A decade ago, Ann Druyan, wife of Carl Sagan, responded to the protests over Rohith Vemula’s death with a question: “Is it possible that the attention paid to his story lessens its chronic repetition?” Ten years later, a second-year IIT Bombay student was found dead in his hostel room hours after allegedly being caught using a phone during an exam. His parents allege he had spoken of caste-based torture in the days before. The case is being investigated under the SC/ST Act and the institute’s dean has been suspended pending inquiry. But the pattern of how such deaths are handled discursively and administratively deserves scrutiny independent of its outcome.

The last two months also saw four student deaths at NIT Kurukshetra, reportedly linked to debt, family discord and academic strain, not campus conduct. Both sets of deaths are absorbed into one policy response, counselling and a circular on student welfare. Indian institutions have grown fluent in wellness vocabulary yet remain illiterate in prevention, because they keep treating causes that are not uniform.

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In India, hierarchy is often marked by inaccessibility. Status is partly built on how tightly bound and hard to reach a group appears. An IIT is a premier institution. Its inaccessibility makes it more respected. A faculty member is someone you need to be deferential to. In his social identity theory, Henri Tajfel argues that a part of one’s self-concept is drawn from group membership — caste, alma mater, department, faculty, student bodies, all of these operate on this logic, identifying that group’s stakes in one’s self-worth and measuring it against others, producing ingroup favour and outgroup derogation without any material cause. Caste works through this mechanism, which is why it does not need a tragedy to enter the room. A student’s caste identity travels with him from admission, sorted long before any single accusation reactivates stereotypes the institution never formally named but never dismantled either. This categorisation may partly explain why the faculty-student divide seems to be widening in the protests at IIT-Bombay.

The response to IIT-Bombay student Sahil Wakode’s death shows this categorisation at work in a more careful form than a simple two-sided divide. Students have rallied around the case while explicitly stating that their protest does not condone academic misconduct. The response isn’t unusual. The students are simply closing ranks against a perceived imbalance.

This is where the NIT Kurukshetra and IIT-Bombay cases diverge. The former reflects a failure of early detection in personal distress the institution did not catch in time. The latter describes something structurally different. Not a student who happened to be in distress on campus, but a student whose treatment on campus may have produced it. Filing both under mental-health crisis and answering both with counselling treats the wound while leaving the causation untouched.

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The diathesis-stress model, used in clinical psychology, explains why identical stressors produce different outcomes in different people. Distress results not from a stressor alone but from a stressor acting on a pre-existing vulnerability. Applied to caste, the fit is precise. Years of stereotyping, exclusion from informal networks and being read as “a quota admission” accumulate into a chronic vulnerability with no relation to ability. A disciplinary correction that a well-integrated student absorbs without much cost can, for a student already carrying that weight, confirm every prior signal that they do not belong. Faculty typically see only the exam-day infraction. They are structurally unlikely to see what it lands on. It is one reason identical infractions carry unequal psychological stakes and why the handling of an incident matters as much as the incident itself.

Let’s take another example: IIT Ropar’s director, popularly known as the pookie professor, wore sunglasses at a convocation at a student’s request. It turned into a joyous moment that drew 27 million views online. Since then, other convocation clips have shown professors declining similar requests, which students read as rebukes. Neither response is objectively wrong. But the contrast shows how much discretion faculty hold over students and how identical requests or identical infractions are read differently depending on who is asking and how it is being handled.

None of this argues against counselling, it argues against counselling as the default answer to every campus death, since it lets institutions add a service without examining themselves. What is needed is a separation: Crisis-response systems for personal distress and independent accountability for institutional bias. Until that separation exists, each death will be folded into the same insufficient sentence that mental-health support is being strengthened. Support is not the same as prevention and in matters of the mind, as in matters of the body, prevention is better than cure.

The writer is faculty, Department of Psychology, Central University of Andhra Pradesh. Views are personal