Dalit suicide case: Why Rohith Vemula's death is the tipping point in caste bias on campus

Anna (elder brother), what will happen to us? We don’t even have proper food. If educated people act like this, what will be the situation outside?” Rohith Vemula had asked Seshaiah Chemudugunta in anguish earlier this month.
It had been two weeks since Rohith, Chemudugunta and three other students were locked out of their hostel rooms at Hyderabad Central University and forbidden from accessing the canteen, administration building and other common areas because of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) member Susheel Kumar’s complaint that they assaulted him.

To protest what they said were false charges and an unjust punishment, the five began sleeping in a temporary shelter at the main “shopping complex” on campus, terming the tent a “velivada” or Dalit ghetto, to protest actions they said amounted to social boycott. Three days after he had confided in Chemudugunta, Rohith hanged himself to death in a friend’s hostel room and the same shopping complex transformed into Ground Zero for an incensed student body that has dubbed the death an institutional murder.

On Wednesday, CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury, Trinamool Congress MP Derek O’Brien and YSR Congress president Jaganmohan Reddy were among those who took the stage to address the agitating students, assuring them of their solidarity and using the platform to roundly condemn the politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

It was BJP minister Bandaru Dattatreya who had written to Union human resource development minister Smriti Irani in August after the assault on ABVP’s Kumar, complaining that the university had become a “den of casteist anti-nationals and extremists”.

The ministry had also sent five reminders to the university asking for its comments, which protesters say led to the suspension and, ultimately, Rohith’s death (an initial enquiry had absolved the students of the charges of assault).

A huge picture of Bhim Rao Ambedkar is on the stage facing the shopping complex while in the foreground is a temporary memorial for Rohith. Slogans of “Jai Bhim” and “Phule, Ambedkar, Kanshiram” rend the air. Irani might have declared in Delhi that there were “malicious attempts” to portray this as a “Dalit versus non-Dalit issue” but at the university, there are no two thoughts about this.

A student leader from another university who had boldly declared on stage that “this is not a Dalit issue but one that unites students all over the country” corrects his statement in minutes to “I’m sorry, this is a Dalit issue, but contiguous with student movements across the country.” The slogans on campus are for “Neel salam”, not “Laal salaam”.

The Big, Bad Picture

The political debate will continue but the picture that emerges from conversations with both students and faculty at Hyderabad Central University is that those from scheduled castes and tribes (SCs and STs) are subject to various forms of discrimination on campus.

Bipin, a PhD scholar in comparative literature who knew Rohith from the time he was doing his Masters, speaks about other slights he suffered. “When he approached a faculty member with sweets to celebrate being awarded his fellowship, the professor asked him whether it had been that easy that year. This is the kind of prejudice the faculty has,” says Bipin who, like Rohith, is a member of the Ambedkar Students’ Association (ASA), which is leading the protests.

“There were 30 students who went to Susheel Kumar’s room that day, so why were only five suspended? They were strategically targeting the leaders of the movement to quell it,” he adds. Joby Joseph, a professor at the Centre for Neural and Cognitive Sciences, University of Hyderabad, says the discrimination is sometimes subtle. “When a student from backward sections answers correctly, a murmur goes around the classroom. Faculty members also make remarks like ‘that student is not from SC or ST, why is she not performing?’” His colleague, Karthik Bittu, says there are professors who make disparaging remarks about SC students.

“They also strategise about how not to take on such students. Everyone discusses caste identity.” This reluctance of upper caste professors to be guides to students from scheduled castes is held to have driven at least two students to suicide on the same campus, the first in 2008 and the other in 2013. Senthil Kumar, who belonged to the panniandi, or pig-rearing, caste (a Dalit sub-caste) in Tamil Nadu, had joined Hyderabad Central University in 2007 as a PhD candidate. In February 2008, he killed himself by consuming poison.

An internal investigating committee found that Kumar had not been allotted a supervisor though he had been at the university for over a year. Five years later, the tragedy was replayed with another protagonist, Madari Venkatesh, who killed himself with rat poison. Venkatesh, too, had not been allotted a permanent research guide or a laboratory, and the V Krishna Committee set up to probe the death highlighted the discrimination against students from marginalised sections and the systematic failure of the university as reasons that forced the 26-year-old to end his life. Rohith’s friend, Chemudugunta, says the faculty are also reluctant to help those who don’t speak English well as is often the case with SC and ST students, often firstgeneration literates.

