How The State Trains Dalit Youth To Dream Small

Near the Maharashtra–Chhattisgarh border lies Sindewahi, a small town where a new educational centre was being inaugurated. I was there with the Savitribai Phule Resource Centre (SRC), part of the slow work of building community-owned educational institutions for first-generation learners and students from marginalised communities.

The event was still being set up. We were asked to wait upstairs.

The room we entered was modest and functional — a library, a study hall, a holding space for ambition. Shelves lined with dog‑eared books. Plastic chairs pushed against the wall. Sunlight entered through a single window. Students sat scattered across the room, notebooks open. Some revised quietly. Others stared into pages they already knew by heart.

There were about fifteen of them. They shared the easy familiarity of people who arrived at the same hour every day, studied together, waited together. Conversation followed easily, as it always does in such spaces.

“What did you study in college?”

“Home Science.” “Gender Studies.” “History.” “Development Studies.” “Sociology.”

These were not students stranded outside higher education. They had passed through universities, acquired theoretical languages, encountered questions of power, inequality, and social life.

Then we asked a second question, almost casually.

“What are you preparing for now?”

“Police bharti.” “Police bharti.” “Police bharti.”

I laughed, mistaking pattern for coincidence.

“How many of you here are preparing for police recruitment?”

Every hand in the room went up.

The moment rearranged the space. What had seemed, minutes earlier, like a room full of divergent academic trajectories collapsed into a single line of flight. There was no deliberation in their answers, no sense of competing futures evaluated and discarded.

Downstairs, the inauguration began. Words like opportunity and empowerment travelled through microphones. The centre was declared open. But my attention remained upstairs, with the raised hands. They had risen quickly, without looking at one another. They did not need to check. They already knew. On the drive back, Sindewahi disappeared from view. The image did not. Fifteen students. Different degrees. One aspiration.

Weeks later, I watched Homebound.

I went as one goes to the cinema at the end of a long day, expecting distance — a temporary suspension of one’s own life. Instead, the film collapsed that distance almost immediately.

What unfolded on screen did not feel unfamiliar. It felt rehearsed. Not in the sense of poor writing, but in the way certain social arrangements repeat themselves so faithfully that they begin to resemble scripts. Young men moving between small rooms and larger disappointments. Conversations that orbit around examinations, notifications, cut-offs, and waiting. Always waiting.

The film did not explain its characters to the audience. It did not need to. Their desires were already intelligible. Their ambitions were modest, practical, calibrated. A government job. A uniform. Stability. The promise that life might finally begin once the exam was cleared.

As the scenes progressed, I found myself returning to Sindewahi — to the way possibility had gathered there, briefly, before narrowing. What Homebound rendered visible was not a particular struggle, but a familiar choreography: education followed by suspension; effort followed by deferral; hope tethered to a single institutional gate.

Watching the film, it became clear that Sindewahi had not been an exception. It had been a rehearsal space. The students upstairs, the characters on screen — they were inhabiting the same temporal logic. By the time the credits rolled, the recognition was complete.

Cruel Optimism

Before working with the Centre, I did not know this exam the way they did. Police bharti was not part of my horizon. I encountered it not as an object of desire, but as a question. Why this? Why so many?

But for those students, the exam had entered their lives the way a season does — predictable, cyclical, unavoidable. When I asked them why, there were no explanations. Only facts.

Security. A government salary that arrives on time. The promise — however fragile — of continuity. In an economy structured around informal labour, short-term contracts, disappearing protections, this promise is not trivial. It shapes family expectations. It justifies years of preparation. Security here was not imagined as prosperity. It was imagined as the absence of constant fear.

Power. Not power in the abstract sense of policymaking or command, but the everyday authority that comes with a uniform. For those accustomed to being questioned, doubted, disciplined, even delegated authority carries weight. It offers a brief reversal in a social order where dignity must otherwise be negotiated daily.

Dignity. A single sentence that could settle questions at family gatherings, in neighbourhood conversations, in marriage negotiations.

Other futures — academic, intellectual, professional — rarely promised all three. Often, they promised none with certainty.

These answers were accompanied by something quieter. A reference to an older brother. A cousin. Someone from the village who had prepared before them. Someone who had failed once. Twice. And then cleared it. Police bharti was not just an exam; it was the only exam whose shape they knew. Its stages were familiar. Its risks legible. Its delays expected. This familiarity mattered. It made the future feel navigable.

What struck me was not the intensity of their desire, but its ordinariness. No one described police bharti as an exceptional achievement. It was spoken of as the obvious thing to do when education ended and nothing else announced itself clearly. Lauren Berlant names this kind of attachment cruel optimism — the condition in which the object that sustains hope also consumes the life organised around it. Hope, here, did not promise flourishing. It promised stability. An end to provisional life.

