Right at the start of the new year 2023 when the techies of the IT capital of India were making new year resolutions about trips to 10 exotic locations or following health plans like their favourite celebs, news came out that in the same city girls from government run backward class hostels were forced to clean toilets with their bare hands. Bowing to different movements led by the Bahujan community, the government provides hostels for students from SC/ST/OBC and minority backgrounds in some cities. When photos of girls cleaning toilets came out from RR Nagar Backward classes girls’ hostel, Bangalore, it exposed that under the pressure of social movements, the government started hostels, but backward communities are still discriminated against. In this RR Nagar hostel girls complained of getting abused regularly by the warden if they protested the verbal rules made by her. And when these issues were taken up to district level authorities, instead of taking action against the warden, the complainants were threatened with cancellation of their admission. This is not the only case where such inhuman treatment is meted out to students from the Bahujan community. Previously, incidents of poor condition of hostel building, unhygienic food and lack of other facilities have come up in Karnataka, some of which were reported.
In such a scenario one would expect the representatives of the people to address caste while making policies. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 enforced by this BJP government, was the final nail in the coffin of such expectations. The NEP 2020 focuses on ‘merit’, diluting the provision of Reservation in the process of admissions and recruitment in colleges. The NEP document rarely mentions the word caste. It brings all groups belonging to marginalized communities into one category called SEDG (Socially and Economically Disadvantaged Groups). This includes gender identities, sociocultural identities, geographical identities, disabilities, and socio-economic conditions. It is necessary to cover all these categories, but there has to be a separate body to address the problems plaguing each community. Instead NEP 2020 wants to club everything together to reduce the number of reserved seats and cause greater competition. Recently, the central as well as the state government scrapped multiple scholarships for minority and Bahujan communities.
Since the neoliberal reforms of the 90’s, the floodgates to the Indian market have been opened allowing foreign investment in health, education etc. In recent years we have seen big corporations opening ‘liberal arts’ colleges. These provide scholarships mostly on economic basis to ensure ‘diversity’. NEP 2020 paving the way for ‘public philanthropicpartnership’ means that the government is recusing itself from providing any sort of social cushion for students coming from any socially or economically backward section. Using words like “greater flexibility, student choice, and best-of-two attempts” in the NEP document will ensure that students coming from disadvantaged classes take substandard ‘vocational training’ so that they can become cheap labourers.
These deliberately discriminating policies should not surprise anyone. For centuries, this Brahmanical society has gatekept education and denied this very fundamental right to the Dalits, OBCs, and women for “cultural and religious” reasons. From the Manusmriti stating that a Shudra is unfit for education, and deserves to have molten lead poured in in his ear if found to be uttering a word of the Vedas, to present day denial of the reservation system, we have come a full circle, or possibly back to square one. All this despite the fact that the importance of reservation has not decreased neither has the implementation been perfect(1) This is besides the fact that the reservation system is a half-hearted, token action by the state to annihilate caste from society. From pre-schools to higher education institutes, the students in India face disparities till date and it is already worsening under the NEP 2020(2).
It must be noted that in India there have been long-standing efforts by the ruling class to separate the class question from the caste question. Most landless agricultural labourers, manual scavengers, and other working people are Bahujans. If this huge intersection between the most backward classes and castes is not acknowledged for a unified struggle, there cannot be any fundamental change.
There is no denying that education is liberation, it made anti-caste warriors like Babasaheb Ambedkar, Savitribai Phule and others possible. It is a right, a necessity for every marginalized student in India, as was the dream of Babasaheb. “Educate, Agitate, Organize” said Ambedkar while addressing the All India Depressed Classes conference in July 1942, and it is what we must follow while questioning the NEP. Students across the nation must continue to stand up and fight against the monopolizing of education by this regime, and make sure this country does not witness yet another Rohith Vemula.
1.In the top IITs more than 60% PhD students are from the general category. Many seats reserved for SC/ST/OBC candidates are left vacant according to a recent study published in Nature
2. According to a 2015 Oxfam India report, due to systemic discrimination in educational spaces, 75% of the more than six million children out of school in India were either Dalits (32.4%), Muslims (25.7%) or Adivasis (16.6%).
