Bigotry is Robbing Our Students of a Future

Another student has taken his own life, leading to a few days of intense TV debates aimed at boosting TRP ratings, before we quickly return to business as usual.

- Anand Neelakantan

A student jumping from a college building is just another statistic added to an ongoing record of administrative indifference. The recent death of Nithin Raj at a dental college in Kannur is the latest example in another caste discrimination tragedy. Whoever called the educational institutions ‘a temple of learning’ had no idea what a temple was supposed to mean or had extreme hatred towards temples. Our colleges are slaughterhouses where the dreams of marginalised individuals are systematically destroyed by a privileged academic elite. Nithin, a Dalit student who reportedly faced relentless taunts about his skin colour and background, chose to leap from a five-storeyed building rather than endure the daily humiliation he faced in the classroom. Nothing much has changed from the day when Rohith Vemula took his life for the crime of committing the “fatal accident of birth.” Our campuses are medieval fiefdoms. We grant unchecked power to the faculty members, and they think they are divinely ordained. In our country, a 19-year-old is considered mature enough to elect the government of a nuclear-armed nation. However, the moment that same individual enters a college campus, they become inmates of a correctional institute, and the faculty becomes the jail wardens, drunk on power. One of the batons that these modern-day torturers in these cloistered institutions possess is the outdated attendance system. This insistence on compulsory attendance is not about education; it serves as a form of confinement. They are well aware that unless they shepherd the students into forced confinement, no one would waste their time attending their boring lectures. Mediocre instructors are given a captive audience over whom they can act like tyrants.