A Dalit scholar at the
University of Hyderabad killed himself on Sunday night, nearly two weeks
after he and four other students were suspended by authorities and
thrown out of the hostel, triggering charges of casteism. The students
were on a protest strike in front of the hostel since the expulsion that
followed an argument and scuffle between members of some campus groups
and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad.
That strike has now
erupted in violent protests across the campus, with an outpouring of
grief and rage across universities and social media.
The
suspension, the ensuing strike and now, the suicide, has been met with a
mixture of apathy and silence. Few outlets reported Rohith Vemula’s
suicide on a day Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal got ink hurled at
him, but the scant coverage still exposed the macabre face of caste that
is the daily reality of millions across the country.
Most of us
think of caste oppression through the lens of the “outdated” practice of
untouchability, violent caste clashes in the distant countryside and in
lavish biopics on the silver screen.
But caste is alive in our
homes and streets, simmering just underneath the surface of our glitzy
malls, in our schools and colleges, in our glass-and-steel workplaces
and inside our gentrified gated colonies. It is alive in who we marry
and fall in love with, in who we talk to and befriend, in who we employ
and who we mourn.
I presents itself in its most terrifying form
in the academia. The erasure of Dalit and Bahujan icons starts right
from the primary and middle class textbooks that are replete with
references to upper caste leaders and reformers — think Gandhi,
Rammohun Roy, Vidyasagar, Tilak — but omits anyone else.
Lower-caste
students are forced to wear colour-coded bands, made to sit on the
floor, served mid-day meals separately, and often bear the brunt of
teacher insults. In state after state, studies have shown the drop out
rate of Dalit children is way higher than their proportion of the
population.
If somehow, they survive schools, the very system of
affirmative action designed to work for the benefit of lower-caste
students, works against them. Students availing reservation are marked
for humiliation in even elite universities and institutes, and with
inadequate academic support and a hostile administration, many quota
students fail, and some kill themselves.
The caste system has
always operated on monopoly of opportunity and knowledge, violently
suppressing any attempt to access by lower-caste people over the
centuries — remember the traditional practice of pouring molten lead
down the throat of any Dalit person trying to learn Sanskrit. That caste
privilege has transformed itself into modern capital today, but the
original structure still stands.
That is why any conversation
around caste in our colleges end up centreing around reservations, and
the response is always to frame quota students as “less intelligent”,
“less worthy” — carrying on the same project of dehumanising
lower-caste lives started a millenia ago.
The death of Rohith
Vemula has beeen easily framed as Leftvs Right debate, added to the
annals of the intolerance debate. But a far-more worthy response would
be to start a conversation around the caste discrimination that
surrounds us, in the monopolisation of academic spaces, teaching
positions and fellowships by upper-caste scholars, in the violence that
starts at the anganwadi. Honouring the life of a young student murdered
by an oppressive system should mean no less.