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| From left: Mahendra Meena and Pankaj Meena were medical students with Anil Meena, who died by suicide in March. (Lana Slezic For The Globe and Mail) |
The sharply truncated life of Anil Meena was marked by a ferocious tenacity.
From
the mud house in rural Rajasthan, where he grew up in a family of
subsistence farmers, he made his way first to school and then to the top
of his class. He studied with monomaniacal intensity and passed the
entrance exam to the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS),
the most prestigious of India’s professional colleges – an achievement
almost unfathomable in the largely illiterate aboriginal community from
which he came.
At AIIMS, he battled through classes where he couldn’t understand a
word of the English being spoken and pored over a dictionary to get
through textbooks. When an arbitrary rule change – that just happened to
affect only students from backgrounds such as his – cost him a passing
grade in a crucial exam, he tried repeatedly to meet his course
director, his friends say. He sat outside the man’s office for four or
five hours at a time for a week.
But Mr. Meena had come up against
something his intelligence and perseverance could not overcome:
Students of his kind are not welcome at AIIMS, no more than they are at
other prestigious Indian universities. They rarely graduate. No one was
prepared to help him succeed.
On March 3, Mr. Meena hung himself from the fan in his small dormitory room. He was 22.
His
death was a crippling blow to his family, a shock to his friends and an
ugly blemish for AIIMS. It was also the 20th reported suicide in four
years at an elite Indian educational institution by a student who was
either aboriginal or Dalit – the people from the bottom of the Hindu
caste system, once known as untouchables.
The suicides have
emerged as a subject for fierce debate. Following the promise of the new
India, these students are hyper-achievers from the grimmest of
backgrounds, who made it into the schools that produce engineers,
doctors and business leaders who are sought the world over.
But
when they get there, they are often isolated, humiliated and
discriminated against. They are told overtly by their professors that
they will never make it to graduation. Yet many feel they cannot drop
out – families and communities are invested in their success, and many
have taken huge loans.
Some, trapped in this dilemma, have chosen to end their lives.
In
the very places that produce the innovators who are supposed to shape
its future, India is dogged by the darkest forces from its past.
“It’s
very pervasive and very invisible,” says Shweta Barge, who monitors
educational discrimination for the National Campaign for Dalit Human
Rights. From a Dalit community herself, Ms. Barge often tried to keep
her identity cloaked as she managed to earn a postgraduate degree.
“Those [Hindu] ideas of purity and pollution exist across every stream,
in every school. It gets to hard-core Indian values: It’s not just about
where you reach; it’s about where you came from.”
The suicides
have occurred at 16 different institutions, including the Indian
Institutes of Technology (IIT) and at the universities of Hyderabad and
Bangalore.
In 2008, a final-year Dalit medical student at
Government Medical College in Chandigarh in the Punjab hung himself in
the college library; Jaspreet Singh left a note in his pocket describing
how the head of his department told him repeatedly to his face that he
would never, ever be permitted to be a doctor.
That professor had
failed him several times in course work, although Mr. Singh had never
before had anything but top marks. After his death, an external
committee re-evaluated his exams and found that he should have passed.
He was awarded his degree posthumously.
On March 3, 2010, exactly
two years before Mr. Meena’s death, another young aboriginal man killed
himself at AIIMS. Bal Mukund Bharti, 25, was just weeks away from
earning his degree, something unprecedented in his community in Madhya
Pradesh.
His parents, who’d taken out massive loans to support
him, told a team from of investigators from the Insight Foundation,
which works to support Dalit and aboriginal students, that he repeatedly
complained of harassment from his professors.
He said that one
often complained, “I don’t know where they come from, these Dalits and
[aboriginals], getting here without studying anything.”
Yet Mr.
Bharti was, in fact, brilliant. He had scored eighth among hundreds of
thousands of students nationwide in the intensely competitive
engineering entrance exam – he passed up the seat to become a doctor
instead. AIIMS carried out no investigation and says he had
psychological problems.
