Are Our Premier Institutes Harboring Casteism?

“Ten people were sent to the moon. Three of them were OBC while two of them were SC/ST. The rest of the five were astronauts” 

-- An IITian joke.

Darshan Solanki was the most educated person in his family. The son of a Dalit plumber from Ahmedabad, Solanki had always dreamed of becoming a big engineer one day so that he can lift his family name. He used to spend hours watching YouTube tutorials to prepare for his JEE exams. And his efforts brought results. He got admission to study chemical engineering at the most reputed technical and research institute in India—the Indian Institute of Technology. But the 19-year-old was soon to realise that life at the IIT was not what he had dreamed of. “None of us had imagined that it would come to this,” his father Ramesh Solanki recalls. 

On February 12 this year, Solanki decided to end it all by hurling himself out of an eighth-floor window of his hostel inside the IIT Bombay campus. 

His death caused an uproar in IIT-B. But it wasn’t the first such instance. In 2014, 22-year-old electrical engineering student Aniket Ambore, jumped to his death from the sixth floor of his hostel. Ambore too, was a Dalit. As in the case of Ambore, Solanki’s family alleged casteism on campus that led to Solanki’s untimely death. The IIT administration has denied the existence of casteism on campus and said that he could not cope with the competitive rigour of the institute. A Special Investigating Team (SIT) instituted to investigate the circumstances of Solanki’s death has so far found no proof of a “caste angle”. 

However, a member of Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle (APPSC), a student body working for marginalised students on campus, confirms that Solanki faced institutionalised casteism. “Some of the students in their deposition to the investigation team said that Darshan was made fun of for not being good at computers and English,” the member, a tribal student, says on condition of anonymity. He adds that students from the “reservation category” are immediately labelled as “undeserving” and made to feel inferior. 

An internal survey conducted by APPSC members in collaboration with the institutionally mandatory SC/ST Cell in IIT-B in 2022 found that a majority of students from marginalised communities faced discrimination on grounds of coming from “reserved” seats. “I was constantly reminded by my old roommate how I am dumber/lesser intelligent cause I came through reservation”, a testimonial by a student read.

This year, there have been six deaths by suicide in IITs until March, government data shows. On July 10, a final year B-Tech student, Ayush Ashna, a Dalit, died by suicide inside the IIT-Delhi campus. The boy from Bareilly had started his course at home during the pandemic and had only started living in the Delhi campus hostel for the past year, his uncle confirms.

Ashna’s family as well as the Delhi campus APPSC body have alleged caste-based discrimination as the cause of Ashna’s deteriorating mental health. Praveen Ingole, the Chief Liaison Officer of the IIT-D’s newly-formed SC/ST Cell, says that Ashna’s death was not due to caste. “He has been facing stress because he was not able to cope with the academic pressure. He had recently changed his stream. Placement year can be tough on students,” Ingole says. 

The Delhi SC/ST Cell was formed only in April this year and an RTI by APPSC revealed in May that among the 23 IITs across India, only 19 have SC/ST Cell and most of them are not functional.

“The SC/ST Cell is an eyewash as it usually works to serve the institute and not the students. What we really need is sensitisation about caste and what discrimination actually means. This has to come through political will and through pedagogical training of students, faculty and staff at elite institutions like IIT, IIM, AIIMS,” says Delhi University Professor N Sukumar, author of Caste Discrimination and Exclusion in Indian Universities: A Critical Reflection. He states that despite considerable movements and mobilisation against the issue of caste on campus following the death of Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi, caste on campus remains an invisible but persistent shadow.

Last week, IIT-Bombay issued a notification containing guidelines against behaviours indicative of caste discrimination. One of the guidelines states that students cannot be asked their JEE rank as it is indicative of caste. Perhaps the idea is to invisibablise the identity of minority students so that they can better fit in. But is JEE rank the only indicator of caste on campus? 

Incidentally, last week, IIT-B was in the news for another matter—a notice that popped up within campus demarcating an area where only vegetarians were allowed to sit. In the 2022 APPSC survey, over 41 per cent of general students voted for segregation and 56.4 per cent stated they were vegetarian. Meanwhile, over 60 per cent of the Reserved Category respondents were non-vegetarian and 74.6 per cent did not want segregation. 

(This appeared in the print as 'Graveyard of Dreams')