Despite the country’s courts — including the Supreme Court — repeatedly condemning the institutional phenomenon known as ragging in India’s 431 universities and 21,000 colleges, it refuses to die. Hard on the heels of the tragic death of Aman Kachru, a student of Dr. Rajendra Prasad Medical College in Kangra, Himachal Pradesh, who was killed in a ragging incident last month, the southern state of Andhra Pradesh has been shaken by the arrest of five senior girl students of the Government Agriculture Engineering College at Bapatla in Guntur district, for ragging a first-year student, driving her to a suicide attempt. Public opinion in this conservative southern state has been particularly outraged by the nature of the offence: the alleged perpetrators reportedly forced N. Triveni, a fresher from a small village, to strip, and humiliated her, driving her to consume pesticide.
Still recovering in a private hospital in Guntur, unable to speak, on March 12 Triveni wrote the names of her tormentors on a slip for her father, Venkataramana, a compounder in a hospital in his native village, Bejjipuram in Srikakulam district. According to the local police who arrested four senior students on March 14 (and the fifth the following day), the ragging had started shortly after Triveni entered the Bapatla Agriculture Engineering College (estb. 1945) which offers degree programmes in irrigation engineering, food engineering, food chemistry and nutrition, industrial microbiology, etc.
“We have arrested five girls and have charged them under the anti-ragging laws, and have booked a case against the college management under the Andhra Pradesh Prohibition of Ragging in Educational Institutions Act, 1997, as they too are liable for negligence,” superintendent of Guntur district police A.V. Ranganath informed the media. Currently the five senior girls are out on conditional bail granted to them on March 17, but they have been suspended from the college.
D. Satyanarayana, principal of the college, refuses to comment on the incident. “I can’t comment at this time. We are investigating the case and we will issue an official statement later,” he informed media personnel on March 16.
However according to sources inside the college, ragging incidents are routine in this college, a parking slot for youth aspiring for government jobs, rather than interested in working in the agriculture sector. There is widespread speculation in Guntur and Hyderabad that the police would not have swung into action so swiftly after the revelation of the scandal, but for the Supreme Court issuing a suo motu contempt notice to the college management on March 16 to explain why it had not forestalled the ragging incident, and also seeking a status report from the director-general of police of Andhra Pradesh.
Meanwhile on March 16, the Acharya N. G. Ranga Agricultural University (ANGRAU), to which the Bapatla Agricultural Engineering College is affiliated, constituted a five-member committee to investigate the ragging incident.
“Although it is seldom reported in the media, ragging of freshers by girl students in college hostels is not unusual. It’s a national phenomenon, though it tends to be less violent and sadistic among women students and is rooted in deep and perhaps unconscious class and caste biases. It requires more than moral exhortations and mild punishments to be eliminated. Now following the recent death by ragging of young Aman Kachru and Triveni’s suicide attempt, the time has come to legislate severe punishment including expulsion and prosecution under criminal law to stamp out this evil from India’s campuses,” says Dr. Sarangi, registrar of the Hyderabad Central University.
Mohammad Vazeeruddin (Hyderabad)