“I feel a growing gap between my soul and my body… The value of man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind… I am writing this kind of a letter for the first time. My first time of a final letter… I am just empty… That’s pathetic. And that’s why I am doing this,” wrote Rohith Vemula (26), a Ph D scholar at the University of Hyderabad (UoH), just before he hanged himself to death in the university’s hostel room on January 17. Following a national outcry, on January 28, Union HRD minister and former Indian soap star Smriti Irani ordered a single-judge commission headed by former Allahabad high court judge Ashok Kumar Roopanwal to “investigate the sequence of events and the circumstances leading to the suicide” and “enquire if the university followed University Grants Commission 2012 resolution on discrimination”. The commission is expected to submit its report by April. This young scholar’s grievance was that he had suffered humiliating discrimination on the campus of this Central government-funded and administered university on account of his lowly Dalit caste credentials. In December, together with four other Dalit students, he was partially suspended from UoH — allowed to attend classes but expelled from the hostel and deprived of his Rs.25,000 monthly scholarship — for becoming involved in a brawl with several office-bearers of ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad), the student wing of the ruling BJP at the Centre. Although a university committee had exonerated the Dalit students of ABVP’s charge of assault, Hyderabad-based BJP Union minister of state for labour Bandaru Dattatreya put pressure on the Union HRD ministry to write five letters to UoH vice chancellor Appa Rao Podile (a BJP appointee) to suspend the five Dalit students for “casteist and anti-national” activities. In protest, the Dalit students pitched tent on the grounds of the university for almost a month, to no avail, finally forcing Vemula’s suicide. Significantly, Vemula is the eleventh Dalit (scheduled caste/scheduled tribe) student (for whom 22 percent quota is reserved in all Central government universities because of injustices this community has suffered for several millennia) of UoH to take his own life since 2008. “These committees are time-buying and face-saving reactions of the BJP government at the Centre. With the crucial Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly election due next year, these are damage control reactions. If at all they are concerned, the ministry and UoH should apologise to the Dalit as well as non-Dalit students of the university for permitting escalation of the issue to this level which has ruined its academic environment. I don’t understand how a brawl between two students’ organisations on campus could have invited the attention of two Union ministers, who should have left the university authorities to do their work. The entire issue has been mishandled,” says Dr. Chandrabhan Prasad, an eminent Dalit thinker known for his weekly column Dalit Diary in the national…
