment of this term by the newspapers with the aim of pepping up their stories, is also objectionable and potentially promotes ragging. The Indian Express wanted to tell fachchas about the eating hot-spots around DU and a frivolous story on P1 of TOI’s Delhi Times supplement wanted to explain fachchas the abbreviations used by college-goers. Obsessed with such earth-shattering matters as what to wear to college, the papers have no time or space to tell freshers how to deal with ragging, where to report, are the anti-ragging measures enough, where to look for counselling…
The first case of ragging?
It was surprising therefore, to read the bylined story ‘Ragging at Hindu College, police called’ on P1 of TOI on August 8. It said:
In the first serious case of ragging in Delhi University, a Hindu College fresher was stripped and ragged in the hostel by several seniors on Monday.
The fresher was able to identify one of the persons who ragged him and lodged a complaint with the hostel warden. The hostel committee has suspended the senior`s hostel admission as ragging has been banned by the Supreme Court. After the fresher complained that the accused that threatened him with ``physical harm``, the warden on Wednesday approached the police for protection.
This was definitely not the first case of ragging, just that it was the first case where matters became serious enough to be taken to the police. However, the Hindustan Times reported the next day: ‘Hindu ragging: Did it really happen?’ The paper reported the version of the accused who said that the college was victimising him as it wanted to prevent him from becoming the president of the hostel union. Meanwhile, the student who reported against this ragging is now moving "like a king," says one of his seniors. Unfortunately, others in DU hostels can’t afford this luxury because they are told ad nauseam that the crime of ragging is ‘fun’.