THE STUDENTS’ CAMPAIGN for Claim on Nation is a group of students which has deep concerns over castist biases of the Indian media and academia on issues of social justice and equal opportunity particularly on caste-based reservations.

 

The name of the group has its origin in one of the placards of protesting castist doctors, which read ‘Our country has disowned us’. In their nation there is no place for non-dwijas or the Scheduled Castes (SCs), the Scheduled Tribes (STs) and the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) people. Reservation for them is not mere number of seats assigned to the underprivileged, but a claim of these downtrodden masses into their nation.

 

In fact, those who are protesting against reservation are opposing this claim of the underprivileged. For us, reservation is not a matter of a few jobs or seats in educational institutions, but a claim for our share in the nation that has been denied to us historically. We claim it as ours for the simple reason that it is we who create wealth for the nation by tilling fields and mining minerals. It is we who build roads, bridges and machinery with our bare hands. This is not merely an issue of reservations for us.

 

We strongly feel that anti-reservationists have provided us a golden opportunity to bring caste discourse into the mainstream. We are aware that the media, academia and the civil society always maintain a conspiratorial silence on the horrors of the caste system and always try to hide caste-based discrimination and inequality in the name of merit. In fact, they have denied us the space to raise our concerns since independence. Now, they themselves have provided us an opportunity to fight caste-based discrimination. 

 

This is also a historic opportunity for us to pressure the Indian government to take stock of its measures for empowerment of the underprivileged and demand effective implementation of government policies.

 

The argument of the anti-reservationists about merit is nothing but an elitist argument. Given the unequal nature of the Indian education system merit cannot be defined in terms of marks scored in exams. Merit is another name for getting an opportunity to study in the best English-medium private schools, as every one of us are from vernacular background and start learning English from class VIII only. We demand restructuring of the Indian education system and oppose its elitist and castist biases.

 

The next demand is our claim on national resources that have been monopolised by 15 to 20 per cent of the Indian population based on the caste system. It is high time that we demanded effective land reforms for landless people that constitute mostly of the SCs, STs and the OBCs.

 

Keeping all this in focus we are trying to urge students to demand our claim on the nation. There are large numbers of effective pro-reservation protests being held everywhere in the country, but the media has turned a blind eye and is not reporting them.

 

We are trying to coordinate with the other pro-reservation students’ groups across the country to bring them on a platform, so that our voice is heard. For this we started our campaign on 21 May with a public meeting at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). The next two days students from JNU sat on dharna at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi. We are planning to bring more students from outside Delhi to protest in favour of reservation.