anti-caste

YET ANOTHER VICTIM OF CASTE BIAS AT AN ELITE UNIVERSITY DRIVEN TO SUICIDE

Report on Recent Dalit Student Suicides at University of Hyderabad (Raju-Venkatesh Solidarity Committee, an alliance of students at the University of Hyderabad)

“On 24th November 2013, Madari Venkatesh, a 3rd year PhD scholar, from Advance Centre for Research in High Energy (ACRHEM), University of Hyderabad (UoH), committed suicide in his hostel room in the campus. Venkatesh came from a Dalit family from Ibrahimpatnam, Andhra Pradesh; probably, a first generation university student. [...]

“M. Venkatesh, after joining UoH for PhD, was not provided a guide and a lab, even after three years, even when other students had started their researches, and published international papers. ACRHEM director, the faculty members, and the management of the university grossly neglected to provide basic academic facilities to a research scholar, thereby, implying a casteist bias in the functioning of the University. Although continuous efforts were made by the deceased in July 2013, through a written request, to provide him a regular guide; his pleas were counter-signed, by the Vice Chancellor (who was the in-charge Director), only to be put in abeyance. In the wake of recurrent suicides in the campus, especially, of marginalized students, student groups came together under the banner ‘Raju-Venkatesh Solidarity Committee.’ [...]

“Venkatesh was worried about the non-allotment of supervisor, and therefore, this must have contributed to the slow pace of his work. However, Venkatesh could publish one paper in a reputed journal, and was about to publish two more. After Prof. S.P. Tewari's retirement, he approached many faculty members, and they had rejected to offer him guidance. On Friday (22nd November 2013), he met a faculty member in school of chemistry, with a request to guide him, and the faculty told him to start the work from the beginning. [...]

“In summary, ACRHEM allotted Prof. Tewari, two years before his retirement, as a guide to Mr. Venkatesh. This is unofficial, and clearly violates the UGC norms, as well as, the University institutional guidelines, as any about-to-be-retiring faculty should not take any new students for guidance. Further, even after repeated pleas by the deceased, efforts were neither made by the director nor the faculty, for the last three years, to allot an official guide, as well as, constitute a doctoral committee for Mr. Venkatesh. [...]

“Even after death, none of the university authorities showed any inclination to console the family members of Mr. Venkatesh. This case is not alone in its occurrence. The problem is cases like this ominously recur.

“Mr. Venkatesh's suicide represents a clear case of discrimination against the marginalized students, especially Dalits, in the campus. Two other Dalit students had committed suicide in similar circumstances: Pulyala Raju from MA Applied Linguistics, from Andhra Pradesh, in April 2013, and Senthil Kumar, a Dalit PhD research scholar in Physics, from Tamil Nadu in April 2008.”

See also:

Report of the Fact Finding Committee on the suicide of Mr Venkatesh, Ph D Student, University of Hyderabad (Centre for Dalit Studies (CDS), Hyderabad, India)

And see all anti-caste posts on
dalit student suicides at elite schools

BEHIND THE EPIDEMIC SUICIDES AMONG UNTOUCHABLE AND TRIBAL STUDENTS IN ELITE INSTITUTIONS

Why there’s an alarming rash of suicides among Dalit students by Stepahnie Nolen (The Globe and Mail (Toronto))

“The sharply truncated life of Anil Meena was marked by a ferocious tenacity.

“From the mud house in rural Rajasthan, where he grew up in a family of subsistence farmers, he made his way first to school and then to the top of his class. He studied with monomaniacal intensity and passed the entrance exam to the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the most prestigious of India’s professional colleges – an achievement almost unfathomable in the largely illiterate aboriginal community from which he came.

“At AIIMS, he battled through classes where he couldn’t understand a word of the English being spoken and pored over a dictionary to get through textbooks. When an arbitrary rule change – that just happened to affect only students from backgrounds such as his – cost him a passing grade in a crucial exam, he tried repeatedly to meet his course director, his friends say. He sat outside the man’s office for four or five hours at a time for a week.

“But Mr. Meena had come up against something his intelligence and perseverance could not overcome: Students of his kind are not welcome at AIIMS, no more than they are at other prestigious Indian universities. They rarely graduate. No one was prepared to help him succeed.

“On March 3, Mr. Meena hung himself from the fan in his small dormitory room. He was 22.

“His death was a crippling blow to his family, a shock to his friends and an ugly blemish for AIIMS. It was also the 20th reported suicide in four years at an elite Indian educational institution by a student who was either aboriginal or Dalit – the people from the bottom of the Hindu caste system, once known as untouchables.

