India education: Dalit student suicide
Caste-discrimination is undermining India's efforts to uplift the
oppressed through quotas in higher education.
Jason OverdorfMay 24, 2011 06:05
India dalit suicides02011 05 22
NEW DELHI, India — Jaspreet Singh, a young student from a caste once
considered "untouchable" by other Hindus, was in his last year of
medical school when his life began to fall apart.
A talented student, and his family's brightest hope for clawing their
way into the middle class, he was stunned to find that he had failed
community medicine, one of his easiest subjects. But he was even more
devastated by the alleged reason: His professor was determined to
flunk him because of his caste.
Like most students from the Dalit castes, Singh had suffered the sly
digs and subtle slights of his classmates in silence for years at the
Goverment Medical College (Chandigarh). His professor's alleged claim
that he would never allow Singh to get there was the last straw.
Singh hung himself from the ceiling fan in the bathroom in the college
library, writing in his suicide note that he could no longer bear the
insults and discrimination he'd endured from two fellow students and
his community medicine professor, Dr. N.K. Goel. (All three have been
charged with abetting Singh's suicide, which is a crime under the
Indian penal code, but no ruling has been issued and the accused
maintain that they are innocent).
"The college says he couldn't cope with the coursework, but he did
fine in all his other subjects," said Jaspreet's sister, Balwinder
Kaur. "In surgery he got 80 percent marks."
Watch an interview with Singh's family:
Sadly, cases like Jaspreet's are all too common, according to the
Insight Foundation, a group of young Dalits who are working to
eliminate discrimination in India's higher education system.
No official effort has been made to determine how many of the more
than 16,000 school and college students who have killed themselves
over the past four years hail from India's historically oppressed
castes, and only one study, covering only the All India Institute of
Medical Sciences, has investigated discrimination on campus.
But the Insight Foundation believes that a disproportionate number of
the students committing suicides are Dalits, and its members allege
that caste discrimination, a dirty secret, is ubiquitous at India's
top universities — even as the government works to expand access to
higher education with quotas, or reservations, for historically
oppressed groups.
"The problem which we face in elite institutions is much worse," said
Anoop Kumar, the Insight Foundation's national coordinator, and a
Dalit himself. "These elite institutions are considered to be very
prestigious, and the Dalit students who enter there are thought to be
intruding into that space through reservations — they don't deserve to
be there, this is such a competitive place, this is such a meritorious
place, and these guys have come through quota. So the hatred and
hostility is much more."
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It just might be possible that hostility marks an inflexion point for
Indian society not unlike white America's reaction to the
desegregation of schools in the 1960s.
To break the stranglehold of caste — which has endured for thousands
of years, defeating the efforts of religious reformers, missionaries
and civil rights activists — India made the persecution or segregation
of the erstwhile untouchables illegal and introduced a quota system
that reserved 22.5 percent of university placements and government
jobs for the so-called "Scheduled Castes and Schedule Tribes" in the
1950s.
But in recent years, since the rise of caste-based political parties
in the 1990s has begun to ensure those reservations are enforced, and
other laboring castes have won their own job and education quotas, the
shakeup in the social order has resulted in a backlash from among high
caste Indians. At the All India Institute for Medical Sciences
(AIIMS), for instance, where there are 50 Dalit students, hundreds of
doctors staged protests and hunger strikes against the expansion of
the quota system to reserve an additional 27 percent of placements for
students from the laboring castes known legally as the "other backward
classes," or OBCs.
Their argument: reserving half or more of the seats in India's limited
universities has made it nearly impossible for high-caste students to
win a place, and the quotas are eroding the high standards that have
earned the Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of
Management and AIIMS an international reputation for producing leaders
like Indra Nooyi, the chief executive of Pepsi, and Vinod Khosla,
co-founder of Sun Microsystems, among thousands of others.
That was the environment that another Dalit suicide victim, Balmukund
Bharti, confronted when he won a place at AIIMS through the quota
system in 2006.
Persecution forced Bharti to move out of his dorm room to bunk with
other Dalit students. His professors and classmates allegedly marked
him out as a "quota student" at every turn. And one of his instructors
allegedly told him flat out, "You are not worthy of becoming a
doctor," according to his parents, who also say that AIIMS never
notified them after their son's first, unsuccessful, suicide attempt.
(AIIMS did not respond to an interview request or questions sent by
email).
"Suicide is just an indicator of the malaise that is there," said
Kumar of the Insight Foundation, which has documented nearly 20 cases
of discrimination-related suicides by Dalit students, and posted video
testimonies from their parents and relatives on Youtube and various
web portals.
View Part II of Balmukund Bharti's story.
Kumar cites the high drop out rate among Dalit students, the dearth of
Dalit faculty, and the large number of unfilled quota seats as
evidence that the whole education system is shot through with
caste-discrimination.
Indeed, while in every other instance institutions and individuals
alike cultivate a disingenuous, willful blindness to caste — refusing
to compare the performance of low-caste students on anonymous tests to
their performance in one-on-one evaluations, for instance — your caste
is the very first thing that the university learns about you on the
first day of class, Kumar says.
On his own first day at university in Uttar Pradesh, a professor asked
each student to stand up and tell everyone his name, his hometown, and
his rank on the standardized test that governs college admissions,
which meant that he had to announce to the entire assembly that he had
gained entry through the quota system, and therefore that he was a
Dalit.
The Bahujan Samaj Party's Kumari Mayawati had just become the first
Dalit chief minister of the state, and the professor concluded with a
message for all the quota students. You had better study hard, he
said, because Mayawati won't be marking your exams.
"From the first day, they identify you as a reserved category student,
or a quota student, and hence, they believe you are inherently weak,"
Kumar said. "At the same time, they're telling you that you can't
approach them for help."
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