{"id":1611,"date":"2026-09-25T07:34:31","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T07:34:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ambedkarsociety.org\/assa\/?p=1611"},"modified":"2026-09-28T07:37:25","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T07:37:25","slug":"india-the-killing-fields-of-learning-caste-humiliation-and-the-death-of-dalit-and-obc-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ambedkarsociety.org\/assa\/india-the-killing-fields-of-learning-caste-humiliation-and-the-death-of-dalit-and-obc-students\/","title":{"rendered":"INDIA: The Killing Fields of Learning: Caste, Humiliation and the Death of Dalit and OBC students"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sahil Wakode, a dalit student at IIT Bombay, committed suicide on September 18, 2026. His death has since triggered protests, allegations of caste based discrimination. A Professor named in the FIR, has subsequently been sent on leave, pending Institutional inquiry.1<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThere is something obscene about a university that calls itself a temple of learning while some of its students come to experience it as a killing field<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThe universities and IITs are supposed to be the place where inherited identities lose their authority. A student enters with a surname, a village, a family history and a caste; he ought to leave with knowledge, intellectual confidence and the freedom to become someone other than what birth prescribed. The laboratory should know no caste. The equation should not ask who solved it. The library should not enquire into ancestry. The seminar room should \u200brecognise an argument, not a genealogy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bYet in India, the universities and IITs and IIMs often become the place where the  contradiction between constitutional citizenship and society is made brutally visible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThe admission letter says: You belong here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The social order whispers: who allowed in?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The professor says: Merit<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The student hears: Reservation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The Constitution says: Equality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The campus may answer: Know your caste.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bAnd sometimes, after humiliation has accumulated beyond endurance, the student disappears from the university altogether \u2013 not by graduating, but by dying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThis is the meaning of the title \u201cThe Killing Fields of Learning.\u201d In addition to the visible and invisible caste humiliation, academic pressure, financial stress, loneliness, family circumstances, psychological stress and many other factors may contribute to suicide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u200b          The question is not whether every suicide is caused by caste. The question is why caste so repeatedly appears in the history of deaths, exclusions, humiliations and institutional conflicts involving students from lower-castes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bAnd why, when caste is alleged, institutions so often find it easier to search for an individual defect than to interrogate the institution itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u200b1.      Rohit Vemula: The student who was not meant to be.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bRohit Vemula\u2019s death at the University of Hyderabad in January 2016 remains the most powerful symbol of this contradiction. His case cannot responsibly be reduced to a single uncontested causal narrative. In 2024, the Telangana Police filed a disclosure report disputing his SC status and finding insufficient evidence to hold the accused responsible. Following objections from his family, the police announced \u200bthat further investigation would be sought. The legal and factual controversies therefore remain important.2<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bBut, the institutional history surrounding Vemula\u2019s death cannot be erased by a closure report.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bBefore his death, he and four other students associated with Ambedkar Students\u2019 Association had been suspended. Their access to parts of the university was restricted, and Vemula\u2019s fellowship had reportedly remained unpaid for months. The university\u2019s subsequent investigation and the wider political controversy became inseparable from questions of caste, student politics and institutional power.3<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bHis famous final letter \u200bbecame a devastating philosophical document precisely because it spoke of the experience of being reduced from a human being to an identity. The tragedy of Vemula is therefore larger than the legal question of whether every allegation against every individual is proved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bIt asks:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          What happens when an institution tells a student that he is formally equal while its disciplinary, administrative and social machinery makes him experience himself as expendable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThat is a question no university can evade by producing a psychological explanation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u200b2)      The dead do not submit institutional complaints.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bOne of the most convenient arguments used after a student\u2019s death is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u201cThere was no formal complaint\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Then, must the murdered conscience first submit a memorandum before it may be heard?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bA student who is humiliated by an upper caste professor may not complain to another upper-caste professor. A student who believes the entire institutional hierarchy is socially hostile may not trust the institution\u2019s grievance mechanism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bA first-generation student may not know which office to approach. A scholarship-dependent student may fear retaliation. A student already marked as \u201cweak\u201d, \u201cundeserving\u201d or \u201creservation-dependent\u201d may reasonably fear that a complaint will confirm the stereotype against which he is struggling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThe absence of a complaint is therefore not necessarily evidence of the absence of discrimination. Indeed, sometimes it is evidence of something more disturbing\u2014 the student\u2019s belief that there is nowhere to complain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThe UGC\u2019s own regulations recognise caste discrimination in higher education broadly, including distinctions or exclusions that impair equality of treatment, and require institutions to take steps against caste-based discrimination and harassment.4<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The question, then, is not merely whether a university possesses an anti-discrimination cell. The question is whether a student believes that the cell will protect him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u200b3)      The institutional grammar of humiliation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bCaste humiliation is rarely limited to spectacular insult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          It can be microscopic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          A professor repeatedly questions a student\u2019s competence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          A supervisor delays approval.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          A research guide becomes mysteriously unavailable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          A student\u2019s scholarship is treated as charity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          A classmate asks his caste and then asks how he obtained admission<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Someone jokes about reservation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Someone says: \u201cYou got in because of quota.