Students at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, on Thursday held a candlelight vigil outside the main gate of the campus in South Delhi in honour of 20-year-old B. Tech student Ayush Ashna’s alleged suicide, further raising demands that an independent committee be formed to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death.
The Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle (APPSC), the Ambedkar Study Circle (ASC), and other student outfits within the IIT-Delhi campus joined the vigil, where a poster of Ashna was placed before the candles. Along with his poster were those of other Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi students who had died by suicide at India’s premier institutes in the last few years.
Ashna, a final-year B.Tech student, was found dead on Sunday in his hostel room with the Delhi Police saying nothing suspicious was found, ruling it as a suicide.
The students insisted that the circumstances surrounding the death had not been made clear enough by the administration and sought a probe into it. They demanded that a committee be formed with members of the institute’s SC/ST Cell to look into this and recommend measures for the institute to ensure safe spaces for Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi students.
On Wednesday, when the institute held a condolence meeting for Ashna, students raised the issue of him belonging to a marginalised background, following which the administration also acknowledged this.
In an email to students after the condolence meeting, the Director of the institute said that the incident was painful and that this pain was “intensified” due to the fact that Ashna was from a Scheduled Caste community.
At Thursday’s protest, the students of IIT-D were joined by members of the Students’ Federation of India (Delhi), the Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students Association of the JNU, and other student outfits from across the city.
The students raised slogans asking, “How many more needed to die?”, calling for concrete measures to address the concerns of Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi students on campus. Government data on student suicides has shown that a disproportionate of these are from Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi communities.
Other student outfits of IIT-Delhi sought a thorough evaluation of the way papers of the Mathematics Department are graded. Ashna was in the Mathematics and Computer Sciences department. The students asked that poor performance of students also be seen as poor performance of faculty and that reservation for SCs/STs/OBCs be ensured in teaching positions. The ASC and the APPSC of the IIT-D have endorsed these demands.
