— ✍️ Dr. Sudhakara Karakoti & Dr. Karamala Areesh Kumar

The nexus between the ancient caste system (varnashrama system) and Indian civilisation is not a new discourse. Several perspectives have emerged over the past hundred years, including major discourses such as the synthetic perspective on the caste order, as advocated by people such as Lois Dumont and M.K. Gandhi, and the dialectical perspective, as given by Dr B.R. Ambedkar and Partha Chatterjee. The synthetic perspective considered caste as integral to the functioning of India, with some of these scholars even considering it as the backbone of Indian civilisation. However, the dialectical perspective tends to critique the synthetic perspective because the punitive realities faced by the lower castes and the twice-born castes are left unrealised by the synthetic approach.

The book titled ‘Caste Discrimination and Exclusion in Indian Universities: A Critical Reflection’, written by N. Sukumar, deals with a similar perspective, which involves the analysis of caste and caste discrimination in the realm of academia and higher education in India.

Understanding Exclusion of the Lower Castes in Higher Education

To put this into a historical context, N. Sukumar draws upon the fact that Indian culture generally limited information creation and scattering to favoured classes; it was Buddha, according to Sukumar, who started to test the Brahmanical scholarly custom, challenging the basic tenets of the Brahminical order on the grounds of their authority over the intellectual space of the time. Thinkers like Jyotiba Phule and B. R. Ambedkar laid the foundation for a commitment to social practices, seeking to evaluate existing frameworks and advance qualities. When considering a caste-based society like India from the perspective of the existing socio-cultural capital, Sukumar explores the prospects of students in such a society being put into categories of either ‘weak’ or ‘good’, which is usually based on the judgments of the institutions or through the value judgments of the upper caste teachers/students.

Such value judgments, according to the author, are one of the predominant reasons for the exclusion of students belonging to the lower castes and marginalised communities in the premier institutions of India. Sukumar cites a study conducted by Viney Kirpal on the socio-economic and psychological conditions of SC/ST students at IIT Bombay. The study found that measures such as special preparatory courses aimed at SC/ST students, offered as a coping mechanism, have backfired, turning them into a matter of ridicule among students from higher castes. This is one of the major reasons that, to date, premier Indian institutions such as the IITs remain far beyond the reach of SC students. This is the crux of the problem the author wishes to address in his work: there is a genuine need to problematise the interactions among the social aspects of gender, caste, poverty, language, higher education, and discrimination.

Sukumar even notes how deep such interactions run in the current higher education system in India. Citing the study by P. Thirumal, Sukumar raises the question of how elite higher institutions can be democratised, given that they serve as a nurturing ground for intellectual elites to flourish. And the intellectual elites, in this case, usually belong to the upper castes. In the fieldwork conducted for Thirumal’s study, it was found that certain disciplines were intended solely for SCs to pursue. Some respondents reported that the SCs opted for the arts and humanities because they did not require as much cerebral capacity as the other disciplines. There is no better evidence than comments like these from students in Indian universities to signify systematic discrimination and exclusion of students belonging to marginalised communities, to the extent that certain disciplines in their entirety have been devalued in popular opinion. Where lies the fundamental issue? Sukumar then points to the meritocracy system itself. For some reason, it is observed that the achievements and accolades of students belonging to SC/ST communities are downplayed due to the narrative that these students had it ‘easy’ due to ‘reservations’ and that the same achievements made by an individual belonging to the higher castes have been ‘earned’ through their hard work instead. There is a foundational flaw in such arguments.

Michael Sandel, in one of his perceptive studies of the American education system, sought to deconstruct the narratives of meritocracy and, instead, argues for the prospects of a better, more humane politics for the common good in academia. Sukumar points out that scholars such as Sandel have focused on the entire ecosystem that should enable students to flourish. However, in a meritocratic society, this is never the case. In such societies, winners are required to believe that their success was due solely to their own talent and hard work. This may be true to some extent; however, their winning cannot be due solely to this. What about the role of the parents and the role of the teachers? Such a society fails to account for the many external factors that contribute to an individual’s success and instead gives a mistaken impression that they made it on their own. This deprives individuals of any humility or gratitude, and it becomes even harder for them to care for the common good. Unfortunately, this is the current scenario of higher education in India.

