An Inclusive University that doesn’t Celebrate Ambedkar Jayanthi
The use of the word inclusive, especially in education, can be very ambiguous. It could be referring to someone with a disability or someone from the LGBTQIA+ community. Seldom it refers to someone who has been denied education for over a millennium due to the caste they belong to. Caste discrimination is one of the most invisible forms of discrimination recorded.
The discrimination on the basis of caste has evolved more rapidly than the social status of Dalits in the past hundred years. In an educational setting it is often overlooked whether the student is a 1st generation, 2nd generation or 3rd generation learner at the university level. More often it is linked with their caste, hence it is not mentioned nor consciously thought of for it is the merit we are running after. Is it not a responsibility to create an inclusive space for a student who is the first person in the entire history of their family to be entering a university. The agenda does not even appear on the list of priorities. Every private university aims to be the top-most university of the country.
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Mind you it is not the aim to be the best but to be the top, as it is a competition between the universities as it is between the students within each university and outside, Just like the students the universities are graded and ranked by an autonomous figure. Now that we are two sentences away from whining about how the Indian education system is the worst and how it can never be fixed. Does celebrating Ambedkar Jayanthi fix all these problems? Most definitely not, but is it a step towards inclusive education? Definitely yes! Beyond the lenses of caste, every underprivileged individual has the right to opportunity to create a life which is equal to that of someone who is the most privileged, and inversely every privileged person has a duty to be aware of the level of unprivilegedness the people around them have, to act on it or not is a choice. But to be ignorant of their existence and deny their experiences any validity is a hate crime.
This works on many levels of caste, gender, class, sexuality and much more. Ambedkar Jayanthi is a day of awareness for all of those intersections. One of the top universities of the country where liberal education is hailed, heard slogans against Brahmanism and Baniyavad in its corridors as it called for a caste census on campus.
While aiming to become a liberal educator, would such universities welcome conversations of caste on campus?
If they do, who else can they turn to except Dr. B R Ambedkar in becoming a caste affirmative and caste inclusive institute.
