In India, Caste Discrimination Still Plagues University Campuses
Subhash Sharma for The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 11, 2011
Discrimination against Dalit, or underclass, students is “blatant,” says Ashwini Shelke, a sociology student at Jawaharlal Nehru U. Here she meets with other students in an annual gathering in Mumbai to honor a Dalit leader and chief architect of India’s Constitution, Babasaheb Ambedkar.
By Shailaja Neelakantan
New Delhi
In February, 20-year-old Manish Kumar climbed to the roof of a five-story building at the elite Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee and jumped to his death. The engineering major was a member of India’s underclass, formerly known as “untouchables.” And that, says his father, was what drove him to commit suicide.
From the day he set foot on campus, “his classmates would taunt him, saying, ‘You can never become an engineer—you are only here because of quotas,'” says Rajinder Kumar, from his home in the northern Indian city of Kanpur. “Every time we met him, he would look depressed, and he initially didn’t tell us why. One day, finally, he phoned and said he was being tormented by his classmates and he couldn’t study because of that.”
Caste-based discrimination has been illegal since the creation of India’s first Constitution, in 1950. To eliminate centuries-old persecution of Hinduism’s outcasts, considered so unclean as to be untouchable, the Constitution made it a criminal offense to engage in practices common at the time, including refusing untouchables entry to temples, serving them from separate cups and plates, refusing to rent them homes, and denying them access to education.
The government also set aside more than one-fifth of places in public colleges and in government jobs for this group of around 200 million people, which the Constitution renamed the Scheduled Castes, and for Scheduled Tribes, a term that refers to indigenous people, who number about 96 million.
Today members of the Scheduled Castes have emerged as a potent political force. They call themselves Dalits, a Sanskrit word meaning “ground down beyond recognition.” But as Manish Kumar’s suicide suggests, thousands of years of prejudice are not so easily erased.
Of 441,424 registered crimes against Dalits and indigenous people from 1995 to 2007, as many as 10,512 were cases in which upper castes perpetuated some of the old “untouchability” practices, according to the National Coalition for Strengthening the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
Even recently there have been incidents—mostly in rural areas, where Dalits are less able to blend in—of people being forced to consume feces, or lynched because they dared to get water from a well not designated for their use. Sometimes they are attacked for seeming to show off by riding a motorbike or by talking on a cellphone.
Disturbingly, caste discrimination is pervasive in India’s universities as well, say many Dalit students and teachers, as well as social scientists, academics, and observers who study issues of class and caste.
In the most egregious cases, Dalit students and their supporters say, upper-caste students beat up Dalits for no given reason; professors ignore questions from Dalit students in class; upper-caste students, with the complicity of professors, ostracize their Dalit peers or force them out of university housing; and professors compel students to reveal their caste publicly, and then give Dalits lower grades.
University administrators, police officials, and the Indian media often deny that discrimination exists, downplay its severity, or simply sweep it under the rug, says Ivan Kostka, publisher of a magazine on caste issues called Forward Press, who notes that 85 percent of all senior editorial positions in the national news media are held by Brahmins, the highest of the caste groups.
Contacted by The Chronicle for comment on incidents that allegedly occurred on their campuses, officials at several universities either did not respond or argued that caste discrimination does not exist at their institutions. At the Indian Institute of Technology at Roorkee, for example, the dean of student welfare rejects Rajinder Kumar’s claims that his son was harassed for being a Dalit.
“There is no truth in this,” says the dean, N.K. Goel. “All students are treated equal. No discrimination occurs at any level.”
Rajinder Kumar says the university did nothing when he asked them for help after his son confided in him that he was being harassed.
“Instead of taking action against the students Manish complained about, they said it was better he leave university housing and take up private residence elsewhere,” says Mr. Kumar. “The supervisor said, ‘There are 400 to 600 students here, and how many can we stop from saying such things?'”
Modern Prejudices
To understand these widely divergent points of view, consider that India’s attitudes toward caste today echo attitudes in the United States until the 1960s, when overt prejudice toward black people coexisted with a nascent civil-rights movement.
And even though many Indians say they oppose any form of caste discrimination, it is not uncommon for employers, for example, to ask applicants about their family backgrounds or to make explicit judgments about which parts of India produce the most- and least-industrious workers.
No national studies have been done to determine the magnitude of caste-related discrimination on campuses. But according to the Insight Foundation, a Dalit activist group, discrimination and verbal and physical abuse have led to at least 18 suicides by Dalit students over the past four years. And a disproportionate number of dropouts from universities are Dalits—even though higher education is their only hope of rising socially.
“This is caste humiliation,” says Surinder Jodhka, a sociology professor at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University who studies social stratification, with an emphasis on Dalits and religious minorities.