Evaluating the Dalit Plight in Indian Universities

The author goes on to further deconstruct how the Dalits have suffered throughout history and are, in fact, still suffering even after the government has taken various initiatives to improve the status of the Dalit community. The same has been cited extensively by the author with respect to the treatment of Dalit students in Indian universities. A university, which must, in fact, stand as a symbol of liberation, has, on the contrary, deepened the roots of caste discrimination in the academic realm. He mentions various instances of scheduled caste students who have committed suicide because of the discrimination they faced from their universities, teachers, professors and peer groups. Also, the number of scheduled caste and scheduled tribe professors recruited in universities is very low. Such a disproportion shows the deep-rooted nature of systemic caste discrimination that prevails in Indian universities. The number has not increased much over the years either, signifying a lack of development or perhaps alleviation of the situation.

States like Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh have some of the highest percentages of teacher recruitment across all categories. However, among scheduled caste students enrolled in universities, the number has been gradually increasing. In states like Uttar Pradesh, SC enrolment has increased from 12.9% to 24%. SC girls’ enrolment has also increased from 13.2% in 2011-12 to 26.4% in 2018-19. However, in some parts of India, such as Bihar, SC enrolment in education has been very low for the longest time. Even after adopting various laws and reservation policies for uplifting the Dalit community from their plight, this marginalised section still faces discrimination in their workplaces, universities and colleges, which has consequently resulted in an increase in suicide rates among Dalits. It was also observed from Sukumar’s work that, with an increasing number of private institutions, the prospects for higher education among backward minorities to enrol in good private universities have declined exponentially due to the absence of affirmative action policies in private institutions. That is also one of the reasons why the enrolment rate of students from SCs and STs in higher education is very low.

In the context of an institutional framework, the National Policy on Education of 1986 and the Programme of Action of 1992 were based on two landmark reports submitted and laid down by the Radhakrishnan Commission and the Kothari Commission. These highlighted the five essential goals for the prospects of higher education in India, which are: equal access, greater access, relevance, promotion of social values, and quality and excellence. However, the past two decades have shown that none of these goals has been fully achieved, as evidenced by the prevailing system of microaggressions against students from marginalised groups in higher education.

One such example of a microaggression based in the innate realm of discrimination can be found in instances wherein students are not allowed to drink water from the same tap that the upper caste students use; also, making Dalit students sit in the corner of the classroom to keep the upper caste students ‘segregated’ from them — all of these show systemic caste violence based on microaggressive tendencies in academia. This is why, unsurprisingly, the Dalit dropout percentage from schools up to class V is 41.47%, up to class VII is 59.93%, and up to class X is 71.92%.

A case that stands out in this regard is that of a Dalit girl who was pursuing her master's from Hyderabad Central University and was involved with a boy from the same university. When the boy refused to marry her later, she committed suicide. The postmortem report found that the girl was pregnant. The boy boasted to the friends of the deceased by saying that they could never harm him because of his influence, stemming from the privilege associated with the upper caste community he belonged to. There are also several cases wherein Dalit teachers harass and mock Dalit students. Madari Venkatesh, a research scholar at one of the universities, pointed out that students from SC/ST backgrounds are even delayed in the allotment of guides, which leads to student frustration and heavily affects their doctoral work. Such microaggressions being prevalent in the realm of Indian academia, both on the higher education front and the primary education front, pose a huge challenge to the aspirations of liberation from the shackles of caste discrimination for the marginalised communities and act as a huge barrier to their academic journey.

Conclusion

The system of positive discrimination in the form of reservation, although it acts as a tiny medium through which students from marginalised communities can attain liberation, has had the opposite effect on students from higher castes and is filled with an egotistical meritocratic belief that their success weighs more because they had to work ‘harder’. Such notions lead to microaggressions from students of higher castes against first-generation learners from lower castes. How can one expect an SC/ST first-generation learner to have faith in the system when they are supposed to deal with microaggressions like this? Can they be inspired to study more? Or are they demotivated due to the failure of the educational system? With even teachers giving out phrases describing marginalised students as a ‘disaster to academics’, how is a student from the lower castes supposed to feel empowered in such conditions? This is what led aspiring students such as Rohith Vemula and Muthukrishnan towards seeking equality, and ultimately cost them their lives. The cultural heritage of the destructive and parochial caste order is still very much present in the academic world of India, and it is nothing but shameful that we have not been able to transcend it.

Author- N. Sukumar is a professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Delhi University. He has extensively researched and written on caste dynamics, Dalit politics, and higher education in India.

Reviewers:

Dr. Sudhakara Karakoti, Professor in Political Science, Department of Arts, RBANM’s First Grade College, Bengaluru.

Dr. Karamala Areesh Kumar, Head, Department of International Relations, Peace and Public Policy (IRP and PP), St Joseph’s University, Bengaluru.