Photo courtesy of Daily Mirror
How do we end ragging at our universities? It is a question that never goes away and one that re-appears every time a student is killed. Charith Dilshan took his own life, a decision preceded by ragging – in this case by torture – at his university. Our outrage is right but our helplessness is learned. Calls for zero tolerance, for universities to detect and punish any student involved in ragging, are common enough. Of course, those who ragged Dilshan and his batchmates should face justice. But perhaps we already know that a policy of zero tolerance will not be enough to end ragging.
Why not? In part, because of what ragging is like today. Because in some universities, senior students contact prospective freshers as soon as their A’level results are out and they know which university might give them a place. The process starts at once. Seniors meet and rag prospective students at different locations close to their hometowns. Ragging can also happen over the phone. The system is fixed before students step into university and once they walk in the on-campus ragging begins. If an alert administration makes this difficult, off-campus is easy: ice cream parlours and seniors’ boarding rooms, parks and street corners, WhatsApp audio and video calls – the options are endless. Complaints are rare because most new students can’t afford to upset their seniors or to be isolated by their batch. They need help and friends in a new place, support for a liveable life at the hostel, guidance in a new academic environment and contacts for employment once they leave. A complaint can jeopardise all this and “it’ll all be over soon, after all”.
What those senior students did to Dilshan requires nothing less than a prosecution for torture. But we need to remember that the kind of ragging that rises to national attention is simply the bubbling overflow of the everyday harassment and oppression that most first years go through. The dress codes, the systematic beatings, the sleep deprivation, the humiliation and abuse, the senior dominance and control – these rarely make the news. But they are what lead to student deaths. If we don’t address everyday ragging, more students will take the decision that Charith Dilshan did. And zero tolerance is not enough to do this. Detect and punish alone won’t solve the problem because it is terribly hard to detect off-campus and online ragging and because structurally dependent freshers will rarely complain or testify. We need much more.
What needs to be done
Last year, I turned up at my first departmental freshers’ orientation programme after being away for post-graduate study. I was stunned. First year students walked in on their first day wearing jeans, t-shirts, whatever they wanted. A few had even coloured their hair. Perfectly normal in everyday life but a shock at a state university. Even more of a surprise because I remember how a few years ago, when the department took proactive steps against ragging, it decided not to touch the dress code. We wanted ragging to end in five years, we said, and the dress code was not the worst of what we were dealing with. Yet things changed for multiple reasons: a supportive university administration, the wisdom of heads of department past and present, a staff team unequivocally opposed to ragging, COVID-19’s ragging reset that caused at least one batch everywhere to miss ragging in-person because they could not be physically present at university for their first year and a small student body (400 students is too many for a Department of just seven permanent staff but is still less than the massive numbers others deal with).
It also depended, however, on multiple generations of senior students who stood up and decided that things had to be done differently regardless of what their own seniors or peers at other faculties thought. This is not to say that things are perfect; it is to say that ending ragging is a multi-modal effort that needs a long term focus and sometimes relies on chance and accident.
The rag’s legitimacy
Seniors rag because of power: union power, batch power and even sexual power for those on the hunt for a partner. Juniors take part because they are afraid and are structurally dependent. Any solution has to address this. But beyond this, the rag’s public justification needs to be addressed, the claims made in its favour. This justification is simple: the raggers insist that the rag is the only way to create a community of unity and solidarity among a new batch of students who bring the difference and divisions of Sri Lanka into the university with them.
On the one hand, seniors claim that the rag is an equaliser, putting everyone on the same level. Rich or poor, from the city or the village, from a national school or a provincial one, everyone suffers, everyone wears the same thing and everyone faces the same restrictions (ethnic divisions are left untouched with ragging being racially segregated). They claim it creates community and solidarity, instilling a sense of family within the batch and between freshers and seniors. Again, there is an ethno-religious twist: unity is often limited to one’s community, fuelled by the idea that “we must stick together or those others (Sinhalese/Tamils/Muslims) will get us”. Behind all this sits the idea that violence and force are the best ways to get things done, a lesson that students pick up, perhaps, by our country’s historical responses to difference and division.
This public justification needs to be unmasked and exposed right from the start for the lie that it is. Yet I want to suggest that doing this means, counterintuitively, recognising an inconvenient truth. A conclusion I have come to based on my experience being ragged and then trying to stop ragging at school, at university and now as a lecturer as well as numerous conversations with students and peers: the rag is effective, in a twisted way. This limited effectiveness is what makes its public justification plausible. The reason the rag works is simple: situations of shared suffering can bring people together, a common hatred of abusive seniors can bind juniors closer and helping each other get through a trying time can break boundaries. Once the rag is over the gulf between seniors and juniors is lessened and a mix of relief, Stockholm Syndrome and seniors acting normal again sometimes leads to genuine friendship. Add to this indoctrination about unity and community and you can find a sense of a faculty family, one that often works as a powerful safety net for students, springing into place when they lose a parent, face abuse at university, fail an exam or end up in hospital.