“The suicides have emerged as a subject for fierce debate. Following the promise of the new India, these students are hyper-achievers from the grimmest of backgrounds, who made it into the schools that produce engineers, doctors and business leaders who are sought the world over.

“But when they get there, they are often isolated, humiliated and discriminated against. They are told overtly by their professors that they will never make it to graduation. Yet many feel they cannot drop out – families and communities are invested in their success, and many have taken huge loans.

“Some, trapped in this dilemma, have chosen to end their lives. [...]

“The suicides have occurred at 16 different institutions, including the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and at the universities of Hyderabad and Bangalore.

“In 2008, a final-year Dalit medical student at Government Medical College in Chandigarh in the Punjab hung himself in the college library; Jaspreet Singh left a note in his pocket describing how the head of his department told him repeatedly to his face that he would never, ever be permitted to be a doctor.

“That professor had failed him several times in course work, although Mr. Singh had never before had anything but top marks. After his death, an external committee re-evaluated his exams and found that he should have passed. He was awarded his degree posthumously.

“On March 3, 2010, exactly two years before Mr. Meena’s death, another young aboriginal man killed himself at AIIMS. Bal Mukund Bharti, 25, was just weeks away from earning his degree, something unprecedented in his community in Madhya Pradesh.

“His parents, who’d taken out massive loans to support him, told a team from of investigators from the Insight Foundation, which works to support Dalit and aboriginal students, that he repeatedly complained of harassment from his professors.

“He said that one often complained, ‘I don’t know where they come from, these Dalits and [aboriginals], getting here without studying anything.’

“Yet Mr. Bharti was, in fact, brilliant. He had scored eighth among hundreds of thousands of students nationwide in the intensely competitive engineering entrance exam – he passed up the seat to become a doctor instead. AIIMS carried out no investigation and says he had psychological problems.”

See also:

Dalit suicide highlights discrimination (Alaska Dispatch, July 10, 2012):

“Allegedly sodomized and sexually harassed for two years, a Dalit student at a university in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh committed suicide Monday, adding to a string of deaths that have highlighted the continuing discrimination against low-caste Indians, even at institutes of higher learning.

“According to the Times of India, 22-year-old Ajay Pardole, a student at Rewa University, hanged himself in his hostel room Monday, after the special police division responsible for crimes against the so-called ‘Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes’ took no action on his complaint.

“Pardole had apparently complained on May 14 that a senior student had been sexually harassing him since 2010, but nothing was done. He wrote several letters to high-ranking officials, but received no response. And finally two days ago, he walked into the police station and told them flat out he planned to kill himself if nothing was done before July 9.”

And see:

AIIMS: A Death Trap for Aspiring Reserved Category Students by Gurinder Singh Azad (Round Table India)

And, see, further anti-caste: dalit and tribal suicides in elite institutions

AT INDIA’S ELITE UNIVERSITIES, SYSTEMATIC HARASSMENT OF UNTOUCHABLE STUDENTS

Protect-shun (Times of India)

“Anti-dalit sentiment erupted in 1991, when the V P Singh government decided to implement 27% reservation for OBCs. In the capital’s “left-leaning” university, JNU, caste clashes took place between students; in the dining-halls of IIT-Delhi, dalits were forced to sit on separate tables, and the walls of urinals in Delhi University were covered with puerile graffiti. And the authorities just watched. ‘The atmosphere in our institutions is very brahminical as the upper castes dominate the faculty. In such an environment, the lower caste students automatically become outcastes,’ says Dilip Mandal, who teaches at Delhi's Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC). [...]

“Many, however, have fought back. Dr Ajay Singh, who joined AIIMS in 2002 with the same marks as the cut-off for "general" students, was the only dalit in his hostel wing. He was barred from entering the carrom-board room and one day someone scrawled ‘Nobody likes you here. F**k off’ on his door. But Dr Singh fought back and that led to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appointing a three-member committee, headed by University Grants Commission chairman Sukhdeo Thorat, to look into caste harassment in the country's top medical institutes. The report was shocking: dalit students were bullied into vacating their hostel rooms, leading to a ghetto being formed on two floors of a hostel; they were specifically targeted during ragging; they were not allowed to play cricket and basketball; they were not allowed to eat in the ‘upper-caste mess’; and the teachers ignored them in class, sometimes deliberately failing them in exams. Shamed by the damning report, AIIMS took some remedial steps. ‘Now the hostels are allotted through a lottery system and general harassment has come down a bit, but all the recommendations of the panel are yet to be implemented,‘ says Dr Singh, who now works with a government hospital in Delhi.”

See also anti-caste: VICIOUS CASTE BIGOTRY IN HIGHER EDUCATION (May 8, 2011)