Special Correspondent | India Tomorrow
NEW DELHI, SEPTEMBER 1— The 29-year-old Jitendra Suna, who is the presidential candidate of the BAPSA-Fraternity Alliance in the Jawaharlal Nehru University Student Union(JNUSU) elections, has worked as an agriculture labourer along with his family members. He also used to dig up the field as daily wage worker under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREGA) schemes.
Suna, who hails from Odisha’s Kalahandi district, moved to Delhi in 2008 to get a better work in Delhi when his family fell short of money for building a house.
“After Std XII, I moved to Delhi to earn money for building my house. We were facing the shortage of money. We presumed that if we work in Delhi, we will get more profitable job. But I used to get only Rs. 3000-3500 a month. In cities like Delhi, this amount is too little,” Suna said while talking to Indiatomorrow.net.
In Delhi, Suna worked as a helper in Indraprastha Gas Ltd (IGS) along with his brother Krishna Chandra Suna. He used to fit the gas piplines, fix stoves and digging roads in case of pipe bursts.
After leaving works in Delhi, he went back to his village Pourkela and continued his education and then took admission in BA in a government college Toosra Degree College which is 15 km away from his village. He completed his Std XII from a government school which is five km away from his village. At that time, he was not aware of the fact that there is also any kind of higher education after graduation.
While he was pursuing his graduation, he went to Pune along with some Dalit youths to work in industrial company as a laborer. But he left that work in Pune and come back home. Then, in 2011 someone told him about a Nagpur institution Nagarjun Training Institute where Buddhism and Ambedkarism are taught. He started reading there about Babasaheb Ambedkar and caste untouchability and sufferings. At the institution, he met some people who came to visit them from all over India. They informed him about the JNU and Hyderabad Central University(HCU) and urged him to get admission there.
After making two attempts, in 2013, he got admission in MA (Modern History) in the JNU. He has now done his M.Phil and currently doing PhD on “History of Identities & Exclusion; Ambedkar and the Marginalised”.
Suna is one of the founding member of the BAPSA (Birsa Ambedkar Phule Student Association) which in alliance with Fraternity Movement(FM) decided to field him as their presidential candidate for student union elections which is due to take place on September 4. Student activist Waseem RS, who hails from Kerala, is the alliance’s candidate from FM for JNUSU general secretary.
“I faced a lot of caste discrimination from the very childhood in my village. I spoke up and wrote a lot about it. We were not allowed to drink water from the public water point. We had separate sitting arrangements at school. We were forbidden even to touch those people who used to cook. The cook used to serve us food from a distance. In our village, Dalit area is segregated from the upper caste habitation as it is in any area in the country’’, he said.
He said that he used to face this kinds of caste untouchability from the very childhood but he considered them “cultural tradition”. It was deep-seated in his consciousness, therefore, he never resisted them. He started realizing these discrimination after he read Ambedkar who describes all this a severe kind of discrimination.
“As I was reading Babasaheb Ambedkar, all kinds of discrimination that I have faced used to come up in my mind. At that time, the determination to change social order, to fight against casteism and Brahaminism woke up in me. Since then, I started participating in student activism,” he describes how he came to take interest in politics.
Now, he said that he still faces some kind of caste discrimination at the JNU. “Fighting fascism and discrimination are the most important agendas of my politics and that of my alliance’’, he says.
“My battle is for equal rights for all the marginalized sections including dalit, adivasi and minorities’’, he declares.