This is not a moral judgment on those who apply. It is a description of the conditions under which power, security, and dignity come to appear accessible only through a single, unforgiving gate.

The question, then, is not why these students apply for police bharti. It is why, after years of education, this was the only future that arrived with instructions.

Information as Infrastructure

How does aspiration become narrowed long before any application form is filled?

The liberal explanation is familiar and convenient: students choose police bharti because it is safe, because it suits their temperament, because the private sector is unstable. This language of choice relocates responsibility from institutions to individuals, from structure to psychology.

By now, we are familiar with the counter-argument as well. We know that higher education has expanded without producing corresponding mobility. A bachelor’s degree signals completion without direction. A master’s degree extends time without clarifying outcome. The vocabulary for this failure already exists.

But what unsettled me was not the popularity of this aspiration, rather the silence surrounding others. The students spoke fluently about physical endurance tests, recruitment delays, cut‑off marks. They could name failed attempts, postponed lists, cancelled examinations.

Yet when asked about central universities, national entrance tests, or academic pathways that promised intellectual mobility rather than disciplinary incorporation, the room grew thin with unfamiliarity. CUET, Delhi University, JNU, Ambedkar University- these were not rejected possibilities. They were absent ones.

The students’ education had trained them in critique, but not in navigation. They possessed disciplinary languages, yet no institutional bearings. Pathways into advanced study had not been refused or evaluated; they had simply never been rendered legible within the space of their education.

This absence is not incidental. It is produced by what can be described as a poverty of information — a structural failure in how futures are circulated. Information about police recruitment is public, repetitive, and aggressively disseminated. Notifications are pasted on walls, forwarded on messaging groups, announced by local officials, reinforced by coaching centres. The state ensures that this pathway is visible.

By contrast, information about higher academic mobility — central university admissions, national eligibility tests, funded fellowships, research careers — circulates quietly and selectively. It travels through English-language websites, informal mentorship networks, alumni connections, and social inheritance. For students without access to these circuits, higher education becomes a closed room with no signboards.

National data mirrors this pattern. While enrolment of Scheduled Caste students at the undergraduate level has increased steadily over the last decade, representation drops sharply at the postgraduate and doctoral stages. Financial aid thins, fellowships remain underutilised, and dropout rates rise precisely where sustained institutional support becomes essential. The educational ladder narrows at the point where autonomy should begin.

Guidance, where it exists, is largely absent from public institutions that serve first-generation learners. Career counselling is either non-existent or oriented toward private-sector placements that remain socially and linguistically inaccessible. Students are left to improvise futures individually, without institutional backing, at precisely the stage where individual effort matters least and structural support matters most.

Language intensifies this narrowing. English operates as the unspoken medium of advancement. Most Dalit–Bahujan students enter higher education through regional-language schooling. The burden of translation is placed entirely on them. The effect is cumulative: students learn early which spaces welcome them and which silently repel them.

Material support follows a similar logic: delayed scholarships, inadequate stipends, and the absence of residential academic spaces turn higher education into a precarious undertaking.

It is within this hollowed-out structure that police bharti acquires its force. Compared to the opacity of academic futures, recruitment exams offer clarity of process. This clarity however, should not be mistaken for generosity. It is clarity without mobility. The path is narrow, the competition brutal, the odds unforgiving. It is a system that stores credentials while draining their emancipatory potential. What follows is not choice, but channeling.

Dalit–Bahujan youth do not abandon education for the state’s lower rungs. They are quietly channelled toward them.

Political Economy of Delay

Police bharti operates as a regime of waiting. Notifications arrive irregularly. Examinations are announced, postponed, litigated, re-notified. Results take months, sometimes years. Medical tests follow written exams; physical tests precede them; verification trails behind. Each stage creates a pause, and each pause demands compliance. Life is reorganised around calendars that do not belong to those waiting. Preparation becomes a full-time occupation. Days are structured by running schedules, mock tests, diet plans, revision cycles. Minds are disciplined to endure repetition.

This is where the state’s logic becomes explicit. Rather than absorbing surplus youth into stable employment or expanding social protection, the state manages them through prolonged eligibility. The promise is always imminent. Selection is always just ahead. What is governed is not merely labour, but time itself.

This can be understood as bureaucratic time — a form of carceral time without walls. Waiting becomes discipline; preparation becomes compliance. Protest is postponed. Political energy is deferred. Youth remain invested in a system that repeatedly fails to absorb them.

Yet the queue does not dissolve. Time already invested becomes reason to invest more. The longer one waits, the harder it becomes to exit. Preparation, once a strategy, becomes an identity. Waiting, here, is not passive. It is a mode of governance.

