Why Our Institutions are Killing Students from Marginalised Backgrounds

Aishani Khurana is a Doctoral Researcher at JNU.

In January 2016, Rohith Vemula’s searing suicide note stirred the national consciousness and arrested the glaring reality of caste discrimination prevalent in university campuses. His passionate lament that, “the value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility” indicted the everyday experiences of isolation, discrimination and exclusion inflicted on students from marginalized sections of society. Yet, it takes one more death for us to deeply reflect on the entrenched structures of caste prejudice and sustained discriminatory practices against Dalits and minorities that plagues our institutions. The death of Dr. Payal Tadvi at the hands of casteist subjugation and a blatant institutional neglect calls for not only a provision of legal safeguards in higher educational institutes but a complete overhaul of these spaces of learning.

The elitist and exclusionary nature of the premier higher educational institutes in India has been well established in both academia as well as in the domain of public policy. In the wake of multiple complaints and reports of harassment and abuse against Dalit and Adivasi students at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in 2007, the Thorat Committee was set up by the government to investigate into the matter. The report highlighted the differential nature of discrimination and structural inequalities meted out to the SC/ST students. From discrimination in Practical and Viva exams to strained social relations with faculty members and segregation in hostels and mess, the SC/ST students were relegated to the margins of the university/institute. Nothing has changed in the past decade. The ‘emancipatory, liberal and progressive’ spaces like universities, colleges and higher educational institutes continue to operate within the ambit of a casteist consciousness which severely jeopardizes the capacity of SC/ST students to expropriate public spaces, participate freely in the social life of the community and more fundamentally to simply exist as persons.

For first generation learners, especially hailing from backward backgrounds, these institutes of higher learning can be extremely daunting and disturbing. The embodied social and cultural capital of the upper caste students gets naturalized and becomes the mainstream, thereby excluding the Dalit students from occupying these social spaces. From learning the ‘right way’ to speak English and dressing up in a ‘proper way’ to inculcating the ‘general etiquette’ of participating in social events; even the most common place interactions become a cause of social anxiety. On top of that, the silos formed around caste/class identities further exacerbates the experiences of alienation. What is tragic is that the exclusion that isolates the victim of caste discrimination, unites its perpetrators. For somebody like Payal, who belonged to a Muslim tribal community from a poor district in Maharashtra and was the first person in her family and second from her community to become a doctor, the everyday micro-aggression of caste by a group of upper caste women had devastating mental impact on her, compelling her to commit suicide. While it is relatively easier to gauge the material and social cost of caste based discrimination, the psychological cost of such brutality and oppression is incomprehensible. The loneliness, feeling of guilt and shame and an acute sense of worthlessness emanate from the structural design of these neo-brahminical institutes that thrive on normalization of caste bigotry and social exclusion.

The dark underbelly of caste that prevails in educational institutes is premised on the Hindu social order that does not recognize the individual and his/her distinctiveness as the center of any social purpose. The collective identity of caste is valorized above all else, and an individual is reduced to his/her caste identity. Thus, what a Dalit student experiences as a personal failure is infact a systemic working of the institution of caste, where the normalization of stigma initiates a victimhood of identity, making them feel as ‘inferior outsiders’. It is the routine acts of exclusion and everyday practices of discrimination embedded within institutional structures that culminates into a tragic event like a suicide.

Dr. Tadvi’s death is a brutal testimony to the normalization of casteism in spaces of learning, the internalization of caste bigotry and the failure of institutions to safeguard and provide protection against these discriminatory acts. Despite two formal complaints, one from Payal’s mother and another from her husband against the casteist slurs used by her seniors and their everyday acts of humiliating her, there was no concrete step taken by the BYL Nair Hospital. This institutional neglect and inability to gauge the mental trauma speaks of the dire need for better sensitization and establishment of anti-discrimination cells which can work autonomously despite the institutional hierarchies.

While the reservation system has helped to rectify historical forms of caste discrimination by opening opportunities for students from marginalized backgrounds to enter institutes of higher learning, what we need today is a provision of legal safeguards, institutional support and a sensitized learning environment that can rectify the continued forms of caste discrimination. There is a need to democratize the classroom for marginalized voices to speak. There is a need to call out the everyday casteist micro aggressions to safeguard the mental health of first generation learners. There is a need to initiate a serious public discourse on why it is problematic to assume that merit gets compromised with reservations. There is need for a complete overhaul of these learning spaces so that the students from marginalized communities are treated, in the words of Rohith Vemula, “as a mind, as a glorious thing made up of stardust” and not reduced “to a vote, to a number, to a thing.”