Twenty-four-year-old Prajwal Chandrakant Gaikwad, who belongs to the Mahar community, categorised as Scheduled Caste, was elected as the president of the Students’ Union of the University of Hyderabad on Saturday, February 25. Prajwal, the convenor of the Ambedkar Students’ Association, had contested from the Ambedkar Students’ Association-Students’ Federation of India-Dalit Students’ Union (ASA-SFI-DSU) panel and won with a margin of 608 votes. Along with him, five other Dalit students were elected to different posts – a testimony of the social justice movement prevailing in the University of Hyderabad, according to the 24-year-old.
“It is a victorious moment in the history of the anti-caste movement. Never in the history of any Indian university, has there been six Dalit students contesting across nine posts and emerging victorious,” says an elated Prajwal to TNM.
The Students’ Union elections are held for nine posts – vice president, general secretary, joint secretary, sports secretary, cultural secretary, and Gender Sensitisation Committee Against Sexual Harassment posts for Integrated students, PG students and research scholars.
Prajwal, who is pursuing his PhD in gender studies, hails from Nasik in Maharashtra. Born to Ambedkarite parents — Chandrakant Gaikwad and Sujata Gaikwad — who are primary school teachers, Prajwal says that he was always inclined towards the Ambedkarite ideology. He began his student politics during his Bachelor's programme at Fergusson College, Pune, where he was the founder-member of the Ambedkar Students Organisation.
He joined the University of Hyderabad in 2019, to pursue his Masters in History and became associated with the ASA. A protest of discrimination against Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes students brought him closer to the organisation. He says, “Not just safeguarding reservations, but the ASA was instrumental in fighting for fellowships of students, ensuring that students from marginalised communities could navigate the space and take cognisance of the problems of Dalit students.”
The PhD scholar is thankful to the student community for electing him and his fellow Dalits and showing their commitment to social justice. “In terms of social justice, the University of Hyderabad student community is far ahead of other universities,” he says.
Disclosing his future plans, he says that he would be in academia and continue his anti-caste movement in the academic sphere.
Besides having a Dalit president, for the first time, the students elected a 21-year-old trans woman, Hritik Laxman Lalan, from the Dalit community as the postgraduate representative to the Gender Sensitisation Committee Against Sexual Harassment.
Hritik, addressing the ASA students
Hritik is a first-year Masters student in Sociology. She belongs to the Meghwal caste and hails from Kutch in Gujarat. “It is being reiterated that it is a historic feat. I feel very humbled by the kind of support and respect that I have received from the student community,” she says, expressing her gratitude.
“When the results were announced, I was thinking of the day when the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act was passed in 2019. A clause in it says that verbal and sexual abuse of a trans person could lead to imprisonment between six months to two years, a punishment which is grossly less compared to the same crime committed against a cis woman. I looked at the victory as an answer to the regressive policy of the BJP government,” Hritik recalls.