Anoop Kumar, founder of the Insight Foundation, says those 18 suicides reflect only those cases in which parents have come forward to complain. In many more cases, parents are reluctant to speak out. He fears that despite the gains that Dalits have made politically, the climate on campuses has actually gotten worse as they have begun speaking up more, and the competition for university placements has grown more fierce.
Opposition to Quotas
At the root of much of the animosity driving caste tensions on campuses is the quota system, or reservations, as they are often called.
Shiv Visvanathan, a sociologist who has written about religion and Dalit issues in India, says reservations have created a barrier of prejudice, especially given the competition in India for admission to universities. That has entrenched existing stereotypes about Dalits, who many feel “aren’t fit to join university and then not fit to study and basically should not be treated as citizens.”
Those opposed to quotas argue that after India’s 64 years of independence, set-asides have outlived their original purpose. Dalits, they argue, have risen enough on the socioeconomic ladder to be able to compete against their peers on a level playing field. Many opponents of quotas believe that the system allows academically weaker students to get in, when merit should be the sole basis of admission.
“Obviously they are weak [academically]. That’s why they are taking the benefit of reservations,” says Kaushal Kant Mishra, a founding member of a group called Youth for Equality, which campaigns against the use of quotas. Dr. Mishra says that while he agrees that Dalits have been discriminated against in the past, it is wrong to relax admissions standards in an attempt to redress those injustices.
He helped formed Youth for Equality in 2006, when he was studying at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, or Aiims, a top medical school. He says he does not believe that caste discrimination exists at his alma mater or anywhere else.
Even some university leaders think the quota system is wrong. Set-asides in top universities are “a bad mistake” made by the Indian government, says P.V. Indiresan, a former head of one of the Indian Institutes of Technology.
And it’s common for students who cannot apply under the quotas to feel that they might have been admitted to a better institution if the quotas were abolished.
Small Differences
The perception among many opponents of quotas is that there is a significant difference in admissions standards between students who qualify for quotas and those who don’t. Yet the difference is actually quite narrow, with a relaxation of between 5 percent and 10 percent of grades on either college-entrance examinations or high-school exit exams.
“It isn’t as if we can get zero marks and get in,” says Ajay Kumar Singh, who studied at Aiims, and has formed a group called Progressive Medicos Forum, which seeks to bring to light caste discrimination in medical colleges.
“In the notion of merit that has been appropriated by the elite, there is no inclusion, there is only individual merit and the natural high IQ which apparently you automatically get if you’re higher caste,” Mr. Jodhka jokes.
The Death of Merit, a documentary about Dalit students’ suicides made by the Insight Foundation’s Anoop Kumar, argues that the real death of merit occurs when Dalit students who have made it to college despite socioeconomic hardships kill themselves.
This year Mr. Kumar has been going around to India’s universities and screening the documentary for students. When he talks about suicides and discrimination, he often hears that hostility toward Dalits exists because of quotas.
“I ask, ‘What about us not being allowed to go to temples or not given houses on rent or discriminated against in jobs? And what have reservations got to do with that?’ Then they have nothing to say,” Mr. Kumar says.
Students who benefit from the quota system often find that it is used against them once they are on campus. Many institutions post lists of new students that include their scores and the category under which they were admitted: general or scheduled caste. This ensures that everyone—students, administrators, and professors—knows who the Dalits are.
The differentiation, and sometimes overt segregation, continues in other ways. Dr. Singh says that most Dalit students at Aiims were housed in separate dorms. He was placed in a dorm where he was the only Dalit, which created its own problems.
Students “used to bolt my dormitory room door from outside and write on the door that no one likes me, and I should change to another dormitory,” recalls Dr. Singh.
More recently, at Jawaharlal Nehru University, two Dalit students were assaulted, on separate occasions, by upper-caste students, according to a Dalit support group on the campus.
In one instance, a Dalit student said that an upper-caste male student and some friends beat him up after the Dalit student asked to see his ID before he could vote for the dormitory student elections.
“Don’t you know who I am?” the latter asked, according to some students at the university. During the alleged assault, the Dalit student claims his attackers were chanting caste slurs.
In another instance, Dalit students complained that they had been assaulted in retaliation for a poster that reinterpreted Hindu mythology with a pro-Dalit spin. Dalit students say the university doesn’t take action when such incidents occur.
S.K. Sopory, Jawaharlal Nehru University’s vice chancellor, says administrators conducted an inquiry about the fight over the poster and found that students on both sides were guilty. The university suspended them. “We have zero-tolerance policy on violence,” Mr. Sopory says. Sometimes clashes between different castes are actually motivated by rivalry between campus political parties, he adds. Also, he argues that Dalit students “sometimes incite groups, saying, ‘You Brahmins have been ruling us for centuries.'”
Proving Discrimination?
It is difficult, of course, to determine whether Dalit students are targeted because of their caste or because they simply misinterpret why they received poor grades or treatment.
