An internal committee of Jadavpur University has recommended that four students be expelled from the university because they were directly involved in ragging, said an official of the university.
The committee has also recommended that an FIR be lodged against six former students, which includes Sourav Chowdhury because they provoked ragging, a member of the panel said.
The four students this panel wants to be expelled are Satyabrata Roy, Mohammad Arif, Manotosh Ghosh, and Deepsekhar Dutta.
The committee was formed to probe the death of a first-year undergraduate student because of alleged ragging on August 9.
On Tuesday, a university official said they will table the committee’s recommendations before the anti-ragging squad because the university is not happy with some of them.
The official said the officiating vice-chancellor was not happy with the recommendation that a student leader who has been found guilty of not alerting the university authorities despite knowing that junior students are being ragged be barred from entering the campus after completion of his PhD degree.
The official quoted VC Buddhadeb Sau as saying that if the student leader is allowed to complete the degree and then barred from entering the campus, it's not a punishment at all.
The four students whose expulsion from the campus has been recommended are now in police custody.
Sourav Chowdhury, one of the former students against whom lodging an FIR has been recommended, was the first to be arrested by the police after the seventeen-year-old boy died in the early hours of August 10.
“The committee said the minor was ragged several times during his three-day stay at the hostel,” he said.
“The committee has recommended that five students be suspended for four semesters, eleven students be suspended for two semesters and 15 students be suspended for one semester based on their degree of their involvement.”
The committee has also recommended that all the residents of the A-2 block of the main hostel be asked to vacate the hostel because they knew about the ragging but did not do anything to prevent it.
Many on the campus wondered whether JU could sum up the courage to punish students as recommended.
In August 2013, JU’s anti-ragging committee suspended a final-year student for two semesters and another for one semester following a complaint lodged by a junior student.
Then vice-chancellor Souvik Bhattacharyya, who had joined JU from IIT Kharagpur, and some other officials, had been confined for more than 52 hours by students, who demanded that the suspensions be withdrawn.
The VC quit on October 21, 2013, a couple of weeks after a meeting of the executive council, JU’s highest decision-making body. At the meeting he was allegedly forced to form a committee to review the punishment.
On Tuesday, Sau said: “One of the recommendations this time says all the residents of the A-2 block have to leave the main hostel because they cannot escape their responsibility for what has happened. They cannot stay in any of the university’s hostels. But everything is subject to what the university’s anti-ragging committee and the executive council say.”