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u200b          A student\u2019s excellence becomes evidence against him, his failure evidence for the stereotype. When answers well, suspicion whispers, \u201che has copied\u201d. When he answers poorly, they call it proof of his lack of merit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThe student is constantly required to demonstrate that he deserves to be where he is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThis is the cruelty of permanent examination.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThe upper-caste student is allowed to be an individual, irrespective of whether he sometimes succeeds and sometime fails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThe lower-caste student can be made to feel that his every failure is evidence against his caste and his every success is evidence of the reservation system. He is not simply taking examinations. He is being examined as a caste.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThat is a different psychological burden. And it is precisely here that Shakespeare\u2019s tragic imagination becomes useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bOthello is never allowed simply to be Othello. His identity is continually mediated through the racial imagination of Venice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThe caste-marked student experiences a related, though historically distinct problem, he is never permitted simply to be a student.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bHe becomes the reserved student.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The quota student. The backward student.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The beneficiary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The outsider.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The exception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u200b4)      The University\u2019s Shakespearean tragedy.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bShakespeare knew something modern institutions sometimes forget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          A tragedy is rarely produced by one villain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bIt is produced by an arrangement of circumstances to which ordinary decisions accumulate until they become fatal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u200b          Othello is not destroyed by one sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          King Lear is not destroyed by one insult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Hamlet does not die because of one conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bTragedy is cumulative. So can institutional humiliation be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bA single remark may be survivable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          A single bad grade may be survivable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          A single rejection may be survivable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          But what happens when they accumulate?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bA student begins to hear one message: You do not belong<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThen the university becomes not a place of learning but a theatre in which the student must continually defend his right to exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThe institution may defend itself:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200b\u201dWe never told him to die.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          But that is not the only question. The deeper question is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          What did we repeatedly tell him about his worth?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u200b\u200b5)      Ambedkar enters the classroom.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bAmbedkar would have regarded this as a fundamental failure of democracy. For him, political democracy could not survive indefinitely without social democracy. The citizen cannot be constitutional equal while socially ranked. And the university is one of the places where that contradiction becomes particularly visible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u200b          Ambedkar\u2019s great insight was that caste is not simply a collection of prejudices. It is a system of graded inequality. There is no single oppressor and a single oppressed caste. There are layers. Each group may stand above another and below a third. The result is a social order in which solidarity itself becomes difficult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bTherefore, the objective is not merely to make the caste system kinder. It is to annihilate caste system, without leaving any trace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

6)      The Shakespearean question.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bShakespeare would finally ask the \u200buniversity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is a student.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          A number?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          A rank?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          A scholarship?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          A category?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          An admission quota?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bNo. A student is a human being in the process of becoming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bAnd caste is precisely the system that attempts to decide in advance what that becoming may look like. The tragedy occurs when the university, instead of freeing the student from that destiny, reproduces it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u200b7)      The Miltonian indictment.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          John \u200bMilton would summon the university before the tribunal of liberty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThe charge: You promised education but reproduced domination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThe university would reply: \u201cWe gave him admission\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bMilton: \u201cDid you give him dignity\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          University: \u201cWe gave him a scholarship!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bMilton: \u201cDid you give him belonging?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bUniversity: \u201cWe gave him equal academic rules\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bMilton: \u201cWere the social conditions under which those rules operated equal?\u201d \u200b<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Silence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThen Ambedkar would ask the final question: \u201cWas he treated as a citizen, or as a Caste?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThat is the question Indian higher education must answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThe dead are not merely statistics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThey are failed futures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThey are unwritten books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bUnfinished dissertations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bUnheard lectures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bUnasked questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bLives that might have altered the very institutions that could not protect them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bShakespeare would call it a tragedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bMilton would call it domination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bAmbedkar would call it the unfinished work of social revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bAnd the university should call it by the proper name: a failure of equality.