Modified from “Three stages of ragging” by Harsh Agarwal, Founder Member, CURE: Coalition to Uproot Ragging from Education
Question No.1: How many of you think ragging is bad?
Majority Answers: Everybody says ragging is bad.
Question No.2: Is ragging necessary for friendship?
Majority Answers: First complete silence. Then few hands are raised. Ultimately majority hands are up.
Question No.3: Does mild ragging should be allowed?
Majority Answers: Yes.
Just think over the following questions:
- What is friendship?
- How did you make friends in school where there was no ragging?
- Is friendship a natural phenomenon or it needs a catalyst like ragging?
- Does ragging happen across the world?
Both students as well as teachers, think that it is fine to have a mild or toned-down level of ragging and it is only rogues and hooligans who make it nasty and are giving bad name to this traditional method of initiating friendship. When any death or serious incident of ragging is reported, students and teachers perceive it as a different ‘form’ of ragging practiced in ‘notorious’ colleges.
Different aspects of ragging can be classified into three stages, with one stage followed by the other and finally leading to unfortunate consequences.
Stage-1:
Stage 1 is the stage of myths and ignorance. As mentioned earlier, people have wrong notions that (a) ragging helps in friendship (b) is practiced across the world (c) helps in personality development (d) mild ragging is good and can be kept under limits (e) ragging is an old practice and we have to keep this tradition alive. These myths sow the seed of ragging.
For some students ragging does give opportunity to interact and make friendship and also provide an informal platform to display their talent if they have, in certain fields, limited to, singing, dancing, acting and mimicry. For these students ragging not only helps in winning friends and becoming popular in college but it also becomes the only mode of entertainment in otherwise dull college life, not offering much extra-curricular activity to students. It is therefore not a surprise to later see these students becoming strong proponents of ragging. However, several others lacking talent in singing and dancing or not comfortable with the idea of forced and speed friendship find ragging humiliating and an invasion on individual’s liberty and choice. Most of these students quietly suffer the agony so as not to jeopardize their career and shatter dreams of their parents. Many such cases gradually fall into the trap of stage 2 and ragging starts taking dangerous turn from there.
Stage-2: Stage 2 is when socio-economic complexities that exist in our country start influencing ragging subtly. Once the concept of ragging gets legitimacy it becomes impossible to ward off the influence of various prejudices and socio-economic factors from ragging. Soon the so called mild ragging starts getting caste, regional, class, gender, sexual, campus politics, etc color to it. These identities decide the nature and severity of ragging and from here ragging starts treading the path that leads to violence and abuse.
Stage-3: Stage 3 is the final stage of ragging that often makes newspapers’ headlines. Once stage 2 gets out of hand it results in violence, hospitalisation, sexual abuse, physical assault, death and suicide. When these cases are reported in the media there is hue and cry and strong appeal from all corners for stricter laws against ragging. Anger at this point is so high that we want nothing less than death sentence for ragging. However because of our myopic approach our focus gets fixed on stage 3 and we tend to overlook the bigger picture how everything started at stage 1 in the form of small prank for speed-friendship and personality development.
We must not forget that ragging originates at stage 1 from a set of illogical reasons and therefore perfect prescription to cure this problem is to attack those reasons right at the inception stage of ragging.
Some Statistics on Ragging
- Ragging is an annual tradition prevalent in South Asia highest in Srilanka and then in India.
- Girls do rag and they also do it brutally.
- In 2008-09, 89 cases of ragging were reported in India.
- including 12 deaths and 5 attempted suicides
- 44% cases led to hospitalization due to physical injuries
- State wise ragging cases reported in India
Now a days ragging means – to tease, to berate, scold or taunt, playing practical jokes on somebody or teaching someone a lesson. Unfortunately, in a college, a senior who has some previous history of ragging may like to get back by venting his frustrations on the freshmen.It destroy the respect and faith to the seniors as well as the reputation of a college.
If ragging means mental torture, accepted in some extended!!
If ragging means physical harassment, then should protest!!