Five days after the death of a first-year student at West Bengal’s Jadavpur University (JU), a new hoarding on campus declared in bold, red and black letters: ‘Ragging: A Criminal Offence. The Supreme Court of India directs institutions to expel students found guilty of ragging.’ Also on display were names and telephone numbers of 22 members of the university’s Anti-Ragging Committee.
Going by the University Grants Commission (UGC) directive that all educational institutions in the country observe August 12-18 as anti-ragging week, the timing of the message was on point. Perhaps the hoarding was commissioned before a student lost his life allegedly due to ragging at the university. In this new context, it became an eyesore, a reminder that JU had failed to protect a boy who would have turned 18 in two months.
As university staff carried ladders to light one of the hoardings at gate no. 3 of the university, Pijush Gayen, a student of the linguistics department, watching this said, “These posters should have been put up before the first-year students started coming to campus; now they look like a cruel joke.”
In the early hours of August 10, a first-year student of the Bengali department fell to his death from the second floor of the university’s boys’ hostel, situated less than 100 metres off campus, next to the Jadavpur Police Station.
He had attended classes for only three days. “He was very happy with the teachers. After his first day in college, he called to say that he liked Kafi Sir’s class,” his father said. Abdul Kafi is a well-known teacher at JU’s Bengali department and was among the few faculty members who rushed to the hostel in the early hours of August 10, when he heard the news.
Despite his shock and grief, the student’s father, who works in a cooperative bank in Nadia district, had reached out to him at the hospital and told him that his son, a part of a batch of 60 to 70 students, had loved his class. “There was only one lecture [for the students of the first year] which I took in the three days. I was his teacher for only 50 minutes,” Prof. Kafi told a Bengali television news channel, poignantly.
Political tussle
This week, the students of JU seethed with anger and poured it into that quintessential Bengali way of registering it publicly: protests. Slogans of “Inquilab zindabad (long live the revolution)” and “Hallabol (raise your voice)” rend the air outside the main entrance of the university’s administrative block, Aurobindo Bhawan. More posters and graffiti have come up across the politically active campus, which has always been dotted with wall writing proclaiming the names and party allegiances of student leaders.
“We want justice for the murder of our brother,” read a poster put up by the Arts Faculty Student’s Union. “We want a ragging-free campus,” read another. Students’ unions led one procession after another, going around the 67-acre campus. Teachers under the banner of JUTA (Jadavpur University Teachers’ Association) also brought out a procession, albeit a silent one.
As the students continued with their high-pitched sloganeering, a group of supporters of the Trinamool Chhatra Parishad (TMCP), the student wing of the ruling party, tried to force their way into the administrative block. When students of the Left unions resisted, a clash broke out and some students fell to the ground. Supporters of the TMCP blame the Left students’ unions and their insistence on not installing CCTV cameras as a reason for the death. Amid ongoing protests, a political battle is also on for a bit of university space. Despite being in power for 12 years, the TMCP has not made a dent in JU.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s claim that “Marxists”, her party the Trinamool Congress’ “number one adversary”, were responsible for the death, has precipitated the situation. The heat of the incident at JU is being felt in campuses across the State, where supporters of Left students’ unions and the TMCP have clashed.
Hostel crunch
“The university’s hostel allocation committee should convene a meeting and segregate hostel facilities for undergraduate students,” a protesting student told a group of journalists, insisting that the main issue faced by students should not be lost in the noise.
Jadavpur University has 14 hostels (four for girls and 10 for boys) across its two campuses in south Kolkata and Bidhannagar (Salt Lake City) with a total capacity of 1,876 students: 1,254 for boys and 622 for girls, as per the JU website. Only 20% of the 11,000 students of the university can avail themselves of hostel facilities. Students and teachers say that more than 50% of those who are enrolled in the university are not from Kolkata, and since hostel facilities cost much less than paying-guest accommodation, hostel rooms are greatly in demand.
“Jadavpur University has not invested in hostel facilities. Our students are forced to stay in rented accommodation in areas like Santoshpur and Garia, adjoining the university,” conceded Prof. Omprakash Mishra, one of the senior-most faculty members of JU in the department of international relations, and former vice chancellor of North Bengal University. “For first-year students the situation is much worse, as hostels are not allocated to them until the end of the first semester.” Currently, the university does not have a vice chancellor. Ironically, JU is at number 4 on the Government of India’s National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2023.
Prof. Mishra pointed out that hostels are overcrowded, with three or four students sharing a room meant for one or two. The student who died was in A2 block of the main hostel, which has 58 rooms for 180 students. The student was forced to stay with seniors, he said. It was only after the death that first-year students were shifted to the New Boys’ Hostel on university premises.
The UGC mandates separate hostels for first-year students. Clause 6.2 of the UGC’s Regulation on Curbing the Menace of Ragging in Higher Educational Institutions, 2009, points out that on admission, every student will be given a printed leaflet detailing when and whom to turn to for guidance, including wardens, heads of institutions, members of the anti-ragging committee, so that freshers need not look to seniors for help.
Contrary to UGC guidelines, first-year students routinely approach seniors for hostel accommodation. The father of the student had asked the seniors to take care of his son. No hostel room was officially allocated to the deceased student.