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200b\u201dIndian government has no reliable national register of \u201ccaste suicides\u201d in higher education. It records the bodies but not the caste relations that may have caused their deaths. The result is a peculiar epistemic erasure; the caste of the student is recorded statistically, while caste as an institutional experience is dissolved causally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bIf the student enters the university only to discover that caste has followed him through the gate, if \u201cmerit\u201d becomes a language with which his presence is questioned, if humiliation becomes part of institutional life, and if someone finally find death, preferable to continuing the struggle\u2014then the political struggle cannot end with securing admission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThe heartbreaking tragedy is that Dalit and OBC students clutching their university certificates of admission with joy and pride so proudly, do  not know. What is concealed behind them: a warrant of death<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Silence of Mandal Heirs.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThere is a peculiar tragedy unfolding in India\u2019s Universities. The very institutions that were expected to open the doors of equality are becoming, for many Dalit and OBC students, places from which some never return. According to central Government figures, 122 students in higher educational institutions died by suicide between 2014 and 2021, of whom 68 belonged to the SC and ST communities and the remainder to the OBCs. Each number conceals a young life, a family devastated and a future extinguished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bBut there is another tragedy, quieter and perhaps more revealing: the silence of those who claim to represent the political descendants of Mandal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bWhat, one wonders, are Akhilesh Yadav<\/strong> and Tejashwi Yadaw<\/strong> waiting for?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bNot for another election, presumably. The dead have already voted, though in the only election from which there is no return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThis is not to accuse them of complicity with those responsible<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bMandal was not merely a governmental formula for distributing seats. It was a historic rupture. It told the lower castes that the university was no longer to remain the hereditary preserve of the twice-born. Dalits, too, entered these institutions after decades of constitutional struggle and democratic mobilisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Mandal opened the gates. The question is whether anyone will now defend those who have entered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bHere Shakespearean irony becomes almost irresistible. The king is dead; long live the king. In the theatre of electoral politics, perhaps the slogan should now read: the student is dead; long live social justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThe speeches remain. The anniversaries remain. The photographs with Ambedkar remain. The arithmetic of Yadav votes remain. What seems strangely absent is the thunder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where is the mobilization?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u200bWhere is the parliamentary storm?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where is the demand for an independent national enquiry into caste discrimination in higher education?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u200b          Where is the movement that tells Dalit and OBC students: You entered these universities through a democratic fight, and nobody has the right to make you feel that you entered by trespassing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThis is where the silence of the Mandal heirs becomes politically painful. They possess something far more important than microphones: they possess the capacity and responsibility to turn scattered grief into collective political force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThe \u2018killers\u2019 should not be allowed the comfort of anonymity. The university should know that every humiliation can become a public question; every discriminatory act can become a political issue; every student death can become a summons to accountability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bYet instead, there is an eerie quiet. \u200bAnd perhaps the most Shakespearean question is therefore not \u201cwho killed these students?\u201d but<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200b\u201dWho will speak for the dead?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bFor when politicians inherit the language of Mandal but lose the voice of mobilisation, something extraordinary happens: the oppressed acquires representation without acquiring a representative voice. The charge \u2013 if one may call it \u2013 is more subtle and more devastating, political ineptitude in the face of a catastrophe affecting the very social constituencies from which their politics derives its legitimacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bIt is not betrayal. It is the silence of those whose voices should have thundered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The unequal geography of Death in Indian Universities<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThere is a striking and insufficiently documented fact about student suicides in India\u2019s universities and elite institutions: while individual suicides occur among students of every social background, there has been no comparable public record of a massive or recurrent concentration of upper-caste suicides of the kind repeatedly documented among Dalit, Adivasi and OBC students. This asymmetry should not be treated as statistical trivia. It demands an inquiry into the unequal social conditions under which academic failure, humiliation, exclusion and despair are experienced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThe crucial question, therefore, is not simply who commits suicide, but under which social conditions does academic failure become existential humiliation?<\/strong> For an upper-caste student, failure may remain a nerve-wrecking personal experience. For a Dalit or OBC student, however, failure can be accompanied by the accusation that he or she entered the institution through \u201creservation\u201d, that merit properly belongs to others, \u200bor that academic difficulty confirms an inherited social hierarchy. The student is thus compelled to carry two burdens simultaneously: the burden of academic competition and the burden of defending his or her very right to belong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThis is why the language of individual pathology can become politically convenient. Depression, academic pressure, family problems, or personal vulnerability may be genuine factors, but they can also become explanatory screens behind which institutional structures disappear. Research on caste and mental health in Indian higher education has specifically warned that the deaths of Dalit students are too readily individualised, thereby allowing institutions to evade questions of caste discrimination and institutional responsibility.6<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The comparison with upper-caste students is revealing. Their individual tragedies must never be minimised. But the absence of an equivalent pattern of caste-based vulnerability among them raises a fundamental sociological question: why does the institution appear to become a far more dangerous social terrain for students who enter it from historically subordinated sections?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u200bThe gravest indictment, therefore, is not that some students die. It is that the social identity of the student may determine how much degradation he or she must endure before the university recognises the suffering as suffering at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Source: Counter Current<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sahil Wakode, a dalit student at IIT Bombay, committed suicide on September 18, 2026. His death has since triggered protests, allegations of caste based discrimination. 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His death has since triggered protests, allegations of caste based discrimination. 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