A Journey Just Begun...

Vertika
B.A (H) Political Science
University of Delhi
CFW graduate 2009

Talking about a campaign through a period of  around 2-3 months, which was the most challenging, the most frustrating and yet the most unforgettable part of my experiences is a task which is very hard for me. But let me take this opportunity to break if only for a while, the self-imposed moratorium on letting my heart and soul connect back to it. Even after coming out open in front of the world with my passion against ragging, till today I haven’t been able to overcome the hesitation I faced with respect to the issue, around 3 years ago. Before I go into actually the course of my journey I would like to throw in some random realisations I embarked upon during this period and in the helpless sabbatical I had to take from something which is so critical to my survival – chief among them being – change is really a slow piecemeal process, and that even though my closest ones still do not know it – somewhere down the line I have been a victim of ragging, even though I have never been directly subjugated to it.

Taking off from there, let me talk about why Anti-Ragging? Many people I met were not so impressed by the “issue” which I wanted to work on. Responses would go like – Why ragging? Clearly demonstrating that ragging is not an issue worth to be worked on. But for me, it is something which made a year for me worse than hell. Such responses of people offended my victim hood and accentuated my suffering, and still does, but to survive I had to do something to overcome it. And the inspiration behind my campaign is nothing, no one, except my own personal emotional suffering.

Yes CCS did play a major role in the initiation of the process. I have to thank you guys for giving me the space to help me gather the courage to come out and begin this process. But I guess the chief catalyst at that time was the context of the living environment. Aman Movement did it for me, and it gave me a platform to enter the arena of Anti-Ragging activism at the right time in the right context. Though the founder of the movement Dr. Raj Kachroo has done such commendable work which cannot be paralleled, at the level of power-holding institutions in this country, my involvement was at the level of my capacity – students in different colleges.

Sitting in a room a couple of Aman’s friends and relatives, along with Dr. Kachroo, we decided to chalk out a plan firstly for the immediate campaign for the beginning of that particular academic session. We decided on an ambitious plan of sourcing trustworthy activists in as many colleges across the country as we can to carry out the task of – a coordinator of the Movement who would be instrumental in helping his/her institution in implementing the new UGC and SC regulations with regard to the prohibition on ragging, in coordination with the authorities and an official student Anti-Ragging Squad where possible, and an unofficial similar Squad where it was difficult for the coordinator to seek official cooperation of the authorities in the matter. Our aim was to have a Squad with atleast one member from every department in the Institution, and adequate representation from the Hostel. The plan was to collaborate with college Students’ Unions for aiding this process. And this Squad would be responsible for generating awareness about Aman Movement, the newly constituted Anti-Ragging helpline in the summer of 2009, and additionally to help monitor ragging cases, reporting them to the authorities, and being a source of help to the first year students in adjusting to the new atmosphere and would be a medium in promoting interaction amongst them and seniors. Things looked nice in plans but it was far too great a challenge to implement them.

I was coordinating all the students I could possibly contact by sourcing them through internet based publicity, personally engaging them with the issue in a conversation, gauging their opinion on the issue and inducting them as volunteers for the movement (this was different from the many people I would speak to everyday about the issue, argue them out and try to sensitize them about the issue.) The challenges were really abundant, ranging from colleges having problems like – disinterested and troublesome authorities, defunct or nil student councils/unions and campus politics to name a few. It was students funded program as there lack of time to come up with a proper budget, raise funds and have a mechanism to distribute them to different students. The posters were generously funded by Aman Movement though.

The campaign's main target was Delhi University and so I collaborated with Delhi University Students’ Union (DUSU) with cooperation from the then President, Nupur Sharma. The Union President was trying to aid us to implement the other half of the campaign – awareness generation through workshops on ragging and a planned Anti-Ragging rally. Due to various difficulties, chiefly lack of enough committed volunteers at a particular time, and me being the single person handling the coordination between Aman Movement as well as DUSU and the student, I found during the course of the movement that enough has not been done to create a team of committed, motivated coordinators which is the first thing needed for a successful campaign.

However, due to the absolute crunch of time at that moment, we needed to create some buzz to generate some awareness about an Anti-Ragging wave going on Delhi University with papers like Delhi Times happily promoting and glorifying ragging as a ‘fun’ part of DU! And though our plans for an Anti-Ragging rally in North Campus could not materialize, we were successful in conducting a workshop on ragging in Ramjas College, which was well-covered by media considering the scale at which the workshop was held was not massive. In hindsight I really don’t think it achieved anything real in terms of awareness generation at that point in time
Unfortunately, due to various reasons, it was a kind of heightened period of activity which soon fizzled away due to various problems which led to weakening of my personal morale and consistent opposition from family, my own college work pressure and the breaking of contact with volunteers, as I see it – it was hard to keep them motivated and interested even though they were personally in support of the issue, and soon as the period which is considered in media memory as the ragging period, got over, the student side of the campaign, which was solely managed and steered by me, faded away. It is something which at that moment I could not find myself helping, even though I badly wanted to. And with this I could not finish the unfinished evaluation of the effectiveness of having this kind of a student movement. It was quite a success in LSR, with no ragging last year and the model of the Squad there turning out quite well with the cooperation of the authorities. But then, it was me, who was there, to see it all personally and even there the plan of interaction, could hardly materialize if not being zero. There were 1 or 2 other colleges though, where students with the help of our coordinator did better at interaction, but again at a very small scale.

But as another year is coming to a close, I hereby plan to get back to the campaign in June once again, and see what I can learn from the failures more than the successes of last time, and what should be the fresh strategy to have a strong Anti-Ragging Movement. I need to get back to surviving meaningfully again and though many of the roadblocks are not going to be ironed out, yet this is still a journey just begun which I believe will travel with time and hope that it will see change one day. So all those who are reading this, and do feel about the issue, please do contact me in June.