Such instances of caste bias play themselves out on campuses across the country, including at premier institutes such as AIIMS, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the IITs, at times culminating in suicides like Rohith’s. Ajay Sree Chandra, a 21-year-old Dalit PhD candidate at IISc, had taken his own life in 2007. Though the institute denied any kind of bias, friends and family members spoke about the discrimination he was subject to.

AIIMS had come in for stinging criticism from a committee under former UGC chairman Sukhadeo Thorat constituted to probe the differential treatment of SC/ST students at the institute; the committee found bias at every level, from segregation in hostels and social isolation of Dalit students to differential treatment by faculty. ABVP leader Susheel Kumar, whose Facebook status “ASA Goons are talking about hooliganism — feeling funny”, had triggered the chain of events that led to his complaint that he was beaten up and Rohith’s suspension, says there should be a fair enquiry and the culprits punished.

“Rohith is not the kind of person who would commit suicide because of the suspension. I’ve known him for five years. There should be a proper enquiry and if I’m found guilty, I should be punished,” he says. Kumar says he didn’t believe the initial reports that Rohith had committed suicide. “I asked my friends to check many times. When I got his suicide note on WhatsApp I read it a hundred times… I couldn’t convince myself that he was dead.”

Caste & Counter

While he says there might be caste discrimination on campus, he toes the BJP line that Rohith’s death should not be made a Dalit issue. “It has been completely diverted into a caste issue. I was against the anti-national slogans they raised after Yakub Menon’s execution, not against any Dalit,” is his stand. Perhaps the only person who could say whether he would label his death a Dalit issue is no longer with us. Chemudugunta says in his final days Rohith had felt an intense hatred over the fact that though they were sleeping in the open, nobody from the administration cared to approach them.

“We are victims of society who experience caste discrimination. Rohith’s last letter clearly speaks about identity,” he says. The anti-national aspersions fly in the face of the prime minister’s condolence message to the family at the convocation ceremony of Ambedkar University in Lucknow on Friday. “A young son of my country, Rohith, was compelled to commit suicide...a mother has lost her son and I feel the family’s pain very well,” said PM Modi, who preferred not to dwell on the caste angle of the episode.

Most Dalit commentators that ET Magazine spoke to say they view the incident as evidence of BJP’s lack of commitment towards Dalits despite the overtures made by Modi during the 2014 polls. The Dalit vote will once again be key in assembly elections, particularly the biggest one of them in 2017, in Uttar Pradesh.

Chandra Bhan Prasad, a scholar on issues pertaining to Dalits, said they had voted for Modi hoping for change. “But the BJP continues to have close links with the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and play to their upper-caste agenda. This is not why vast sections of people, particularly the Dalits, voted for Modi,” he said.

Suraj Yengde, a scholar at Harvard University and a Dalit activist, alleges that Dalit students who are part of BJP-affiliated groups are often posted at the forefront in violent agitations while the upper-caste members seldom face police in confrontation. According to Yengde, there was an element of irony in BJP invoking Ambedkar as he “is an antithesis to the very ideology of Hindutva”. D Shyam Babu, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research warns that atrocities against Dalits will damage BJP’s self- projection as an inclusive party. “It will now be seen as an upper-caste party…Let us see whether Modi or (BJP president Amit) Shah show some leadership here.”

Past Forward

BJP spokesperson Siddharth Nath Singh said he disagreed with the view that the Centre had not lived up to the expectations of Dalits. “There are several schemes being run for Dalits. For instance, the social welfare department is working towards doing away with manual scavenging and the party is also fully behind the project. This incident is an existing problem in Hyderabad University.

Earlier also there were nine deaths,” said Singh. He also said that new facts had come to light such as scratched out parts of the suicide note in which Rohith is alleged to have expressed dissatisfaction with his own organisation. The prime minister, for his part, has done enough to dismiss the anti-national charge against Rohith. Now his party has got to do even more to display it is not anti-Dalit — not just for electoral gains but to prove that inclusive development is not just a pretty buzzword meant to adorn election manifestos.