Swapnadip Kundu fell from the balcony of Jadavpur University's main hostel and died
The Kolkata Police has made two more arrests in the alleged ragging and subsequent death of an 18-year-old Jadavpur University student earlier this week. The police arrested Deepshekhar Dutta, a second-year economics student, and Manotosh Ghosh, a second-year sociology student, over their alleged role in the incident.
Earlier, the police had arrested an ex-student of the university - Sourabh Chowdhury. On Saturday, he was remanded in police custody until August 22. An ex-student, Chowdhury was living in the hostel illegally. He did his MSc in Mathematics in 2022.
Preliminary investigation suggested that the victim was subjected to intense ragging, sources in the police, adding that they are probing a sexual harassment angle.
Some social media posts indicated that students often face lewd remarks and are forced to perform sexual acts, like stripping, during ragging, they said, adding, all these angles are being investigated.
Swapnadip Kundu, a first-year undergraduate student of Bengali (Honours), fell from the balcony of the main hostel building in the university around 11:45 pm on August 9. He was taken to a hospital, where he died at 4:30 am on Thursday.
"Swapnadip spoke to his mother on Wednesday evening and told her he was not feeling good and was scared. His mother asked him what had happened and he said, 'You please come fast. I have lots of things to tell you.' When she called him back, the calls went unanswered. About an hour later, his parents got a call asking them to come to Kolkata as their son had suffered a fall," the teen's uncle, Arup Kundu, said.
"The body was completely covered but the doctor showed me a piece of paper which indicated injury marks on his body. How does this happen if it was not ragging?" Mr Kundu asked.
Swapnadip's father, Ramprasad Kundu, filed a police complaint alleging some of the hostel boarders are responsible for his son's death.
A Facebook post by one of Swapnadip's classmates, Arpan Majhi, also pointed to ragging by "some seniors", a report by news agency PTI said.