New Delhi: Over a month after a Dalit student died of suicide at the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B), a special investigation team (SIT) of Mumbai Police’s crime branch has found a “suicide note” from the student’s room.
Police said a fellow student who is on the same floor of the hostel where Darshan Solanki lived was found to have harassed and threatened the latter. “We found the note inside his room. He has accused one of the co-student of threatening and harassing him. We have also found some WhatsApp chats shared between them,” a senior official from the probe team told Indian Express.
“Initially, we believed that he jumped to death owing to poor performance in the semester. However, the suicide note, which we suspect that he wrote minutes before ending his life, shows that he was harassed,” the official added.
Solanki, who hailed from Gujarat’s Ahmedabad, jumped from the seventh floor of his hostel building on February 12 at noon. While an internal report by IIT-B authorities said Solanki had killed himself due to his “poor” academic performance, his family, however, blamed it on the alleged caste discrimination at the institute.
Another investigating official told Midday, “We suspect that something happened that day, and he (the deceased) wrote a suicide note before jumping from the 7th floor.”
The official added that a process is underway for the registration of an offence under Section 306 (abetment to suicide) of the Indian Penal Code and relevant sections of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.