Sayantan Datta
Inhabiting and Orienting towards the Necropolitical Infrastructures of Higher Education in India In March 2013, Mudasir Kamran, a Muslim and reportedly queer student from Pulwama, Kashmir, at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, died by suicide. Wajood Society, a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights group, had alleged that the administration's ‘callousness’ in dealing with the case was contingent on Kamran's sexual orientation ( The Hindu , 2013). Just less than a decade later, in February 2022, Arvey Malhotra, a fifteen-year-old queer student with dyslexia at the Delhi Public School, Faridabad, also died by suicide. His mother, Aarti Malhotra, later alleged that the school authorities, the police, and the Child Welfare Committee did not do anything to stop the queerphobic harassment and violence that Malhotra attributed his death to in his parting note (Datta, 2022b). In his suicide note, he had written, ‘This school has killed me’ (Mehra, 2022). Kamran and Malhotra are but two examples of student deaths by suicide in Indian educational institutions. When Aniket Ambhore, a Dalit student at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay), died by suicide in 2014, the institution attempted to frame the death as a result of an accident. However, according to a report by the Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle (APPSC), IIT Bombay, Ambhore's death was a result of an ‘atmosphere of discrimination’ on the campus, which included discrimination against him for being a ‘category student’ and the wrongful conflation of availing reservations with the lack of ‘merit’ (2022).