There are deaths that pass quietly, absorbed into numbers, reduced to entries in reports, filed away under categories that numb the mind. And then there are deaths that refuse such burial. The death of Nithin Raj belong to the second kind.

The Anjarakandy, a dental college where young minds supposed to learn how to relieve pain and teachers call themselves as healers – a different kind of wound was inflicted. Not on the body, but on dignity. Not in silence, but in public.

A wound made of words; A wound made of caste

And like so many wounds of caste, it was invisible to those who inflicted it, and unbearable to the one who carried it.

The old script rewritten again

We have seen this before. We saw it when Rohit Vemula wrote his last letter – not as a victim but as a thinker whose mind had been concerned by an institution that refused to see him as human.

We were told then: this will not happen again. But caste does not learn. Institutions do not remember. And memory, in India, is always selective.

Nitin’s death is not an exception. It is a continuation.

Birth, Registration and the shadow of death

There is a sentence that sounds unbearable, but reality often speaks in unbearable truths:

In India every birth of a dalit child carries, silently, the shadow of a death warrant.

And if one were to push the truth further – into administrative heart of the state – it might read like this.

When the birth of a Dalit child is recorded in a local office, it is entered not only into the register of life, but into a structure that has already marked the limits of that life.

No official documents say this. No law records it.

And yet, through practices, exclusions, silences, and the humiliations, a society enacts it. What appears a life is often a prolonged negotiation with structured vulnerability.

The quiet Epidemic in Higher Education

Across India’s Universities a pattern persists – quiet denied bureaucratically softened, but brutally real.

Students from lower castes and dalits enter institutions carrying: first – generation aspirations, fragile hope and the invisible burden of proving their legitimacy. Inside, many encounter: humiliation masked as discipline, exclusion disguised as merit, ridicule disguised as culture.

Reports over the past decades indicate thousands of student suicides in India’s higher education system with a troubling concentration among OBCs, SCs, STs and Muslims. Exact attribution to caste is often erased in official records – but testimonies, inquiries and independent studies repeatedly point to caste – based discrimination as a recurring factor.

In Kerala – often celebrated for literacy and development, student suicides over the last decade have also raised alarms. The numbers fluctuate year to year. But what persists is not just the count – it is the pattern of institutional silence that follows each death.

Each case becomes:

An inquiry committee; Temporary outrage; And then, a return to normalcy.

Normalcy, the most dangerous word in a caste society. The Architecture of indifference.

Look around, Campuses gleam, Buildings rise in glass and steel

LDF Government keeps on boasting of world – class infrastructure, modern facilities.

During the last 10 years, under successive governments led by Pinarayi Vijayan, there has been a visible push towards infrastructural expansion - road widened, bridges built, campuses modernized, and institutions expanded. But we must ask that cuts through all celebration.

What is the value of a building that cannot hold a human being with dignity?

It is a polished, refined chamber of exclusion. A college where a student fears humiliation more than exam failure, is not an educational space, it is a site of quiet violence.

The violence that leaves no bruise

Caste violence in higher education rarely leaves visible marks. It operates through, tone, gesture, insinuation and public shaming. A word spoken casually by a teacher can become a permanent scar. A laugh in a class room can echo across years.

When humiliation becomes routine, self – doubt becomes internal. And when self – doubt deepens, silence follows. And in that silence a life can collapse.

Dignity, the Lost Foundation of Education

There was a moment in human thought when dignity was redefined – not as a privilege, not as inherited status, but as something inherent to every human being.

In the Philosophy of Jean – Jacques Rousseau, dignity emerges as a condition that precedes society itself. Every human being, by virtue of being human, possesses an equal moral worth that no institution has the right to deny. If this principle is taken seriously, then humiliation is not a moral lapse – it is a foundational violation. A classroom that permits denigration is not merely failing a student. It is negating the very basis of education. For education, at its heights, is nothing but recognition of another as equal.

And where that recognition collapses, knowledge itself becomes hollow.

Roads, Building and the Illusion of Progress

We are told that development is visible, in highways, in skyscrapers, in campuses that resemble corporate parks. But development without dignity is decoration.

A 6 Lane road can carry speed, but not justice.

A high–rise building can reach the sky, but not equality. A Society that invests in concrete but neglects love and dignity is building monuments to its own failure.

Grief Beyond Language

At the edge of grief, language begins to fail. For Nitin’s family and friends, what remains is not explanation but absence. In one of the most seering elegies, W.H. Auden writes:

“He was my North, my South, My East and West.

My Working week and my Sunday rest.

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong”

Such words do not belong to one life alone. They become the voice of all who stand before a loss that cannot be repaired.

No institution can return what has been taken. No inquiry can restore life.

The Responsibility that cannot be Defended

In cases like Nitin, responsibility is often diluted: “Systemic failure”, “Unfortunate incident”, “individual distress”. But such language conceals more that it reveals. Institutions are not abstract. They are made of human beings.Responsibility for the death of Nitin is located:

In the teachers who humiliate

In the authority that ignores

In the system that normalizes.

Let there be no refuge in procedure, no comfort in silence.

Acts of humiliation do not disappear. They accumulate. They testify.

There comes a moment when institutions are tested not by their buildings, their rankings or their claims – but by the lives they have broken and the dignity they have denied.

A Different Measure of Education

Education is not, the height of buildings, the number of class rooms, the shine of infrastructure. Education is: equality, respect and care.

Education is: the courage to speak against humiliation, the commitment to create spaces of belonging. Without these, institutions become structures without soul.

What must change

If Nithin’s death is to mean anything, it must not be absorbed into routine.

It must disturb. It must force institutions to confront, caste not as history, but as present discrimination, not as exception, but as pattern. And it must remind us: No amount of infrastructure can substitute for dignity. No system of education is worthy if it cannot protect the most vulnerable within it. Until then, every shining campus will carry a shadow. And in that shadow, the question will remain:

How many more must fall before we learn to stand human?