The Outsiders

A new case of caste discrimination in IIT Delhi highlights the miserable plight of Dalit students in India’s premier technical institute, reports SHOBHITA NAITHANI

Brave heart Ravinder Kumar wants to force caste discrimination into the public eye Photo: Jake Cornish

FOR AKSHAY (name changed), his admission in 2002 to the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, (IIT-D) was an achievement whose magnitude has less to do with his being Dalit than with the fact that he has battled schizophrenia since his early teens. Diagnosed in 1997, Akshay has been through years of therapy, which his doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) have certified to have had 95 percent success. His struggle with this complex, mind-debilitating illness, however, meant that it took him six years to reach third-year studies at India’s premier engineering institute.

This May, Akshay went to his professor of Applied Mechanics to request an attendance waiver because he hadn’t been keeping well. A sensitive response is what one would have expected, particularly from a person of the sophisticated calibre IIT professors can be thought to possess. What Akshay received, instead, was a reprimand of stunning crudity. “Every second beggar on the street is a schizophrenic,” he claims the professor told him. “IIT has no room for such people. Degree engineer ko milti hai, bimaar ko nahin (engineers get degrees, not the sick).” Then came the crowning blow: “The only reason you’re here is because of reservations.” The stunned 24-year-old stood speechless.

But worse was to come. Akshay’s name, along with those of 19 other IIT-D undergraduates, was struck off the institute’s rolls earlier this month because his “performance was below the required minimum level for continuation”. This is the first time the institute has asked so many students to leave; 12 of them are Dalits. Akshay, a bank clerk’s son from Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh, doesn’t deny the fact that he hadn’t done well, but insists that the institute must examine the reasons for his poor show. “I sought support but all I got was a dressing-down for being a Dalit,” he says. “I can’t get over that, and I can’t understand why the faculty is not more supportive.”

Along with AIIMS, IIT-D was at the vanguard of anti-reservation protests in 2006, when the human resources development ministry sought to expand reservations for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in State-funded institutions of higher learning. The anti-quota campaign reached a nadir of vulgarity when IIT-D students took to articulating their protest by pretending in public places to mend shoes and sweep roads, implying that these “low” professions (to which Dalits have traditionally been confined) would be the upper-caste IIT aspirant’s only career options were the quota law to be enforced. Propaganda through SMS and e-mail was a highlight of the campaign — these and other inspired ideas were, it was later found, the brainchild of a Gurgaon-based public relations firm, which had offered to help out.

Resentment of backward-caste students is apparently endemic at IIT-D, and comes not just from peers but the faculty as well. Where professors are meant to guide students through the institute’s demanding course work, many of them actively demoralise those from disadvantaged backgrounds. “The IITs were never democratic,” avers a former student, who asked not to be named. “I don’t mean in terms of functioning, but in their attitude towards students.”

The 20 students expelled this year were also obliged to vacate their hostels without delay. Some left without questioning. One decided to fight back. Last December, Ravinder Kumar Ravi achieved passing marks in a subject he was later informed he had failed. He approached the Dean with the initial mark sheet, but, he says, “the Dean took no heed and said the teacher’s word was final”. He then went to the teacher concerned (whom he doesn’t wish to name); she subsequently e-mailed the Dean to explain that the discrepancy had occurred because she had missed one of Ravi’s assignments, which had caused his grade to fall from D to E. “Is it not perverse that the same teacher who gave me passing marks at first found cause to fail me later?” Ravi asks.

HAVING APPROACHED the offices of Union Human Resources Development minister Arjun Singh, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati but to no avail, Ravi lodged a complaint with the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC), which sought an explanation from IIT-D director Surendra Prasad. Although NCSC chairman Buta Singh has told TEHELKA that Ravi’s is a clearly established case of discrimination, Prasad denies the charge. “Students who are aggrieved will obviously make allegations of discrimination,” he says. “Our teachers don’t even know who is a Dalit student and who is not.” When told that students contend that faculty members often ask them their caste, Prasad said: “You must take their claims with many, many pinches of salt.”

Ravi, meanwhile, is planning his next move if the “institute doesn’t accept its mistake”: a hunger strike. Following the termination letters, he has in fact started a mini movement of sorts. Its aim, he says, is to force into the public eye the discrimination that has gone unobserved at IIT-D for years. IITians allege that four to five students are expelled each year from the institute for poor performance. Of them, at least three are from the Scheduled Castes/Tribes (SC/STs). This time, while the institute claims that 20 termination letters were dispatched, students suspect that there are 28 expulsions of which at least 18-20 are SC/STs. After Ravi put up posters in each of the campus hostels, asking fellow sufferers to get in touch with him, distressed students began calling him right away. “One of them told me it was best for him to end his life,” Ravi says.

“In all the institutes of excellence, the question of merit has turned into blatant casteism,” says Anoop Kumar, the editor of Insight: Young Voices, a bimonthly Dalit youth magazine. “The faculty is already prejudiced and therefore they treat Dalit students as substandard. It’s worse for students who are from financially weak backgrounds and lack proficiency in English.”

Sunil (name changed), a Dalit who graduated from IIT-D in 2003, says the discrimination begins in senior school itself. In his final years at the premier Delhi school he attended, Sunil says his classmates were resentful of the fact that he, an SC, had a reservation-ensured fillip to his chance of an IIT admission. “When you enter IIT, you arrive with this baggage of having been branded as second-rate,” he observes. The 27-year-old says he escaped jibes from his professors because of his urban background; a Dalit student from a small town or village, however, has a bad time of it. Lacking proficiency in English, these students are thrown into the same pool to sink or swim as the rest. With little institutional assistance, many of them are unable to cope. “There is immense pressure at IIT for a general category student, but for a Dalit, it becomes twice as tough,” says Sunil, now pursuing an MPhil in sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University. He recalls a day in the first month of his course when a chemistry professor found out that one among a group of students who had sneaked out of his lecture was an SC. “He went ballistic,” says Sunil. Addressing a class of 50, the professor reportedly said, “These worthless people resort to such antics. They don’t deserve being educated.”

Dalit students were often referred as ‘shadda’, a derogatory term derived from ‘Scheduled Caste’, leading to a sense of segregation. According to Kumar, it is then that students withdraw into a shell and some even contemplate suicide.

The IITs always claimed that they admit students on the basis of merit. But Kumar says the concept of merit is bogus and it’s all about opportunity. “The Dalit predicament is not only about caste and reservation. It’s about educational reforms. And these so-called premier institutes need to value that.” •