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SUICIDES BY DALIT, TRIBAL STUDENTS
Suicides by Dalit students is a worrying issue even for the Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud who said he was disturbed by suicides by students from Dalit and Adivasi communities and called for a system of education that emphasized on empathy not excellence. Referring to the suicides by a Dalit student of IIT Mumbai and a tribal student of NLU Odisha the CJI said that these “numbers are not just statistics. These are stories sometimes of centuries of struggles”. Suicides by students from marginalised sections in top institutes have not been discussed as a social problem of caste and class discrimination. The problem was eloquently described by Rohith Vemula in his suicide note. A PhD student at Hyderabad Central University, Vemula’s suicide not read, “My birth is my fatal accident…I was always rushing…” He did not take any benefit as a Scheduled Caste and was, therefore, declared “not Dalit” by the probe panel. It is time to look into humiliation faced by marginalised students.
Spiritual Speak
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Meanwhile, it may be recalled that the TMC, led by Mamata Banerjee, had stormed to power for the third consecutive time riding on the “Bengali Pride” poll plank and bagged 213 seats. TMC had propagated the ‘Bengali pride’ by coining the poll slogan, “Bangla Nijer Meyekei Chai” (Bengal wants its own daughter), and had created a poll narrative to counter and trounce BJP’s identity politics in the 2021 Assembly polls
“Apart from reaching out to the people with our policies and programmes, our mass outreach programme is aimed at reaching out to people in those areas, especially where the TMC leaders have faced protests,” said BJP. Reacting to BJP’s programme, the TMC dubbed the saffron camp as a “bad student who always wishes to pass an exam by copying from the topper in the class.”
“The BJP is just copying our programme. They don’t have any ideas, so they must resort to stealing our ideas. The BJP is like a bad student who always wishes to pass an exam by copying from the topper in the class. But despite copying our programme, it won’t yield any result in the
