Marginality In A Caste Capitalist Public University: A Review Of Legal Education At NLUs

— ✍️ Kapil Kumar Verma

National Law Universities (NLUs) are generally understood as autonomous universities formed by state governments for specialised education in law. Admissions to them are generally through the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) exam, with the only exception being NLU Delhi, which conducts its own exam known as AILET. These institutions offer a lucrative career in law, especially the promise of direct placements to law firms and access to social capital. But this promise is asymmetric; to those with existing social and economic privilege, it amplifies their access, while to those with marginality, its promises are at best half-hearted. Through this, one can reflect on how these institutions are failing in their public duty to provide inclusion and mobility to their students. These may be generalisations, but I have tried to locate these experiences in a larger paradigm of institutionalised Caste Capitalism.

To get into such institutions, one has to clear the CLAT exam, which charges 4000 Rupees as application fees (3500 if you are SC/ST), which would be roughly a week's wage for a worker. This is a part of a larger trend where you are excluded at the outset. Gone are the days when one would pay rupees 100 to apply for the university. Then comes the admission process, and the fees for the institutions, NLUs charge between 2 Lakh to 5 Lakhs per year from the students, and some institutions even want such payment all at once for the first year.

A large number of SC, ST and OBC rarely have access to such capital at once, and even those who may be covered by a scholarship need such funds to make the payment that may be reimbursed by the scholarship. Then, certain institutions follow a caste-based admission process in the allocation of hostels, wherein the General category would be invited on Day 1, then OBC, then SC/ST, thus this entrenches the identities and hierarchy amongst the students. In such processes, the hostel allotment also reinforces casteism. Further, when the hostels are to be changed in subsequent years, the Grade becomes the only criterion where the marginalised students are pushed into ghettoisation.

Institutional Apathy is a pervasive problem in NLUs. There is a lack of any sensitisation to caste, and colour-blindness is the official policy, the institutions lack SC/ST Cells, student run collectives on Caste are rare, and if you want to raise issues of Caste, then you are sowing divisions. These institutions themselves lack representation amongst faculties from marginalised communities, the representation is abysmal. This makes for a peculiar situation where one denies their identities and tries to imitate the false colour-blindness of capitalism. The students try to play by the rules of the system, comply and develop false consciousness as to their belonging in this institution.

The idealism associated with the image of NLU as a place of mutual learning starts to crack with admission into various societies and access to academic opportunities. The Classroom becomes a site of caste directionality wherein a number of professors do not have appropriate training to teach students who are inherently unequal, and special support would be essential for them. The Professors can also be understood on a spectrum. There are a very few who understand Caste and other questions of social location, there are some who are progressive on gender or queer but averse to Caste or intersectionality, there are some who are wilfully ignorant, but there are some who openly display their superior caste location and denounce reservation as killing merit.

The Culture at NLUs is something students driven thus there is a tendency of these processes to reproduce caste relations, the Upper Caste will aggregate in positions of societies/Cell etc that deal with so called intellectualism (editorial work, review, networking or money), while the physical labour would be outsourced to the marginalised ( logistics, arts, craft, etc). To this hegemony, a number of NLUs have a quota for NRI-sponsored candidates, who tend to create a culture of capitalist consumption wherein the mode of authority is capital.

Certain opportunities in areas like ADR, etc, would be gate kept by them. Through these daily acts, hierarchies associated with caste capitalism are reinforced every day. As the five year law course student approaches 4^th and 5^th year, the caste privilege students will be done with their placement processes, and the placement committees are generally dominated by privileged castes, thus reinforcing their exclusion. By then, the struggling student would either be left with the option to try for CLAT PG, to get into LLM or PSU, or the judiciary exam preparation that has also been recently shunned due to 3 years practice requirements.

All is not lost, students at a number of universities have come up with student collective organisations to help students and form a community, either as a support group or reading circles. This includes the Savitri Phule Ambedkar Caravan, abbreviated as SPAC (NLSIU), SPAC-NLIU, Birsa Phule Ambedkar Forum (GNLU), Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle, APPSC (NLU Delhi), and many more. In this context, when University support or recognition is sought, the institutions tend to be hostile or indifferent to such collectives. Under the guise of depoliticising or anti-politics, these institutions harbour and entrench caste patriarchy, betraying the foundational ideas of the Constitution of India. This was my attempt to elaborate on the experience of a marginalised student at an NLU. Examples cited are from different places and experiences of my friends and colleagues.

- The author is a Ph.D. Scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University's Centre for Law & Governance, with an LL.M. from National Law University Delhi and a BALLB (Hons.) from National Law Institute University, Bhopal.