THE ASIAN INDEPENDENT UK
Bal Ram Sampla
Geopolitics
It Took a Hunger Strike
A Dalit scholar had to starve herself in public before anyone in power picked up the phone.
Anagha Sasi enrolled at Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University in March 2024 to study microplastics.
Two years later, she says she still has no lab access, no constituted doctoral committee, no reviewed synopsis, and no chair to sit in. She says she was made to sit in the corridor while her peers used the scholars’ cabin. She alleges she was asked to sweep classrooms, dust files, and haul boxes. She alleges she was told, point blank, that she only got her fellowship because she is Scheduled Caste, and then threatened with losing it.
This is, her account, two years of a woman’s doctorate being quietly strangled while the institution that admitted her looked away.
So she sat outside the university gates. For 22 days. In sun and in monsoon rain. And nothing moved. No committee convened, no inquiry launched, no minister called.
Until she said the only thing left to withhold was her own body, and started an indefinite hunger strike.
That is the part that should sit uncomfortably with everyone reading this: it took a hunger strike. Not a complaint. Not a grievance form. Not two years of documented obstruction. A woman had to put her health and potentially her life on the line before the machinery of a public university remembered she existed.
She asked it herself, better than anyone else could: if the system needs “one more martyr,” will it finally be satisfied? It’s a question that should not need asking of any institution in 2026, nine years after Rohith Vemula’s death was supposed to be a reckoning, not a rehearsal.
The faculty member she has named has denied the allegations and disputes that he was even her formal supervisor; the university has pointed to issues with her synopsis rather than discrimination; and a judicial inquiry has now been ordered, which means these are contested claims that a proper process still needs to test. That process matters, and it should be swift and genuinely independent, not another delay tactic dressed up as due diligence.
But whatever that inquiry finds about any one individual, one fact doesn’t need an inquiry to confirm: a student was left without a lab, without a committee, without a chair, for two years, and no ordinary channel fixed it. Only starvation got attention. That is the indictment, not of one professor, but of a system that responds to bodies in crisis faster than it responds to injustice in progress.
A university is supposed to be the one place where merit and rigor decide who gets heard. When a scholar has to stop eating to be believed, the university has already failed , regardless of how the inquiry ends.
Reference
1.https://theobserverpost.com/kerala-dalit-phd-scholar-begins-hunger-strike-over-alleged-caste-discrimination/
2.https://dailypioneer.com/news/dalit-phd-scholar-hunger-strike-kerala-university-discrimination
3.https://news.careers360.com/dont-want-be-another-rohith-vemula-kerala-govt-intervene-in-dalit-students-hunger-strike-at-mg-university/amp
4.https://www.thenewsminute.com/kerala/kerala-dalit-scholar-on-strike-since-aug-15-alleges-caste-bias-by-faculty
