There were 35,950 deaths by suicide by students between 2019 and 2021, according to the government. There is a lack of socio-economic data about these deaths. In elite educational institutions of engineering and management, 122 students committed suicide between 2014 and 2021, of which 68 were from “lower-caste” communities. Given that a majority of India’s population belongs to lower castes, caste discrimination plays a significant role.
Elsewhere on our social scales, the affluent increasingly rarely send their children to an engineering college or university to pursue physics or chemistry — they are often destined for elite universities in the anglophone First World. It is now the upper-caste middle-income and the lower-caste majority families that often opt for technical or professional courses for their children. The arduous coaching for entrance examinations to elite Indian institutions of professional education is expensive. Their gruelling regimen is something that the most affluent prefer not to let their children encounter.
These coaching institutions are often found unliveable by some students. In Kota, Rajasthan, 26 students committed suicide in 2023. Earlier this month, it was the teenager Mohammed Zaid. Then, Niharika Singh Solanki, the daughter of a bank security guard, leaves a suicide note to her mother and father, which is also a note to India: “I can’t do JEE so I suicide. I am loser. I Worst daughter. Sorry […] This is the last option”.
What is it in our educational spaces that forces young lives, so many of them from lower castes, to extinguish themselves?
There are two aspects to this. The first is the public sphere which suppresses discussions on the socio-economic conditions in which a child learns. Here, the marginalised are already judged as “losers” for the fatal accident of their birth as Rohith Vemula wrote, while the privilege of being upper in caste is simultaneously asserted and masked as “meritorious”. The second is modern norms of equality and justice that are perverted to oppose provisions for equality, including reservation. Here, a notional equality at the starting gun — birth — is asserted only to deny the most terrible disadvantages of historic oppression.
Last week, according to reports, thousands of poor construction workers were screened at an ITI for temporary jobs in a war zone, Israel. One applicant said: “People like us are at war with society, and internally with our souls, from the time of our birth”. The students, the farmers, and the workers are soldiers at war with society, their deaths are cannon fodder.
We should be horrified by the statistics of last options, which reveal a truth about society. Compressing Émile Durkheim’s insights, suicide is homicide by social forces and laws. Indian societies are defined by two distinct laws in conflict — the ancient oppressive caste order founded on graded inequality and subjection and, the modern constitutional order of equality and autonomy. The experience of the “lower-caste” majority is that the adoption of the latter is punished by the former, often through the instrumentalisation of modern law itself.
Psychoanalytically, it is the torturous unease — Unbehagen, said Freud — where the pressing social reality of a person’s world is at war with this world’s ideals of moral law, building up in them a complex of psychic resistances to oppressive social organisation in the immediate world. When this world — the hostel, the classroom — becomes unendurable, the individual breaks down.
“Weak” is the diagnosis our society gives to the unarmed, unarmoured souls sent into this civilisational war, relegated by society to be born as broken gifts to their parents. It teaches a section of its wards to find in themselves the “worst daughter”.
Then, those who have the power to make the world liveable again for others should feel responsible — academics, the media, judiciary and intellectuals, and perhaps, under ideal conditions, politicians too.
There are texts by important politicians and intellectuals of modern India on pedagogy: The remarks on modern education by Gandhi, its “uselessness” against caste-based training; the Nehruvian aspirational education programme; Phule’s revolutionary educational programme; and Dr Ambedkar’s rationalist project of education as emancipation. But, they answer differently the question of what education is for, and therefore do not constitute a tradition on pedagogy.
School education is a preparation for a student to graduate as an autonomous rational human being navigating constitutional rights and duties, trans-national rights, and having the literacy to master other forms of knowledge, either through universities or autodidactically. In On Education, Kant called it the cultivation of a faculty for “being adapted to various ends” — the faculty of freedom.
Educational programmes in most parts of the world repeat the temporal schema established in the 20th century — 12 years of school, three to four years for a graduate degree, and two years onwards for postgraduate education. The disciplines, however, have undergone extraordinary transformations since the 1940s. Twelve years of school are becoming insufficient to gain competent literacy for the world of today.
The norms and ethos under which people interact in a democratic state are to be determined by education alone, according to the values of justice and equality. In India, education is a means to be discarded, futuram oblivionem in Kant’s words. It is the educators and the elders of India who need to be educated first about the ends of education.
The writer is a philosopher, teacher and co-author of the upcoming book Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics
