Why the case of Seema Singh from IIT KGP isn't an exception - a thread.

The truth is that any Bahujan student who enters the educational institutions in this country has to face some form of extreme casteism or the other.

It could be from the faculty or the administration staff. But more importantly from how the institution and its programs are deliberately structured to exclude them. They are repeatedly reminded that they don't belong in these Brahminical institutions.

And the treatment meted out gets even worse if the student happens to be from Dalit or Adivasi identities. This is in contrast to how Brahmin-Savarna youngsters are made to feel at home.

What then makes the individual experience differ lies in how much a Bahujan student can hide or deflect one's own identify during the academic years and use whatever means available to insulate and protect themselves in order to survive the course.

The caste violence on these young students ranges from polite patronizing comments that make them feel inadequate or underserving to outright verbal or mental abuse that is often camouflaged as academic intervention by the institute or faculty.

It is only in the rarest of rare cases that you find a Brahmin-Savarna faculty who isn't casteist.

So essentially, the casteist behaviour of Seema Singh from IIT Kharagpur is only the expected norm. It is her bad luck that the poor woman's comments got recorded on a zoom call.

If every classroom in this country has video recording facility enabled, we would have to file a case against almost all Brahmin-Savarna faculties in this country.

But Seema Singh having to blame her behaviour on the pandemic and the stress involved is a boring joke.

For someone who has written often on the 'subaltern' in several journals, one would at least expect her to be more creative in the excuses she would come up with. But unfortunately, she seems quite 'meritless' at that too.