On February 26 evening, 26-year-old Dr. Preethi, a tribal student belonging to Telangana’s Warangal, succumbed to her injuries, days after attempting suicide. A first-year postgraduate medical student at the Kakatiya Medical College, she was reportedly harassed by a male senior, following which she tried to end her life. Investigation so far hints at this being a case of ragging, based on WhatsApp chats of both the victim and accused, police officials said.
The accused was arrested by the police on charges of ragging, abetment to suicide and harassment under the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and Anti-Ragging Act. Protests broke out in her native Girni Thanda village in Kodakandla mandal of Jangaon district. Activists and relatives argue this was a caste-based crime.
As Dr. Preethi’s death rekindles the topic of ragging and bullying in medical colleges, we revisit stories of two medicos who faced similar fate.
Pon Navarasu, the case that shook Tamil Nadu
The mention of ragging evokes the memory of Pon Navarasu, a first-year MBBS student of Rajah Muthiah Medical College in Tamil Nadu, which resulted in Tamil Nadu becoming the first State to ban and criminalise ragging.
Navarasu, son of the-then vice-chancellor of the University of Madras, was murdered on November 6, 1996. John David, a senior student of his college, confessed to the crime days later and surrendered to judicial custody.
During a ragging session, Navarasu was assaulted, and forced to strip and lick David’s footwear, according to police charge sheet. He was violently beaten up and killed when he refused to do so.
Tamil Nadu passed the country’s first anti-ragging legislation in 1997.
David was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder by a trial court on March 11, 1998. Justice S.R. Singaravelu, who delivered the final verdict, ascribed the motive of the murder to be personal indignation. “...that while other juniors had obliged the accused, the disinclination of Navarasu, who happened to be the son of a vice-chancellor, might have irritated the accused and made him desperate and led to an ego clash,” he said.
The Madras High Court, however, acquitted him in 2001. A decade later, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction, arguing that “the view taken by the High Court is totally erroneous and the outcome of misreading and misinterpreting the evidence.” The Bench noted there is “enough circumstantial evidence to hold that it is none else but the accused who could have caused the concealment of torso and limbs, because it was the accused who had severed the head of deceased Navarasu and, therefore, he must have been in possession of the torso and limbs, which were subsequently recovered and were proved to be that of deceased Navarasu.”
David, who was then working in a BPO in Chennai, turned himself in after the Supreme Court verdict. He is still imprisoned.
Payal Tadvi, the death of a doctor
Twenty-three years after Navarasu’s death, in 2019, a 26-year-old doctor who belonged to the Adivasi Tadvi Bhil community, was found dead in Mumbai. Payal Tadvi, a second-year MD student at Mumbai’s TN Topivala National Medical College (TNMC), had spoken to her friends about caste discrimination and harassment within the campus. She was reportedly prevented from conducting surgeries, was subjected to casteist slurs, asked about her NEET scores (which would indicate if she availed of the reservation) and was routinely humiliated over her caste and religious location. Payal’s friend testified that two days before she took her life, Payal was demoted from the antenatal care unit to the postnatal care unit -- the latter usually assigned to underclassman.
Three senior colleagues were arrested in connection with the case for destroying evidence and abetting suicide. The Mumbai Police filed a 1,203-page chargesheet, based on statements from 180 witnesses, in July 2019 under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, the Maharashtra Prohibition of Ragging Act, and the 2000 Information Technology Act. The trial is still ongoing in Maharashtra.
In October 2020, the Supreme Court allowed the accused doctors to re-enter medical college and resume post-graduate courses, arguing that “the pendency of prosecution against them will add further penalty in the form of prejudicing their career”.
Two health networks termed the crime an “institutional murder”, adding that “this type of harassment is rampant in educational institutions and must be urgently recognised and stopped”.
Later in 2019, Payal Tadvi’s mother, along with Radhika Vemula -- mother of Dalit student Rohith Vemula who died by suicide in 2016 -- filed a petition in the Supreme Court arguing for more exacting and stringent enforcement of anti-caste discrimination measures within universities.
In July 2022, a parliamentary panel found rampant caste bias within All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), as MBBS students from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes were failed repeatedly in their exams. “The committee are given to understand that MBBS students from SC and ST community are declared failed a number of times in the MBBS course at first, second and/ or third stages of professional examination despite sincere efforts by them,” the report said.
“Further, the committee are made to understand that the examiners tend to ask the name of the students and try to judge/ know if a student belongs to SC/ST community. The committee, therefore, recommends that the ministry of health and family welfare should take stern action to check such unfair practice in future.”
Those who require assistance for overcoming suicidal thoughts may contact Sanjivini, Society for Mental Health suicide prevention helpline 011-4076 9002 (10 a.m. to 7.30 p.m., Monday-Saturday).
