Guest Column

Ragging an evil – Let’s say “NO” to it

Rinku Khumukcham11K views

By: Vinod Chandrashekhar Dixit
The vicious practice of ragging has not only become rampant in our educational institutions but also acquired hideous proportions costing the sanity of the institutions and life of some of the students. Even today, students from the rural areas have a lingering fear when they go to cities for higher studies. To dispel such fears, colleges should prominently display a banner saying their campus is free from ragging. Those who indulge in ragging look for temporary pleasure but end up destroying many lives. Students alone can put an end to it. Anti-ragging steps should be strictly enforced. Parents and teachers are equally responsible for eliminating the virus. Service organizations and NGOs should too launch awareness campaigns against the menace in educational institutions. The cantankerous behaviour of some students in colleges is often the offshoot of indiscipline in the schools in which they studied, and uncaring families. Instead of attempting to classify the acts of ragging as “soft” and “hard,” we should employ the guidelines of the committee in letter and spirit. If faculty members communicate more informally with them, a healthy academic environment can be created.
Ragging and abetting the crime on the college campus will remove the lurking fear in the minds of freshmen, especially those who opt to stay in hostels. The authorities should not stop with just making rules but take effective steps to implement the same and highlight the ill-effects of ragging through the visual media. The move will implant fear and discipline in the minds of senior students who indulge in ragging. Even today, students from the rural areas have a lingering fear when they go to cities for higher studies. To dispel such fears, colleges should prominently display a banner saying their campus is free from ragging. Those who indulge in ragging look for temporary pleasure but end up destroying many lives. Students alone can put an end to it. Anti-ragging steps should be strictly enforced. Parents and teachers are equally responsible for eliminating the virus. Service organizations and NGOs should too launch awareness campaigns against the menace in educational institutions.
There was not much awareness in those days and ragging in the past was one way of familiarizing freshers with senior students. But now, the increased incidents of ragging have exposed the errors in our education system which may be successful in churning out academically brilliant students, but has failed to inculcate proper values in them.
The cantankerous behaviour of some students in colleges is often the offshoot of indiscipline in the schools in which they studied, and uncaring families. Instead of attempting to classify the acts of ragging as “soft” and “hard,” we should employ the guidelines of the committee in letter and spirit. If faculty members communicate more informally with them, a healthy academic environment can be created.
It is also noticed that those who indulge in ragging do not plan in advance. On most of the occasions, things go out of control. The guilty should not only be expelled but also barred from admission to any other college.
Looking to the increase in ragging incidents, active involvement of media and the civil society is essential in tackling the problem of ragging. The mindset of the student has changed and now we need to focus in on enforcing stringent measures like rustication of a student, withholding of scholarship, debarring a student from appearing in any test. If possible students who involve in ragging must be put in jail instead of just being suspended or expelled. An example needs to be set.

