A class apart

What Barack Obama achieved through the power of his mind, Coleman Silky Silk did through a lie. The hero of Philip Roth's The Human Stain was blessed with a skin colour so light that it was easy for him to pretend that "he wasn't a nigger". He made people believe he was a Jew instead and went on to become an eminent classics professor. But what the fictional Silk and the very real Obama had in common in their formative years were good educators.

It was Silk's boxing instructor who told him how to take on an opponent, to never be afraid and more importantly not disclose his origins unless he had to. That was how Silk dealt with his country's Negrophobia. Barack Obama's skin colour didn't leave any chance for him to lie about his roots, maybe he wouldn't have anyway, but like Silk, the American president is also the product of a liberal education system. And good teachers.

Vishnu Chavda has no such luck. He was born Dalit and his teachers never let him forget that. At the government school where he studies, he was thrashed by a teacher for drinking water from a common vessel. A newspaper report said that it is a regular practice in Vishnu's school. Not just him, all Dalit students are routinely humiliated by teachers.

That's not all. Since Vishnu belongs to the Valmiki community that has traditionally been manual scavengers, he is forced by his teachers to clean the school's toilets, a task that is considered 'way beneath the dignity of upper-caste students'.

The state health minister says he has never heard of such a thing. His defense is he never received any such complaint. If somebody had written to him, he insists, he would have commissioned an inquiry. Dalit activists say he is lying. They have been complaining to the government about such injustices for long, but no action has ever been taken, they add.

According to NGOs, Dalit students across India are routinely made to sit in the last row in class, made to do the dirtiest of jobs, beaten up and called Bhangis and Chamars. "Outside schools Dalits face discrimination anyway. The last thing schools should do is make Dalit kids feel unwanted," says an activist.

Vishnu, meanwhile, has come to terms with his 'social inferiority'. With teachers showing him his place, he has little chance of rising above his roots like Coleman Silk. All Silk has wanted "from earliest childhood on, was to be free; not black, not even white, just on his own and free.u00a0 The objective was for his fate to be determined not by the ignorant, hate-filled intentions of a hostile world but by his own resolve." Sadly, for Vishnu and other Dalit boys that resolve gets broken every day. In school.