A fair ordeal: Discrimination, State accountability and the menace of ragging in Indian educational institutions

Despite the Supreme Court’s strong guidelines in 2009 to monitor and curb ragging, a recent report reveals that ragging related offences surged in India between 2012 and 2023. To effectuate the Constitution’s transformative vision on India’s educational spaces, we need a deeper relook at how gender, class and caste inform everyday oppression on our campuses.

THE Indian Constitution establishes political unity in a widely divided society. The Constituent Assembly members envisioned a State capable of liberating the population from the shackles of legacies of injustice. In the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill apprised us about the difficulty of democracy in certain societies in the absence of some background condition. Sudipta Kaviraj has argued that the democratic credentials of our Constitution, the lexicon of which is borrowed from the West, improvised itself in the everyday life of Indian polity.

This constitutes a pedagogical issue that the State, the courts and citizens continuously encounter in independent India. Unlike the West, the concentration of power was never limited to the State. Hierarchies of power were maintained by self-regulating communities, creating a system of “layered sovereignty”. India’s founding moments, that culminated in the framing of the Constitution, also put into motion the liberation from political servitude and the conditions for self-determination against layered oppressive structures.

It is this transformative vision of the Indian Constitution that invites us to look closely at the ravaging problem of discrimination against minorities in India's public educational institutions

While on one hand, the Constitution induced the equality provisions in a legal regime defined strictly by the relationship between the State and citizens, it simultaneously aspired to dismantle the repressive forces operating in the society, which resulted in unequal power relations among citizens.

It is this transformative vision of the Indian Constitution that invites us to look closely at the ravaging problem of discrimination against minorities in India's public educational institutions, the growing number of suicides due to ragging, and the accountability of the State mechanism.

KIIT student death: Need to reform UGC and BCI guidelines to strengthen institutional accountability

Ragging on the rise

This month, after five students at Kottayam's Government Nursing College were arrested for allegedly ragging juniors, a disturbing video surfaced showing a student being tortured. It underlined the prevalence of ragging-related crimes in many campuses despite legal liabilities and the Supreme Court’s guidelines. In another incident earlier this month, a 15-year-old schoolboy in Kochi committed suicide allegedly due to relentless “ragging and bullying”.

Beyond the horrific nature of the crime recorded in both incidents, the operational callousness of the authorities is deeply troubling, though not unusual. In the first incident, the details of the chilling nature of the crime were unveiled when three first-year students of the institution registered a police complaint. What was initially treated by the authorities as a dispute between juniors and seniors turned out to be an act of ragging that had reportedly been going on for three months.