Dalit student’s death | IIT-B students reject interim report, faculty speak out

An Associate Professor asked in an email to all faculty, “What does one do with our denials of institutional responsibility, of casteism?”

The interim report concluding that 18-year-old Dalit student Darshan Solanki’s death was not caused due to caste discrimination released by the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay was “strongly rejected” by the Ambedkar Periya Phule Study Circle, a student body on campus, in a public statement issued on Tuesday midnight. 

The APPSC, which has been at the forefront of demands for creating safe spaces for Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi students in the institute, said that the report was a “haunting reminder of denial of justice”, just as it was in the case of Aniket Ambhore’s death, another Dalit student who died by suicide at IIT-Bombay in 2014. 

And with student resentment building over the report, an Associate Professor at the institute has now also spoken out on the issue, highlighting the “déjà vu”. In an email on Tuesday night to all faculty on campus, the Associate Professor asked, “What does one do with our monochromatic denialisms — denials of institutional responsibility, of casteism, of the need to take a hard look at ourselves and our campus culture?”

The students pointed out that the 12-member committee headed by Professor Nand Kishore of the Chemistry Department, was neither impartial, nor did it show “any marked competence” in investigation by appointing an external member. 

The APPSC said that the report showed the committee’s “shallow, superficial, and flippant attitude”, and that a “hasty report” was prepared to “cover up the Institute’s shortcomings”. 

The students questioned how the panel had linked his interest in academics based on JEE Ranks, asking, “Is the committee not aware that JEE scores form the basis for discrimination in IITs where the practice of asking for ranks is used to single out, humiliate, and guilt the marginalized students into thinking that they are not deserving and competent?”

The student body called the interim report “the most unscientific document from a ‘scientific institution’”, and said that the committee never had any public terms of reference, nor was it revealed as to how it called for testimonies, how they were assessed and the tools to gauge their validity and reliability. It added that the panel had no external member, the representation of SC/ST members was less than 50%, students on the panel were not told that they had a right to dissent, no subject matter expert was consulted, disregarded his sister’s statement, and did not consider possibility of implicit discrimination and effects of structures.