Amitava Datta, the pro vice chancellor had, on August 10, announced an internal committee to enquire into the “extremely sad incident”. The committee is to submit its report in 15 days.Meanwhile registrar Snehamanju Basu on August 17 issued orders for several security measures including the installation of CCTV cameras at strategic points on the university campus and directions that anyone entering the campus between 8 p.m. and 7 a.m. produce an identity card.
In the dark
On the night of August 9, when the student was allegedly ragged by a group of seniors, he reached out to his mother. “Ma, I am very frightened here,” he had allegedly said over his mobile phone, in Bengali. When the parents called again, one of his seniors, Sourav Chowdhury, took the call and told his mother there was nothing wrong and that her son was busy with friends. Chowdhury was the first to be arrested.
In all, nine people have been arrested, five students and four who had recently completed their courses but were still staying at the hostel.The police pressed charges under Sections 302 (punishment for murder) and 34 (common intention) of the Indian Penal Code in the FIR drawn up on the basis of a complaint by the father. According to the police, the nine people were present at the hostel when the student fell to his death.
Most of those arrested hail from rural areas, and come from families with similar backgrounds and income profiles as the victim. While Chowdhury, 23, had completed his M.Sc. in Mathematics 2022 hails from Chandrakona in East Medinipur; Saptak Kamilya, 27, who studied environmental studies, is from Egra in Purba Medinipur; Suman Naskar, 26, from the philosophy department is from Mandirbazar in South 24 Parganas; and Asit Sardar, 21, from the Sanskrit department is from Kutalai in South 24 Parganas. They had completed their courses but still lived in the hostel. The other five students arrested are Deepsekhar Dutta, 19; Manotosh Ghosh, 20; Mohammad Asif Afzal Ansari, 22; Mohammad Arif, 18; and Ankan Sarkar, 20. As per the police, those present in the hostel at the time of the incident have said that the student was ragged, tortured, stripped, and repeatedly asked if he was gay.
Chairperson of the West Bengal Commission for Protection of Child Rights Sudeshna Roy has said that the organisation was of the preliminary view that charges under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012, be drawn up against the accused.
“After the student fell, we tried to find out what happened. There was a crowd, and we were not allowed near. The seniors were engaged in a heated argument which we could not understand, and then a taxi came and took him to the hospital,” said Akash Sarma, a third-year student from the international relations department.
Sarma, from Cooch Behar district and a boarder, said many parents have been asking students to return home to a local college. “How will parents allow children to stay in the hostel after this?” he said, adding that his family does not have the means to rent a place in Kolkata.
Meanwhile, police investigations have revealed that after the student fell, seniors held several meetings and discussed what they would tell the police. The gate of the main hostel was locked, preventing them from entering, and the police have filed a separate case regarding this.
“I was told by the students and the hostel superintendent that I should lock the gates so that the media and police cannot enter the hostel,” Jayanta Kumar Pal, the security guard at the main hostel, said. Dipayan Dutta, the main hostel superintendent, denied giving any such instruction and said that about 10 minutes past midnight when he reached the hostel, the gate was locked, and the injured student had already been taken to the hospital. The superintendent admitted that those staying at the hostel would drink inside their rooms and that he did not interfere, fearing altercation and a backlash from students.
Digging deeper
The tragedy has raised questions about administrative lapses. Registrar Basu and dean of students Rajat Ray are also being questioned by the police. In a letter dated August 16, the UGC said that it was not satisfied with the report submitted by Jadavpur University on the death of the student. The statutory body regulating higher education in the country said that it had found the response “very generic in nature, basically mentioning therein mostly the reactive approaches adopted in the matter rather than proactive measures taken to curb the menace of ragging.”
State Education Minister Bratya Basu and other leaders said that there has been “utter lawlessness on campus for years”. In 2014, an incident of sexual harassment of a student and subsequent police action inside the campus during had paralysed JU for months with the Hok Kolorab (let there be clamour) protests.
“The Trinamool Congress is using the crisis to attack the Left student politics,” said Tarun Naskar, a professor of mechanical engineering, who retired in May. Prof. Naskar, associated with the All-Bengal University Teachers Association, said ragging has been a “perennial problem” to which authorities have turned a blind eye.
In October 2022, IIT Kharagpur in West Bengal had erupted in protests over the death of 23-year-old Faizan Ahmed who was found dead in his hostel room. The Calcutta High Court, after pointing out that Faizan’s death was a “clear case of ragging” had ordered a detailed investigation. A second post-mortem was conducted after exhuming the body in May 2023 from Dibrugarh in Assam, which revealed that the student’s death was “homicidal” in nature. On August 16, the Calcutta High Court directed the SIT (Special Investigation Team) to go ahead with the probe on the basis of the second post-mortem.
Jishu Debnath, a visually impaired Ph.D. student from the Bengali department, has spent more than a decade at different hostels in JU. “I had to leave the hostel in 2014-15 as an undergraduate student, as I could not take the ragging. I returned a year later as a postgraduate student, but nothing had changed. There are particular dates in the calendar like Mahalaya when marathon ragging sessions are held in hostels,” he said.
In November 2022, Debnath and a few others approached the dean of students, when a visually challenged student was ragged. “They did not act against the perpetrator and the complainant was harassed. Over the years the authorities have simply refused to act,” he said.
In case of a problem, please reach out to the UGC’s 24x7 anti-ragging helpline at 1800-180-5522.
