A BTech first year student, named Darshan Solanki, one of us from IIT Bombay, committed suicide on Sunday night, 12th Feb 2023. Ever since then the administration and the director have been insensitive, disengaged, distant and dismissive about the case. This news broke among students at 6:39 PM through an email sent by the director of IIT Bombay. The email subject was “tragic loss of a life in our campus today”. The IIT Bombay director did not care to mention the name of our fellow student Darshan who lost his life. On the same night, the student community organized a candle march from hostel 12 cone area to hostel 16 at 10 PM to give homage to the lost soul. Then, another email was received by students with the subject line “condolence meeting for Darshan Solanki”. We want to ask the admin, why did they hide the name of the student in the first mail? A person’s identity is everything when a student belongs to a Dalit community. In addition, it has often been observed that higher education institutions like IITs always try to hide a person’s identity so they can hide the truth in cases like this. This is ironic, because Darshan had been reminded time and again of his caste during his three months on campus— he tried to struggle against it but couldn’t bear it.
As the condolence meeting organized by admin turned out to be merely a symbolic gesture implicating nothing but a hollow show-off, death is again normalized by the ‘premier’ institute. The director spoke his two words and resorted to petty gestures of taking the mic away to prevent students from speaking. He walked out of the condolence meeting as students were coming up to speak for Darshan. The institutional silence through murder was accentuated when the director shut students up in a meeting called for the students to grieve. According to him, there is a place and time for students to grieve and raise their issues, and then the director would send a mail to the students to intimate them when that would be.
What was more outrageous was that classes were not suspended while the condolence meeting was going on. When students asked the director to apologize for the insensitivity of letting classes continue, he just walked out on them.
In the statement by Darshan’s senior Udaysingh Meena, then a final year student of chemical engineering, it has come to our knowledge that Darshan was facing caste discrimination and exam depression. Darshan confided to Uday that his roommate, mentors, and wing-mates were from general category and reduced talking to him after coming to know about his rank which is a marker for his category. The combined issue of academic pressure and caste discrimination, along with a lack of mental health and academic support might have pushed him to take such an extreme step.
“My Birth is my fatal accident”.
– Rohith Vemula
Rohith Vemula wrote the line mentioned above, a victim of institutional murder ended his life fighting against caste discriminatory practices. Similarly, Darshan Solanki was also fighting against social evil like caste discrimination within the boundaries of IIT Bombay, rampant in higher educational institutions in India and elsewhere. It is indeed that we don’t need this Institute of Eminence (IoE) like IITs; what we need is an “Institute of Empathy” (which indeed calls for transformations at many levels).
APPSC IIT Bombay