And this April, an MBA student hanged
herself at a private college in Gurgaon, the new technology and industry
hub on the edge of Delhi. Dana Sangma was aboriginal, from Meghalaya
state in India’s remote northeast.
The university quickly released
the explanation that she was distraught after being caught cheating on
an exam – but her uncle, her home state’s chief minister, who had
personally enrolled his niece at the high-priced school, called that
claim preposterous.
He registered a complaint with the National
Commission of Schedule Castes and Tribes, saying she had been driven to
suicide by harassment at the college.
India has one of the highest
rates of suicide in the world, especially in the age group of college
students. But these deaths stand out because of the clear connection,
often described in suicide notes, with the discrimination the victim
endured.
The issue goes to the heart of a story that India wants
to tell about itself these days: that traditional guarantees of
privilege – wealth and caste – are losing power in favour of merit.
But
if that is at all true, it is thanks largely to the program of
“reservations” – a form of affirmative action under which all publicly
funded educational institutions must reserve about 40 per cent of their
seats for aboriginal (or “tribal”), Dalit and “other backward caste”
students.
A percentage of jobs in government institutions are also reserved, as are political seats in municipal government.
The
education reservations were set out in the Indian constitution adopted
in 1950, although it was decades before there was more than a handful of
such students who even reached the point of applying, and uproars from
dominant-caste students and their families were a consistent drag on the
program’s full implementation until recently.
Today, there is a
politically incorrect tint to complaining about reservations, but many
dominant-caste students still resent them.
India is desperately
short of higher-education institutions. The Ministry of Human Resource
Development says the country needs at least 1,500 more – 520,000
students wrote the entrance exam for the IIT this year, competing for
fewer than 10,000 spots.
A degree from one of the elite
engineering or medical institutes is a ticket to a life of comfort. But
the competition for seats, combined with the reservations, means the
admission cutoff – the minimum grade for acceptance – for non-reserved
students hovers in the high 90s.
Dalit students are perceived as
taking seats that should go to students who scored higher. Indeed, there
are thoughtful critics, such as the leading New Delhi public
intellectual Gucharan Das, who point out that inequality in India today
does not always follow traditional lines – some in the “other backward
caste” groups are prospering, but they pressed to be included among the
reservations, while other poor people are left out.
But those are
the exceptions. Anoop Kumar, who runs the Insight Foundation, says most
of the backlash against reservations comes from an (often deliberate)
misunderstanding of the principle. “People are defining merit strictly
in terms of marks in the entrance exam, and that conveniently discounts
all the other factors affecting the performance of the students,” he
says.
“So a student from an urban, upper-caste, upper-class
background who has both parents literate and studied at a an elite,
private [English-language] school is considered more ‘meritorious’ when
he or she has 85-per-cent marks, than a reservation-category student who
goes to a terrible government school in [Hindi] and has no one in the
family who is literate but still scores 75-per-cent marks.”
Yet
their dominant-caste peers still grouse that the reserved-category
students would never make it if they had to compete on an open field.
Their professors often share that view: As Ms. Barge points out, the
faculty in these prestigious institutes is overwhelming made up of
people from the dominant castes, since only a single generation of
Dalits really has had the chance for a professional education.
“They
have this idea rooted in their psyche that tribal and Dalit students
‘don’t have the merit and can’t match up to us,’ ” says Ajita Rao, a
Dalit medical doctor who studies discrimination in professional
education. “That’s the hidden thing.”
Dr. Rao says that
resentment, hostility and isolation – rooted in the idea that Dalits and
aboriginals are “unclean” – permeates college life. They are shunned in
dining halls and dorms and mocked in classes, ever reminded of their
marginalization.
This has a debilitating effect on students who always thought of themselves as achievers.
“You
go for [an oral examination] and they ask you your name and where you
are from, and you say Meena from Rajasthan – they say, ‘ Oh,
okay,’ ” says Jagram Meena, 20, who was a close friend of Anil Meena’s
(but no relation – their surname is given to all in their caste group).