Now none of this justifies the rag. The ends, even if they worked perfectly (which they do not), can never justify the horrific means. Even its limited effectiveness does not apply across the board. For many students ragging is a nightmare. It drives them away from university, it leaves them alienated from their batch and it stunts their intellectual, social and emotional life. The rag works in the way that any the ends justify the means logic works. The means used – abuse, humiliation, force – reach back to infect whatever equality, community and solidarity that might result. Ragging never ultimately overcomes Sri Lanka’s structural social and economic divisions (if it did we would be in a different Sri Lanka). Forced unity, a contradiction in terms, evaporates once the rag ends and everyone goes back to doing their own thing. The faculty family is sometimes a genuine source of help but is also an oppressive, intolerant one.
Yet the idea that the rag can achieve all these things lives on. The idea that force is the only way to create community, equality or solidarity persists.
Embodied alternatives
This idol can only be shattered by embodied action. This is why universities need to couple zero tolerance with alternative, voluntary, orientation programmes, designed and run by students, staff and the administration, programmes that form a sense of community, enable unity and create the conditions for solidarity. Quite apart from ragging, universities have a duty to do this because these ideals are at the heart of university life. A university cannot be a place that forms a community of people dedicated to seeking the flourishing of society if it never addresses the deep ethnic, religious, social and caste divisions students bring into the university with them. It has an interest in promoting deep friendships between students from different backgrounds. It has an interest in bringing together those who have already been in and contributed to the place and those who are just joining, on an equal footing. It has an interest in giving new students the help and support they need to get used to life on their own. A university should not be neutral about these things.
It so happens that if we pursue these ideals through alternative means right from the start, we also undermine ragging. The rag’s public legitimacy is grounded in its claim that it is the only way to bring about a sense of equality, unity and family. Universities can unmask this false claim if they themselves had engaging, bold and creative programmes that aimed at friendship, community, dialogue and maturity right from the start.
I have been deeply encouraged by local examples of student-initiated orientation programmes that are engaging, promote a sense of community and provide essential help to students. They do this through sports, competitive group activities and student mentoring programmes among other things. When coupled with efforts to inculcate the skills needed to transition to university life and with appropriate supervision of the staff and administration, these types of initiatives strike at the heart of ragging. They are an embodied, focused refutation of the rag’s claim to legitimacy, a parallel process that eats the ground away from under the rag.
Getting here from where we are today is not easy. There are no methods or formulas; every department is different and for some this might not be possible without a great deal of other changes in the relationship between staff, students and the administration. Perhaps what is needed is thought along two wave lengths: “What can we prevent right now?” and “What can we do now to make ragging unthinkable in ten years?”
Lecturers, unions, movements
For this has to be our ultimate goal: making ragging unthinkable, something of which students say “that’s not how we do things at our faculty”. This requires shaping the broader culture, the way things are done at a university. Even if we can’t get an alternative orientation programme underway tomorrow, there are things those of us who are lecturers can do right now to change the broader culture:
The desire for dominance that underlies the rag is something students bring into the university but it is also a way of thinking that they can be formed into by the university. If those who are senior or who have power in the university – lecturers, administrators – use their power to oppress those who do not have any, that creates the kind of atmosphere where ragging is normal; ragging becomes just another a subset of seniors oppressing juniors in a system where this is the norm.
For staff who want things to change, we need to ask ourselves, how do we treat those lower than us in the hierarchy, whether students, non-academic, non-executive staff or junior colleagues? The way lecturers use their power when they are the seniors in the room influences, in subtle and intricate ways, how students who are senior behave. It is a mode of being that is caught rather than taught. Here is one test: after adjusting for our different roles, when a batch of freshers is about to enter the universities what would happen if we told the senior students whom we teach, “Treat the new first year batch the same way that we treat you”? If those seniors took us at our word and saw us as models for how to relate in senior-junior relationships, would they act in a way that supported or tore down a culture of dominance and control?
But there is also a challenge for student unions here. Student unions have little legitimacy because they are built on the broken backs of the most vulnerable members of the communities they claim to represent. This is why it is so easy for the public to ignore them and for university administrations to shut down even genuine student political action that Sri Lanka needs. The question is this: will student unions stand up for the weak and the downtrodden even those weak and downtrodden are in their first year at university?
These questions need to be raised by the NPP alliance and the People’s Struggle Alliance, the two political movements with the greatest influence among members of the university community today. Will they both launch targeted, multi-faceted, long term campaigns to make ragging unthinkable at our universities? Will they use the power they already have at universities in a way that protects those who need it the most even at the cost of some of their supporters and their influence?
What they do will tell us a lot about their own approach to power, even as they ask us to give them more of it. Ragging is a litmus test.
The writer teaches law at the Department of Law, Faculty of Arts, University of Jaffna. Thanks are due to those who read a first draft of this article