Amid the Gen Z-led youth protests demanding the resignation of then Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had released a video referring to the protesters as “friends” – a departure from his usual “mitron” – to address the younger generation. In the video, he ‘forgave’ the students for using foul language and appealed to them to work together. His message for unity and peace grated against the many videos on social media of students being beaten, tear-gassed and arrested for partaking in the protest. For most Indians, the message also reeked of something we have all grown up hearing – never disrespect your elders (code for ‘obey us without questioning’).We Indians have normalised a form of bullying that is meted out to the young, and it comes from a substitution of the word respect for obedience. One is mutual, and the other is strictly top-down. When this happens in universities, we call it ragging, and elsewhere, we pretend it is the norm.Respecting our eldersEvery culture expects the young to appreciate and accord due respect to their elders. However, in India, this sentiment runs amok. The young in India are mandated not just to respect their elders but also to perform for society. We have all, at some point or another, touched someone’s feet against our will. Where this becomes problematic is when people start assuming the role of the ‘elder’ and demand that the same performance be bestowed upon them unquestioningly.Village elders, politicians, people of a certain caste, teachers and seniors in colleges make up an endless list of people who seamlessly walk into the mould of the ‘elder’, and demand respect be apportioned to them. Did we ever agree to this arrangement?Indian schools and colleges make this demand for submission explicit. As Shah Rukh Khan famously said in Chak De India, “There can only be one bully in every team, and I am the bully in this team.” Spend a few minutes reading through the comment section, and you’ll notice that this sentiment has reached all of us from the mouths of our teachers growing up, and then from our seniors. It is explicitly repeated and enforced at first. Eventually, as it assimilates into our idea of what constitutes ‘normal,’ it is implicitly expected.These are initiation rituals, and they function as tools employed to ‘break individuality and enforce submission’. Ragging is the logical outcome of such rituals, whether they be practised by athletes, soldiers or students. The University Grants Commission (UGC) calls ragging a ‘menace,’ a phenomenon that “affects the physique or psyche of a fresher or junior student” and which can lead to “adverse effects such as depression, anxiety, and sometimes even suicide”. The UGC proposed a ‘Zero Tolerance Policy’ and notified ‘Regulations on Curbing the Menace of Ragging in Higher Educational Institutions, 2009.’ These regulations are mandatory for all educational institutions, and strict measures must be taken to curb ragging among students affiliated with them. Despite this, premier institutions such as the IITs and IIMs have failed to comply with the UGC’s anti-ragging norms. The first-ever anti-ragging legislation was enacted by the state of Tamil Nadu in 1997, followed by a few other states in India. The National Crime Records Bureau (Ministry of Home, GoI) ‘Crime in India’ annual report doesn’t have separate data to know the criminality of ragging-related issues in our country. International research on ragging across countries has now confirmed that ragging in India has reached endemic proportions. What is it about India that makes this ‘menace’ so systemic?For most students in Indian schools, college is the imagined ideal of freedom. Students, especially those who were repressed in their families, are known to use this space to vent out and exhibit behaviour that would be deemed ‘out of control’ elsewhere. Movies, as popular cultural media, go a long way in normalising this expectation. They project the college as a space where the student first imagines freedom as transgression. Bunking classes, playing pranks on figures of authority, and teasing women are often packaged as part of this image. Kids grow up watching their heroes do this. In the strictly censored media landscape of the Indian household, anything the child is allowed to watch alongside their parents is internalised with a stamp of approval. This is where the child learns how to ‘perform’ freedom. This performance is as much for the peers as it is for the children themselves.College is widely acknowledged by psychologists as a crucial arena for self-making. An adolescent is exposed to a new cohort, and they roleplay their ‘ideal’ selves to them. It is no coincidence that this happens alongside elaborate rituals that establish ‘pecking orders’ within the cohort. A student constantly negotiates their way into social cliques, and some of that negotiation is carried out through initiation rituals, such as ragging, that employ humiliation as a test. Taming our young through enforced hierarchiesThe social evolution of human beings has been studied and discussed from diverse vantage points, such as Homo Economicus (John Stuart Mill), Homo Ritualis (Axel Michaels), Homo Deus (Yuval Noah Harari), Homo Faber (Appius Claudius Caecus), Homo Ludens (Johan Huizinga), and Homo Politicus (Aristotle).In Homo Hierarchicus, Louis Dumont provides an understanding of how people organise and behave in a society based on presumed caste hierarchies. These hierarchies are internalised in the culture of many Indian communities. We can see this play out in the peculiar ways in which Indians see everything in terms of purity and pollution, and tend to hierarchise them accordingly: majority vs minority religions; vegetarian vs non-vegetarian, right-hand vs left-hand, tribal vs non-tribals. These hierarchies are so complete that, in some cases, they also extend upwards, categorising deities on the same scale.People who support ragging as a harmless initiation ritual or a practice that fosters fraternity among students express an adherence to these implicit hierarchies. They justify the humiliation of ragging and expect the juniors to ‘bear with it’ in exchange for a sense of community, support from their seniors to help them relate better to teachers, or a favourable nudge during campus placements. Each of these is a way to enforce who belongs in the in-group and who deserves to be ostracised. These compromises disguise the negotiation one is forced to make in order to confirm an established order.The notions of caste, gender, and class are to be respected, and the humiliation is to be accepted with utmost obedience. These factors intersect, interplay interchangeably. Social hierarchy, when played out in a seemingly secular environment of a university, the ragging is systematised and ritualises bullying as a form of play. The hierarchy is serious, but the way it is meted out is disguised as play.This ‘menace’ is but a symptomThe ragging that the UGC is trying to curb through its punitive and educational measures across all higher educational institutions is not isolated. It’s a symptom that holds up a mirror to deeper issues that have been normalised in our society. The students who partake in ragging and the ones who get ragged are merely, and sadly, reflecting the norms of the society we are in. Take away the university, and the same humiliation rituals play out on our screens and in our political arenas, establishing the same implicit order. If we are serious about fixing this ‘menace,’ we need to introspect on what hierarchies the ‘elders’ are enforcing on the young. We need to allow ourselves to ask which transgressions can be ignored and which ones deserve to be punished publicly. Who holds the right to decide what is and isn’t an offence, and who decides what deserves to be forgiven? Only when we dare to answer these questions can the peace that the video implores the young protesters to work towards be truly achieved. Sipoy Sarveswar teaches Anthropology at Visva Bharati, Shantiniketan, West Bengal. His X handle is @SsarveswarRam R Bhupathiraju is an Anthropologist and a Qualitative Research Consultant in Hyderabad. His X handle is @RamRBhup