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1 comment

Spartacus June 10, 2026 - 12:03 pm
Unlike the frat-pledge hazing incidents in America, in India ragging never involves any element of voluntary participation in suffering by a junior. It consists of the most hideous sexual brutalisation, humiliation and gruesome physical torture inflicted by force on juniors who are given no choice but to submit and endure the monstrosities or else risk being tortured to death with very dim chances of any legal costs accruing to the bullies. This is true even of the Raakhan rites in which medical college junior males and females are forced to sodomise one another's bodies under pain of severe beatings; or male juniors made to urinate on live naked heating elements of electric cookers as punishment for underperformance. Some closet-ragging-apologist influencers are offering advice to wannabe medical students in how to negotiate through the PDP in hostels of medical colleges in India ? Is there any way for junior girls to take ragging in one's stride even while enduring it helplessly ? Is there a safe strategy that can be pursued by women enrolled in the first year of college for coming to terms with equanimity with the new and sometimes unsettling sexual experiences that get naturally encountered whilst enduring ragging and for managing the scandals they can precipitate in one's psyche ? To realise the viciousness of the mindset behind such campaigns, it is first necessary to be acquainted with what errands PDP or mild ragging entails upon junior girls in many medical colleges Stripping, nudity, vulgar vituperation and lingual and digital masturbation are the common errands demanded of juniors in medical college girls' hostel PDP (Personality Development Programme) aka mild ragging in India, more especially Southern India and Maharashtra. Defiance is punished with beatings with dumb bells, pulling at the pubic hair and pricking with sharp objects on the private parts. During so called PDP, senior women palpate the exposed breasts of junior girls standing before them in the nude state and pass judgements on whether the junior girls are chaste or promiscuous based on the appearance and feel of those breasts. The following is a description of a PDP session, or " Personality Development Programme" which is a euphemism for so-called "mild" ragging:- Junior girls are made to strip completely from head to toe and remove underwear, then stand either in the Crucifixion pose with the arms outstretched and extended sideways, or the hands up position, or in between the two with the arms raised up diagonally, and the back and legs as well as the back of the head abutted firmly against the wall. Senior girls then take turns to abuse each girl in the vilest of vulgar language, spewing lewd invectives on their mothers as well, and inviting them verbally to engage in lascivious acts mimicking homosexuality with the senior girls. Then starts a round of incessant hard slapping on both cheeks of the junior girls for as long as any senior girl might fancy. During this time, senior women leave no stone unturned in humiliating the junior girls by squeezing the latters' breasts at will, and saying things like the bobs are filled with dirt from the puddle instead of milk and will interest only an animal and not any male human etc. etc. They tease and handle junior girls by fiddling with their exposed clitoris without the least iota of shame, and then the PDP session culminated in a round in which junior girls are ordered to engage in mutual digital and lingual masturbation, even as senior women film and record video clips. Senior girls take more liberties during PDP with married female juniors who might be subjected to finger rape. Lady doctors have recalled how they were tortured in medical college hostels during their 1st MBBS years by senior women who had threatened to kill them when they had resisted orders to strip nude, and had plunged their heads in bucketfuls of water , holding them down by force in such position for some seconds. They were psychologically manipulated by being told that drowning deaths will be easily passed for suicide by college administration.This in short is what might befall a junior girl during PDP. Another testing ordeal faced by selected girls during more severe ragging is the Raakhan (protector) rite of cross-gender anal coitus rampant in Maharashtra. Raakhan rites of adultation:- Undergraduate Female juniors residing in medical college girls' hostels are led away by senior girls from their dorms like docile sheep after an arduous session of conditioning via severe beatings, to postgraduate doctors' hostel or to undergraduate boys' hostel in the evening, well before commencement of the night time curfew in girls hostel. In the boys hostel, after stationing private security guards as sentinels at the entrance, those girls are herded like sheep with boys from their own batch under pain of severe beatings and pinching/pulling of pubic skin/hair in their own hostel later on in case of defiance) and then the entire community is made to strip completely nude and ordered into pairs comprising of opposite genders each, made to stand one behind the other in close embrace in a position of mutual masturbation or anal coitus, with the right hand placed on the introitus or male member of the partner standing directly ahead as the case may be, with very heavy penalty for the male partner in form of having to urinate on naked elements of an electric cooker (with its inevitable excruciating pain of electric shock to the pudendum) for even momentary lapse wherein the male member might have been withdrawn before climaxing or the right hand might have shaken exposing the opposite partner's intimate areas to the onlooker crowd of seniors. Such excruciatingly painful treatment is meted during Raakhan rites of ragging to a male junior who deliberately or inadvertently withdraws his male member before climaxing or hesitates or removes his right hand from its proper position on the female partner's introitus out of shyness, indisposition or oversight. Juniors are told that the idea is to foster bonding and team-spirit between male and female batchmates and to transform shy boys into tough and libidinous men who are serious in bed and can pride themselves on being worthy protectors of their wives. In medical college campuses, it is most commonly the hostels of post-graduate students where terrified first year male and female juniors rounded up from undergraduate hostels are forcibly trafficked for enaction of the "Raakhan" rites of anal coitus with fellow batchmates of the opposite gender. Postgraduate hostels are convenient locales because many male postgraduates share living quarters inside those hostels with their spouses, so the mere presence of sight of female (first year) women in those hostels does not of itself suffice to raise