Ragging News

No news is bad news

Ever so often, The Stop Ragging Campaign receives emails and comments on the pages of this blog, earnestly telling us that ragging is “fun”, that surely, we can’t be against light banter? Such communication has the uncanny quality of invariably using similar syntax and adding the same disclaimers again and again: “Only some perverts bring a bad name to ragging;” “You can always say no to the senior;” “Ragging can be fun if it is not physical;” “The media over-hypes stray cases of bad ragging,” and so on.

However, our continuous monitoring of news reports of ragging around the country shows that ragging is invariably “physical”, meaning both violent and sexual. That freshers who say ‘no’ face a further backlash. And that the media downplays ragging incidents, considering them a routine activity, carrying a small report only when an FIR is lodged or a few students suspended. In fact newspapers rarely undertake follow-up stories even in the most serious cases. It is indeed troubling that what the law increasingly regards as a criminal activity is not considered worth investigation and in-depth reportage and analsyis by our fourth estate.

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