Authority as Compensation

The promise that hovers over police bharti does not end with employment. It extends into the uniform itself. The uniform matters because it converts proximity to the state into visible authority. For communities historically positioned outside authority, this visibility is not trivial. But why does the state offer this authority?

Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital helps clarify this exchange. Symbolic capital is recognition without material power — honour detached from control over resources or decision-making. The badge confers legitimacy, but not sovereignty.

Within the police hierarchy, this distinction is stark. Constables constitute the overwhelming majority of the force, while decision-making authority remains concentrated at higher ranks. Data on caste composition consistently shows that Scheduled Caste representation thins sharply as rank rises.

The everyday realities of service reflect this asymmetry. Transfers are frequent and opaque. Disciplinary action is discretionary. Work hours stretch unpredictably. Lower ranks enforce law without institutional protection, absorb public anger without organisational backing, and shoulder risk without control.

For Dalit constables, this vulnerability is compounded by caste. Subordination does not dissolve inside the institution. Upper-caste dominance persists in informal command structures, social interactions, and the distribution of favour. Posts such as constable, contractual teacher, clerk, or peon are often misrecognised as ladders of mobility.

In practice, they are sites of disciplined service. Contractualisation has crept into these sectors once associated with stability. Pensionless appointments, temporary contracts, and delayed regularisation ensure that incorporation into the state does not translate into long-term security.

The consequences are material. In the event of injury or death, families navigate compensation regimes that are slow, discretionary, and unevenly enforced. Benefits are partial. Safeguards are conditional. The promise of state protection thins precisely when it is most needed.

Authority is leased, not owned. It can be withdrawn, transferred, or suspended without explanation. Recognition is contingent on obedience.

This is the paradox at the heart of low-tier state employment. Proximity to power substitutes for power itself. Authority, in this arrangement, becomes compensation — for exclusion endured elsewhere, and for emancipation indefinitely deferred.

Ambedkarian Reconstruction

I arrived at SRC wanting to contribute something back to my community. At the time, I thought of such spaces as supplementary: meaningful, perhaps, but peripheral to the real work of education happening elsewhere. I did not yet understand that spaces like these were never meant to be peripheral.

Education, in Ambedkar’s vision, was inseparable from collective responsibility: “they(students) are not merely to tread the path of personal happiness but to lead their community to be free, to be strong and to be respected.”

This conviction shaped his institutional imagination. He was aware that formal entry into colleges did not guarantee intellectual survival within them. Speaking of educational spaces that treated unequals as equals — where the economic and social difficulties of Scheduled Caste students were ignored — he saw how students were left to navigate systems that neither recognised their conditions nor compensated for them.

The response he called for was, construction.

Long before the language of NGOs, he articulated the need for social centres — not as charitable shelters, but as engines of intellectual life. Libraries. Reading rooms. Spaces for study, discussion, cultural activity. He described them as places where minds could be cultivated, where the Dalits could be drawn toward “ideas, art and broad human interests,” where leisure could be reclaimed from drudgery and turned toward thought.

These centres were meant to do three things at once: coordinate activities under one roof; act as a visible site of knowledge, culture, and pride; and sustain themselves materially, without dependence on external benevolence. Dependence, he warned, would render the Untouchables “unfit to fight their own battles.” The force that could emancipate them would have to come from within.

Seen in this light, spaces like SRC are not compensations for a broken system. They are the core of Ambedkar’s educational project. Where the state offers access without support, these centres offer continuity. Where education produces isolation, they produce collective study. Where aspiration is left to wander, they make futures discussable.

This article does not propose a programme. It returns to Ambedkar’s demand: “The time for action has come. Deeds and not words are wanted.”

I think often of that room in Sindewahi. It would be easy, from a distance, to read those raised hands as ambition. Easier still to read them as resignation. Both interpretations are comforting. Both are wrong. These hands were neither dreaming too small nor surrendering too easily. They were responding, with precision, to the institutions that had shaped them. To rebuild the horizon, then, is to return to the work Ambedkar called for. Centres like the one in Sindewahi do not appear at the margins of this story. They sit at its centre.

A democracy wherein its most oppressed citizens dream small is not malfunctioning. It is working exactly as it has been built to function. The raised hands tell us so.

References:

All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2021–2022. Ministry of Education. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1999713&reg=3&lang=2

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A SOCIAL CENTRE FOR THE UNTOUCHABLES IN BOMBAY, BAWS Volume 17, part 2, pp 452.

A SOCIAL CENTRE FOR THE UNTOUCHABLES IN BOMBAY, BAWS Volume 17, part 2, pp 454.

Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. “Social Space and Symbolic Power.” Sociological Theory, vol. 7, no. 1, 1989, pp. 14–25.

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