Many Dalit students with whom The Chronicle spoke said they didn’t file formal complaints because they were afraid of the repercussions. However, on politically active campuses like Jawaharlal Nehru University, Dalit students have been able to produce some evidence suggesting that discrimination exists.
A petition last year by students at the university, using India’s Right to Information Act, showed that many Dalit students who scored well in their written exams, on which students are identified only by a number, received extremely low scores in the oral exams.
Discrimination “is that blatant,” says Ashwini Shelke, a sociology student at the university who is a member of the United Dalits Student Forum, a group that brings attention to issues faced by Dalits.
Sometimes, students say, they suffer from the prejudice of low expectations. Mr. Kumar, of the Insight Foundation, says that on his first day of engineering school, “one professor said, ‘Those who are from the Scheduled Caste category better work hard. Mayawati won’t be marking your exams—I will.'” Mayawati is the country’s first female Dalit chief minister of a state.
Mariaraj, a former student at a Tamil Nadu college, who goes by one name, says he felt shut out in class.
“No teacher talked to us Dalits in class, and they ignored any questions we had,” he recalls. “Teachers were very partial to non-Dalits. If any Dalit was absent one day, he would be severely punished,” but non-Dalits who would skip class weren’t penalized, says Mr. Mariaraj, who is now pursuing a doctorate at Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, in Tamil Nadu.
But quota opponents say they’ve seen such hostility go both ways.
“Some are good, but many are arrogant,” says Mr. Indiresan, the former head of an Indian Institute of Technology, of students admitted under quotas. “One Dalit student in my class had a low attendance record, and he said because he is Dalit, he doesn’t need to bother.”
Dalit students also seem to fare worse than their peers in college.
In 2007 the Progressive Medicos and Scientists Forum conducted a survey and found that student-failure rates at Aiims, the medical school, were 60 to 70 percent for Dalit and Scheduled Tribe students, while for nonquota students, the rates were under 10 percent.
At the Indian Institutes of Technology, says Mr. Kumar, of the Insight Foundation, the annual Dalit dropout rate is 25 percent. Whether this is the result of prejudice or other factors—such as weaker academic preparation—is difficult to know.
A Taboo Topic
It is also hard to know whether the average professor or student believes that caste-based discrimination is a problem, as the topic remains largely taboo. No national surveys on discrimination, or on beliefs about quotas, have been done.
The Chronicle approached several professors at the University of Delhi to ask about their views, but all refused to discuss those issues publicly. Some who opposed quotas didn’t want to be named but said that once Dalit students get in, they don’t work.
University administrators have also not seemed to take many overt steps to deal with possible discrimination on their campuses or tensions around the issue of quotas.
In 2008, Senthilkumar, a Dalit physics scholar pursuing his doctoral degree at the University of Hyderabad, killed himself on campus because no professor was willing to be his doctoral guide, say Dalit activists and some academics there.
A university spokesman says an investigation turned up nothing incriminating.
“No evidence was found in any of the schools for systematic or deliberate discrimination against students on the basis of caste, although problems in administering the Ph.D. programs have given rise to such apprehensions among students,” wrote Ashish Thomas, a university spokesman, in an e-mail response to a question about Mr. Senthilkumar’s case.
P. Thirumal, head of the department of communication at Hyderabad, says the situation is not so simple.
“There have been [discrimination] cases I have heard of from students,” he says, emphasizing that his views do not necessarily represent the university’s. When society is the way it is, it’s too ambitious to expect professors to transcend its behavior, he says.
“By and large, caste discrimination is an affliction, a collective one,” he adds.
What Mr. Thomas doesn’t say, but Mr. Thirumal confirms, is that Hyderabad’s investigation also concluded that discrepancies and ambiguities had crept into the assessment of students at the school of physics.
“The sad part of the report is that while it agrees discrimination happened in physics, it didn’t pinpoint any authority. So no one was punished,” Mr. Thirumal says.
Looking for a Solution
There are some small signs of change.
After lobbying efforts by the Insight Foundation and other Dalit advocacy groups, in July the country’s university regulator ordered hundreds of institutions to take strong steps to prevent caste discrimination.
An unnamed official told an Indian newspaper that the number of Dalit students committing suicide “is shocking enough for us” to take such action. Anoop Kumar says the university regulator’s order has been posted on bulletin boards on university campuses.
One thing many Dalit students don’t want to change is the quota system itself. “Yes, the quota identifies you as a Scheduled Caste student, so the chances of discrimination are high,” says Ms. Shelke, of the United Dalits Student Forum. “But if there is no quota, we wouldn’t even get in, because discrimination is so huge, right from [elementary] school.”
She and other advocates hope that more Dalit students feel comfortable speaking up for themselves, and that universities take a more active part in breaking down longtime social prejudices.
“We have to get universities to break the ice between communities,” says Mr. Visvanathan, the sociologist. “We need imaginative faculty. I see [the current situation] as a failure of imagination.”