Violence on Campus

Love gone sour*

Piyush, a second year student from Hostel 3 taught at a coaching class for JEE aspirants, where he met a female student. As they got to know each other, they started frequently corresponding with each other. When the girl’s father, Ramesh, found out about this, he told Piyush to stop contacting her. Ramesh also changed his daughter’s contact number. Three months later, she re-initiated contact and they began conversing again.
Only this time when Ramesh found out, he had his daughter call Piyush to South Bombay and had him physically beaten up. Later, using his status as the legal guardian of Shyam, another resident of H3, Ramesh entered the campus accompanied with a few goons. They then called Piyush to a room, where they beat both Piyush as well as his roommate up pretty badly. Meanwhile, Shyam stood outside the room, making sure no one went inside the room and interrupted them.

Implications

After the incident was over, a formal police complaint against Ramesh was filed. The institute also imposed a DAC on Shyam, following which he was suspended for a semester. The moral issue that is brought up here is that as students, we live in a community. While the security of the institute is assigned with the responsibility of the safety of the students, it can only go so far. After that, we as students are responsible for each other. But in this case, we see a fellow student actively abetting a crime against his peers, while he should have, no matter what his constraints, tried to prevent such an event from actually happening! Such abhorrent actions need to be publicly condemned so as to prevent a repeat.

Drunken fiasco in Study Room
One February evening, Pranjal, a B. Tech student of Engineering Physics department, saw a commotion in front of the study room. He found out that some people were beating some students up in the study room. By the time Pranjal could get any security to the study room, the perpetrators had absconded on their Pulsar. He later found out that those people had beat up the students and vandalised the study room on the little provocation of being told to stay quiet in the study room.
After rigorously following up the incident with the DoSA, Pranjal found that action against them had been delayed because they were technically not part of the institute. They were related to some of the staff (security) on campus. 6 months after the incident, he found out that the only punishment meted out to them was that they were banned from entering the academic area.

Implications

After such a grievous offence, why is it that the action taken against the culprits took so long. Also, when they were finally punished, why was their punishment so meagre? The security of the campus is assigned the task of looking after the safety of all the students, then when such blatant violations occur, why is their response so uninspiring? The security office claims that they did not have direct jurisdiction over the miscreants, but such light punishment begs the question- is it a lapse on their part, or does it have to do with the fact that the culprits were related to some security personnel?

ANTARIKSH BOTHALE, ANUBHAV MANGAL, ANIMESH SWAIN, SUMAN RAO, RUSHINA SHAH