He
says such exchanges have a direct effect on his performance: “You feel
dehumanized and you forget everything you want to say. They are saying,
‘Okay, you are a reservation-category student and you don’t know
anything.’ You’re marked from that moment.”
In 2006, a series of
protests by Dalit and aboriginal students at AIIMS complaining of
discrimination prompted the central government to appoint Sukhadeo
Thorat, a prominent academic from a Dalit background, to investigate.
His
three-person commission found dorms segregated by caste, students
subjected to open hostility by their teachers and even physical attacks
by dominant-caste students on those they considered inferior.
The
Thorat report said these students consistently reported having less time
with oral examiners, and being asked their surname in unnecessary
situations. It faulted AIIMS for failing to provided language support to
students coming from Hindi- language schools and for relying heavily on
subjective assessments rather than more objective tests.
Also, in
a grim foreshadowing of the experience Anil Meena would describe a few
years later – the report criticized cases of sudden rule changes that
had a disproportionate impact on reserved-category students.
In
Mr. Meena’s case, the weight given to one assessment was changed to 50
from 25 per cent, seemingly arbitrarily, after the exam had been
conducted. This caused him and many other students to fail – almost all
reservation students, said Mahinder Meena, an intern at AIIMS (also from
the Rajasthani aboriginal community) who helped organize protests after
the suicide. The Thorat report recorded a pattern of such incidents.
AIIMS’s
administration rejected the report “in totality,” calling it biased,
although under public pressure it did increase its language-learning
support.
In the wake of Anil Meena’s death, the administration
acknowledges only that he had been depressed about failing an exam and
was struggling with English.
“This was a tragic event,” says Rakesh Yadav, AIIMS’s subdean for academic issues. “No institution wants that.”
The
school did offer financial compensation to Mr. Meena’s parents. But Dr.
Yadav rejects the idea that the university’s conduct had any role. “It
is absolutely not true. All support any [medical] student needs is
provided – the faculty and the administration is always there to help
out.”
Dr. Yadav will agree that the area of language support might
be insufficient – that an hour a day might not be enough to get a
unilingual Hindi student through a medical curriculum. “It’s basically a
language problem.”
Beyond that, however, he says there was “no
discrimination” in AIIMS. “If you say faculty are doing the
discrimination – it’s too much. … They assess students based on marks.”
As
for bias, he adds, there are processes to prevent any individual
professor from vindictively undermining a student, but clinical skills,
for example, must by definition be evaluated in person: “To modify it to
be 100 per cent objective – it’s not possible.”
However, after
Anil Meena’s death, AIIMS contacted Prof. Thorat again and asked him to
return to the school to investigate, which he considers a major
improvement over the hostile reception to his last inquiry.
“This
time there is an attitude to do something about the problem they face,”
he says. “I have a feeling that because of these two suicides … it shook
the faculty and teachers.”
Jagram Meena hopes so. He points out
that his friend Anil placed 400th in the all-India medical entrance
exam, far higher than most of the general-category students at AIIMS.
They both certainly struggled in their first year – they had to consult
the dictionary 10 times to read a single page of their textbooks – but
Anil was managing.
He played Bollywood music loudly to relax, or
joined friends – mostly from his caste group – for cricket in the
courtyard. His father and brother were taking loans to send him fees
every month. He was coping, Jagram says, until the rules kept shifting.
“We’re in no way lower than the general-category students,” says Jagram, sipping tea at the canteen outside the student dorm.
“One
day,” he says – when the public schools that prepare Dalit and
aboriginal kids are as good as everyone else’s – “we’ll all be one
category.”
But Mahinder Meena cuts him off, demanding to know how
change like that could come as long as it’s almost impossible for Dalit
students to succeed.
“Our fear about his suicide,” Mahinder says, “is that it will change nothing.”
Stephanie Nolen is The Globe and Mail’s correspondent based in New Delhi.
source:- http://www.theglobeandmail.com
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