Darshan Solanki died at the IIT Bombay campus on Sunday.
Mumbai:
An 18-year-old Dalit student at IIT Bombay, who is believed to have died by suicide, told her sister and aunt about being ostracized by friends because of her caste, the family has told NDTV. While authorities at IIT Bombay say there was no discrimination on campus, Darshan Solanki’s family insists he has faced abuse.
“When he arrived last month, he told me and his parents that there was caste discrimination going on there. His friends knew that he belonged to a certain caste, so the behavior Their behavior towards him changed. They stopped talking to him, they stopped going out with him,” his sister Jhanvi Solanki said.
“He suffered, he was tortured. That’s why he did this,” said Tarlikaben Solanki, Solanki’s mother.
Divyaben, Darshan’s aunt, said: “A month ago, when I came here, I said that many students don’t like the fact that I study for free. People are jealous, they ask ‘why are you studying for free in this school? when we are spending a lot of money’. ‘Many students envy me,’ he told me. He also stopped talking to some friends.”
Rameshbhai Solanki, Darshan’s father, said he spoke to his son just hours before his death.
“Two hours before he committed suicide, we got a call from IIT. He was still talking normally, asking ‘how are you.’ He called to wish my brother’s daughter a happy birthday. He said he is going out today. I deposited some money in his account. He said, ‘I have money, I don’t need money’. He didn’t spend much, but I still deposited one. I didn’t know something like this could happen.
IIT Bombay has denied allegations that Darshan Solanki faced systematic discrimination and said his death is under investigation.
“IIT Bombay strongly refuted claims in several articles about the tragic death of a first-year BTech student, implying that the cause was discrimination and saying it was an ‘institutional murder’ ‘,” the education institute said in a statement on Tuesday.
Police registered an accidental death after Darshan died, apparently after he jumped from the seventh floor of the dormitory building on Sunday. They have yet to find his suicide note, but a group of students allege that he committed suicide due to discrimination against Dalit students on campus.
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