[Reader-list] Ragging/Representation

[Stop Ragging Campaign]

See this: http://www.imsindia.com/nrrane_trust/images/ragging_tearshi.jpg

It's a poster brought out jointly by two organisations with the aim of
appealing to seniors not to rag. It is emotional rather than rational
in nature. "Everyone gets ragged. Not everyone survives," it reads
along with a photograph that focuses on an eye filled with tears
brimming over. The contours of the skin around the eye are clearly
visible. The person who visualised the poster must have thought an
actual photograph portraying trauma and suffering is important, rather
than a graphic. "Tease. Humiliate. Assault. Torture. Kill." The
trajectory is graphically presented so as to drive home the point that
one leads to another.

"Everyone gets ragged. Not everyone survives." How many meanings can
you tease out of that statement? Everyone doesn't survive ragging: but
surely, most people do? So who survives ragging, and who commits
suicide?

The Stop Ragging Campaign regularly gets hate mail (or comments on the
blog-website) saying things such as, "Only sissies and pansies have
problems with ragging. You guys are a bunch of them." And: "Those who
committed suicide must have been so weak that they wouldn't have
survived the big, bad world anyway."

This becomes worrying when the police talks in the same vein about a victim. 

So when Anoop Kapoor committed suicide [
http://stop-ragging.blogspot.com/2005/04/anoop-kapoor-kanpurlucknow-12.html
], a Times of India report said:

"The officials said that Anoop was not a lone case and hundreds of
students were subjected to ragging every year and nobody committed
suicide so easily.

"They said that their intention was not to defend the seniors and
justify the ragging. But since the boy took such an extreme step, the
matter needed a thorough investigation. There could be a possibility
that the boy was hyper-sensitive or was suffering from depression,
they said."

The guilty were not identified, not punished. Neither does Uttar
Pradesh have an anti-ragging law.

What is happening here, without doubt, is victim blaming. Dig deeper
into the facts of the Anoop Kapoor case, and you will find that he was
The Only fresher in the hostel, and therefore singled out as the
burden of the "tradition" that hundreds of seniors thought they need
to continue.

The above poster, therefore, represents Anoop Kapoor. Who even the
police, which didn't get around to punishing those who drove him to
suicide, thinks was hypersensitive.

But Who Will Represent the Abuser?

See also this photograph published in The Hindu:
http://www.hindu.com/edu/2005/01/31/images/2005013100660101.jpg

It shows a poster brought out by the Hyderabad police. "Stretching the
joke too far may be fatal," it says.

The hype against ragging has given rise to a new phenomenon: the
forbidden is desired. So particularly in day-scholar ragging (in
places like Delhi University), you find freshers telling newspapers
and TV channels they wanted to get ragged but have been disappointed,
that they have been going to other colleges to see if someone wants to
rag them.

The statement "I want to get ragged", is heard in hostels by only one
kind of fresher: him who hails from a boarding school where he has had
enough time to internalise the discourse of fagging and hierarchical
ritual abuse.

"I want to get ragged" is an expression of masculinity: the fresher is
desperately trying to say 'I am not a sissy'.

Now posters like the two I have given links to, what do they achieve?
They only perpetuate the myth that the fresher who commits suicide was
neurotic. However, I have found that in all cases of suicides and
drop-outs caused by ragging, the fresher had in some way been singled
out, and thus abused more than others. Furthermore, psychoanalytic
theory tells us that everyone is equally 'normal' - or abnormal.

The popular film /Munnabhai MBBS/ (2001) represents hostel ragging in
just one scene. The macho Sanjay Dutt ('Munnabhai') is shown as having
no 'problem' in dancing to the orders of the seniors. But his
roommate, a thin, bespectacled sorry figure - the sort that would
typify a 'sissy', is shown shivering.

I have only one question to ask the makers of the movie, who are
planning a sequel: why is it that Sanjay Dutt takes off only his shirt
but the jeans is intact, whereas the other freshers are shown dancing
is merely their underwears? Did Dutt refuse to dance in an underwear
like the 'extras' and his roommate? Did he say his 'modesty' would be
'outraged'? If yes, then doesn't it make a farce of the portrayal of
the character of Munnabhai (a criminal-turned-medical student) who
actually enjoys ragging, in contrast to the 'sissies' who are pissing
in their pants?


-- 
www.stopragging.org | info at stopragging.org