Indian campuses which reflect the diverse nature of India are the sophisticated arena where caste and other forms of discrimination are allowed to nurture and breed through the upper caste – elite hegemonic dominance. In a very precise term, Institutional Murder is putting a life to end because of caste and other socio – economic backwardness. From administration to professor to their peers they have to face casteist slurs and comments over and over. This venom of caste discrimination is taking the lives of minority and lower caste students. From Mudassir Kamran to Fathima Latif, the list of tragic loss is endless.
The crux of this discrimination by upper caste is the fact that the marginalised students are provided reservation in congruence with the affirmative action enunciated in Article 15 of the Constitution of India to emancipate them from their blighted condition because of the historical discriminatory realm which is working in our nation. SC, ST, OBC students are called as ‘quota students’ and caste is accredited to all of their achievements and failures, they are taunted and ostracised in the campus.
An individual’s educational and social concerns are coalesced and will influence from one’s family, parental education and access to resources. They may also face impediments because of the ‘lack of fit’ between the culture at home and culture in elite colleges. Higher education remains a selective field and elitism built within its institutional mechanism excluding students from the weaker sections due to the design of its selection, admission and tendency towards neutralising merit (DESHPANDE:2006). Been deprived of the privilege of education for so many generations and as a first-generation entrant into the University and first learner in English Medium, they are intimidated, they lack support and handholding to increase their language skills to cope up in that atmosphere.
When these elite teachers and students who belong to the same socio – economic status, they share a degree of familiarity during the classes where they converse their private school experiences, foreign travels, and those books in which they were negated. Also how these marginalised sections of people contribute when all these institutions are being made beyond their economic limit. The expenditure of IIT, IIM, and other higher educational institutions are deliberately making the fee structure accessible to students hailing from elite background only and making sure that students from economically weaker background do not reach there just to make those institutions similar to Brahmanical Agraharas. As a result of the pandemic and the resultant online classes, Universities simply postulate that all of their students have laptops and proper facilities back at home. Even there are students who don’t have good mobile phones, laptops, and they hail from remote villages where the Digital India is a dream and they face issues like paucity in the internet. The institutions had blatantly neglected their troubles and put them in a burden of another stress.
If it is in the case of Hijabi Muslim girls when they assert their identity they are being pestered and tortured to take of their hijab by the pretended so called “progressive /feminist savarna elites”, and try to stereotype muslim women even at a time when they have gained much legitimacy and visibility. I had faced verbal torture and queasy questions related to my identity as a Muslim girl and their way of fascism by limiting my Muslim identity to ‘Burkha’. There is no feminism until and unless a woman accepts the rights and choices of another woman.
I swear institutional murders happen every single day in every space of the university. The voices of subaltern are excluded and unheard. They lack representation. Nancy Fraser argues that Public Sphere is constituted “by a number of significant exclusion” of historically marginalised groups. She calls for ‘Participatory Parity’ in which she views social justice as a requiring social arrangement which make it possible for all to participate on an equal footing in social life. Even if it’s IIT, JNU, DU, JAMIA, or any institution, everywhere the voices and spaces of minorities are suppressed and subdued. If our institutions are killing students from Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim communities then it’s high time to have a serious look into these highly corrosive institutional mechanisms. Or else these elite Indian campuses will continue to kill those students hailing from backward community and will remain on the top of India’s academic rankings until we democratise our institutions which reflects the diversity of India.There must be effective and stringent legal safeguard against discrimination as a punishable offense, civic Education and awareness, academic assistance to the students who need support, participation of these students among all the decision making bodies of the college and so on. The way towards this is a strong and resilient political battle and perpetual struggle for human rights, equality and social justice.
