Casteist slur in Bengaluru college fest skit stirs row

Bengaluru: The incident of casteist slur made during the presentation of a college skit recently in Bengaluru has triggered a row.

A police complaint has been registered in this connection, while an online petition slamming the organisers is also getting support.

The Delroys Boys’, the group of students performing the skit, has tendered an unconditional apology for the presentation. However, the debate over the issue is rising every day.

The incident came to light after a group of students published an online petition on Jhatkaa.org on Thursday evening. The petition stated that the college contingent from Jain University’s Centre for Management Studies (CMS) staged an incredibly casteist and insensitive skit at a college fest.

The anonymous petitioners objected to the normalisation of caste discrimination in the pretext of humour. The skit was performed as part of Madads’, a segment at the fest where the participants had to advertise imaginary products.

‘The Delroys Boys’, the theatre group from CMS, who are in the thick of the controversy, in their skit exhibited a man belonging to the lower caste attempting to date an upper caste woman. The skit turned B.R. Ambedkar as ‘Beer Ambedkar’. It also used the phrase, ‘Why be Dalit, when you can be D-Lit’.

Akshay Bansode, member of the Vanchit Bahujan Yuva Aghadi, has filed a police complaint in Maharashtra in this matter. The complainant urged the police to treat the complaint as an FIR and initiate action against the performers and the university.

Sources said that the controversial skit was performed at other platforms as well. The ‘Delroys Boys’ maintained that they are sorry if they spoke ill about some people and apologised for their ‘mistake’.