Where would you expect to find these practices carried out in a ritual manner? Physical and mental abuse, torture, sexual violence, beatings so vicious that they lead to death. You might say “a prison”, if the Abu Ghraib pictures are still fresh in your mind. Or you might think of Indian police stations.
If you’re a man or boy of a certain age, though, this might bring back a rush of nostalgia for your boarding school or hostel. Every year, there’s an outcry against ragging: a few students are expelled, editorials wax eloquent on the menace, and then everyone forgets about it until the next crop of victims.
But it’s difficult to forget what happened this week at the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi. Three freshmen were forced by their seniors to have sex with each other — and in one case, with a dog — while a dozen other students watched. This has been described as “vulgar”, as “shocking”, as a hazing ritual gone terribly wrong. I’d suggest we need new terms here. How about “prisoner abuse”? How about “torture”, and “violence” and “cruelty”, and while we’re at it, how about reviving a little word called “outrage”?
Most victims of ragging are male. Women’s hostels can get vicious. Forget pious pap about the gentler sex, women are perfectly capable of being as warped as their male counterparts. But the fact is that the students who’re driven, year after year, to suicide, or who die “accidentally”, or who suffer sexual abuse, even rape — most of these are men.
At SPA, you had three people who were so terrorised that they had no choice except to comply with a humiliating and brutalising rite — in front of other adults who did nothing to stop it.
But the way a lot of people see it, what went wrong was a matter of degree. In our twisted society, a measure of violence among men is acceptable, even expected. Victims of ragging who complain of minor violations — being forced to strip, being locked in a dark place — are treated with derision. Boys will be boys, and men will be sadists — to be ragged is to be inducted into the men’s room, the cult of power and humiliation that fuels male violence.
What happened at SPA was a violent crime carried out on three people who were coldly rendered powerless. If we took the rights of men seriously, the perpetrators would be expelled and would face criminal charges. Instead, SPA has “suspended” the students — they can attend classes, but they won’t get attendance. An HRD inquiry is on, but the message is clear: SPA isn’t going to take this seriously.
I cannot imagine the levels of sexual repression, self-hatred and powerlessness any man would have to feel before he could harm someone else by way of a stupid ritual. But I cannot imagine, either, how deep the currents of darkness run in a society where ragging, in all its twisted sadism, is seen as a normal rite of passage. Until something goes wrong. And as three students at SPA know, as the father of the boy who drowned during another “ragging incident” at Manipal knows, as countless other silent victims know, something does usually go wrong when it’s this time of the year.
