Death of a student

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Last week, 18-year old Darshan Solanki, a first year Dalit student at IIT Bombay, son of Rameshbhai, a plumber and Tarlikaben, a domestic worker, died by suicide.

Reading about this young man's death, of his parents' heartbreak; of his father sending him some money to have a good weekend just two hours before his death is painful. But IIT's unwillingness to admit that campus casteism has something to do with such a death, is enraging. It not only echoes, but bolsters upper caste pretense that merit is not socially acquired, and the resentment about reservations.

In 2014, Aniket Ambhore, a Dalit student at IIT Bombay, died by suicide. A committee set up on the demand of his parents, submitted a report in 2015 which acknowledged his death as an outcome of a discriminatory atmosphere. It took seven years after this for IIT to set up an ST-SC Students cell. Yet the onus of surfacing these issues seems to rest with the Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle-IITB (APPSC-IITB). As one APPSC-IITB member said in an interview: "This can't be our job. But if we don't do it, the institute will never."

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Last November, the students raised the issue of the Students Wellness Centre being headed by someone who held anti-reservation views. While mental health is a pervasive issue for young people, the pretence that social context does not impact mental health is outdated, unkind and dangerous. Most elite parents, conservative or liberal, are anxious and obsessed about their children getting into elite schools in order to maintain a certain status in the social system. That anxiety of status affecting the mental health of elite students is caste privilege playing itself out in one way. The suffering of a student from a marginalised background is affected by the constant hostility of caste-based discrimination.

After a week of student resistance and persistence, IIT Bombay acknowledged that surveys they carried out have revealed casteism on campus among faculty and students. They refuse to make the results public, saying they do not have the consent of participants. But if such evidence remains shrouded and such truths are kept covert, how can they be addressed?

As we know, from reports but also general conversations around us online or offline, Bahujan students constantly face taunts from faculty and peers, for being "quota students". Only a few days ago, a Bangalore college staged a play with mocking dialogues about reservations. The institution did not reprimand or penalise anyone for this until the video went viral. What does that tell us about the value system of educational institutions?

Let us ask some new questions about how we define merit. What is the merit of institutions if its Bahujan students are regularly pushed to suicide? What is the merit of students and faculty who are incapable of confronting social inequality with a certain gravitas and empathy, and taking joint ownership of systems which will change it? What is the merit of a structure that cannot create systems of care and assistance for its diverse student body, but exists only to judge them and in turn teach them to judge others? Social change is a complex problem - but what is the merit of an education that can only address tough exam questions but cannot redefine itself to tackle this tough problem?

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com