eyebrows of lay bystanders. But inside those hostels, as the female spouses of male postgraduate students, who include non-medico women as well, move about the corridors they sometimes fortuitously run into pairs of first year juniors of opposite gender being coerced via beatings into Raakhan-ship. But they turn away unfazed in nonchalant indifference without raising any alarm as if they have seen nothing untoward because they have been conditioned by their husbands to accept such ongoings as part and parcel of college culture. Eventhough forcing junior girls kidnapped from their hostel rooms and forcibly dragged or goaded under duress to post graduate doctors' hostel or to junior boys' hostels into oral or anal coitus or the more common coitus interfemoris with male batchmates, is logically tantamount to rape; yet, the juniors are scared into silence by frightening them with the idea that it is not the senior bullies, but the male junior batchmates participating in such carnal liasons under coercion through pain of physical torture for refusal, on whom the onus of sexual offence will fall under criminal law. Girls who are stripped and forced to undergo anal coitus and to sip semen in the course of medical college ragging under pain of severe beatings and ramming of their heads into the wall are told that experiences of anal and oral coitus are mandatory for successful career as a doctor because a doctor supposedly needs to eschew all shyness when conducting physical examination of disrobed patients. Whereas when these very same orgies are repeated under an entirely different setting in engineering colleges, the female victims are told that they needed release by way of forcible adultation since they will ne ofed to shed all inhibitions in future as well because a truly well educated woman ought to be able to entertain her husband in multifarous ways to keep him from succumbing to vices. Married women residing in medical college hostels too are visited without leniency with the hedonist rigours of ragging such as oral and anal coitus, but are left so gravely battered psychologically that they fail to muster the courage to enter into a honest conversation detailing their ordeal for the entire remaining part of their lives. The mafiosi rules book of ragging brooks no exemption or leniency even for married women in this regard. In fact, married female juniors are informed that they are supposed to be conversant with the nuanced antics of pleasurable companionship from experience and are ordered to share their expertise with fellow female batchmates by way of pratical demonstration of foreplay and unnatural intercourse with batchmates of the opposite gender in the nude state. As gory details of Vafaadari or Raakhanship rites of anal coitus in medical college ragging transpire out(Raakhan is widely prevalent in Maharashtra colleges with no stakeholder serious about its discontinuation), a deliberation is needed into the psychology of extreme terror which can manipulate juniors into compliance. The everpresent threat of progressively increasing physical torture which may well continue unabated uptil the point of death, looms large over every junior who might contemplate resisting the sexual advances of seniors who ragging them, or of lodging any formal complaint with college authorities which largely go unheeded or sumnarily dismissed. Seniors who indulge in ragging seriously mean it when they threaten juniors. The threat of being tortured to death and the legal system remaining unmoved and indifferent is real and actionable. Ragging is never a one-time event but is a continual process of intermittent bouts of moderate-to-severe physical torture, which is spread over a period of about one and a half years. Fairly significant numbers of both male and female juniors running into about a hundred in number have been actually tortured to death in the process of ragging over a span of 8 years as part of a monstrous strategy designed by seniors for setting an example to discourage all potential whistleblowers among remaining students. Vasavi Tomar was murdered at a college in Nainital by her female seniors by strangulation/hanging for having stood up against ragging and saved her roommate in the girls' hostel the previous night. It cannot not be overemphasised that the torture inflicted upon juniors in the name of ragging/ interaction is far graver than murder in terms of the quantum of physical and emotional suffering perpetrated, because every session of grand ragging which is undoubtedly an instance of collective participation by depraved defacto mafiosi ruffians masquerading as respectable students in an orgy of mass abduction, illegal confinement and tyrranical physical torture plus sexual vandalization, and often lasts several long horrendous hours past the midnight, comes with the implicit looming threat of evermore severe torture which might linger in intermittent continuality for indefinite extent of time IN THE RARE CIRCUMSTANCE THAT A JUNIOR VICTIM MUSTERS THE COURAGE TO FILE A FORMAL COMPLAINT WITH THE AUTHORITIES. And this looming threat comes with the rider that such the next ragging session might well last until the break-point of endurance ie to say until it has caused the demise of the victim. And when a ragging murder occurs, which is an all too comon phenomenon, pro-ragging apologists demand acquittal by arguing that it was a lamentable instance of a harmless "traditional" " interaction" session unintentionally gone "overboard". The only reason whole lots of helpless juniors comply with hedonist orders to participate in such revulsive rites as the cross-gender sodomy of "Raakhan" is that in the circumstances they find such compliance as the only feasible (albeit repugnant) choice against the alternative of being earmarked for vengeance in subsequent days in form of targetted brutalisation by way of severe beatings that test the limits of human endurance on the flimsiest of pretexts. The big question is not the debate on whether it is ethically defensible to "tarnish the image of the medical profession and or malign reputation of women" who had suffered as victims of such traditions in their yesteryears by going public with the gory details of criminal obsessions such as Raakhan, but the more pertinent one of asking why the college ecosystem should even be permitted to be one wired to be conducive to the fulfillment of such grotesquely obnoxious errands in the event that a perverse senior should fancy experimenting with them. Senior just had to input the most vile of his secret obsessions and lo, chances are that it will manifest without costs to the perpetrator. This system needs a major overhaul; perfunctory tweaks serve no other purpose than pushing the widely prevalent monstrosities under the carpet somewhat more removed from public view than before.
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