In his short life, Rohith Vemula had faced and suffered many cruel slings and arrows of life. Yet he had a wide range of social, cultural and intellectual engagements that tell us about his restless energy, incendiary intellect, and a passion for transformative politics. In his death, he has left behind a grieving mother, a devastated family and a larger family of millions of enraged and empathetic Dalit-Bahujan, Leftist, Feminist and other activists who should now come together to fight a decisive battle against the ruling dark forces of caste, brahmanism and Hindutva

By Braj Ranjan Mani

Countercurrents.org

The death of Rohith Vemula brings us face to face with the horrible cruelty of caste and the absence of basic civic virtues—the kind of virtues that make us human and civilized. This explains the nationwide and spontaneous outpouring of grief, rage and anger at the tragic end of Rohith’s young and promising life. Of course, there were the Hindutva groups in league with the casteist university system (as the various news reports suggest) which made life suffocating for Rohith and other Ambedkarite students, but Rohith’s decision to end his life, as his suicide letter makes clear, was also dictated by the larger oppressive socio-academic circumstances that variously smother the life and dreams of millions of young dalits.

The society that forces an impassioned lover of life to take his life is a sick society. Yes, Rohith Vemula was a lover of life and a science enthusiast.

All of his 26 years, right from his impoverished childhood, he waged a desperate but determined struggle for educating himself, and combined his personal struggle with the larger social fight for equality and justice. With the care of his courageous parents who brought up and supported him by labouring and tailoring, he came up to the level from where he cleared two Junior Research Fellowships and then succeeded, against the terrible bureaucratic and brahmanic odds, in getting admission for his PhD research in Science Technology and Society Studies at Hyderabad Central University. This was a brilliant achievement for a first-generation dalit student like Rohith, but he also had a range of other dreams—personal as well as social—he wanted to pursue.

Rohith’s poetic suicide letter and the bits and pieces of information (floating on the social media since his death) give us a glimpse into his incendiary mind and soul.

As he himself says, he looked at the stars and he always dreamt to be a writer. ‘A writer of science, like Carl Sagan.’

He talks about his love of nature, but does not write about flora and fauna on this earth. Instead he twice mentions in his short letter his fascination with the stars in the sky. His alienation from the hierarchical social relationships and his resentment at the humiliating identity (that was thrust upon him) find unmistakable expression when he writes, ‘…Our feelings are second handed. Our love is constructed. Our beliefs coloured. Our originality valid through artificial art. It has become truly difficult to love without getting hurt. The value of a 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 was always rushing. Desperate to start a life. All the while, some people, for them, life itself is curse. My birth is my fatal accident.’

In his short life, Rohith had faced and suffered many cruel slings and arrows of life. Yet he had a wide range of social, cultural and intellectual engagements that tell us about his restless energy, incendiary intellect, and a passion for transformative politics.

Rohith had been associated with the Leftist SFI (Students Federation of India), which he had to forsake because of ‘ill-treatment’ he got at the hands of some fellow comrades. Yes, he was influenced by Marxism.

Later, he joined the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA), with which he remained deeply attached till the last. He was a staunch Ambedkarite, and was popular among ASA members.

He was an Ambedkarite and a Marxist. And he was keen to bring Muslim and Dalit students together to fight the oppressive forces of caste, class and communalism.

He had participated in the protest against the controversial hanging of Yakub Menon last year. And he and his Ambedkarite associates incurred the wrath of the right-wing forces for supporting the film Muzaffarnagar Abhi Baqi Hai that exposes the sinister Hindutva politics. He had also participated in the beef festival last year.

His main target was injustice in all its forms, and he wanted to dismantle the casteist mindset and brahmanical social order.

For these activities, he and his friends became the eyesore for Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the BJP-RSS. The ABVP accused the ASA of ‘anti-national’ activities, and alleged that they have brought a culture of violence in the university campus. After this, a faulty investigation found five ASA students, including Rohith, guilty of the assaulting an ABVP leader for which they were suspended by the university administration last year. Later, on the same trumped-up charges, they were also thrown out of the hostel, and thus forced to live out in the open. The Dalit students were protesting against their university suspension and expulsion from hostel. All of them were traumatized, as they came from very poor socio-economic background. After the stipend was stopped, Rohith’s poor family was struggling to support him. He had to borrow Rs. 40,000 from a friend to make ends meet. All this took a heavy toll on his life, and he went into depression. His unbearable pain can be gauged from an angry but poignant letter he wrote to the Vice-Chancellor in 2015 (just a month ago), sarcastically asking him to provide euthanasia facilities for Dalit students. But instead of providing a helping hand to the suffering Dalit students, the University authorities continued their witch-hunt against them. It was under such oppressive circumstances that Rohith decided to end his life.

By not blaming anyone for causing his death, Rohith showed his astonishing magnanimity but this does not absolve those who directly or indirectly aggravated his melancholy and hopelessness. While the Hindutva forces and the university authorities directly harassed and hounded him and other Dalit scholars, all those who normalize the cruel discrimination of caste and brahmanic social order have also played a part in Rohith’s death. After all, many Dalit students have been forced to commit suicide in Indian universities in recent years. Evidences of murderous examples suggest that the institutional discrimination is rife against Dalits, especially in higher centres of science, medicine and engineering.

The expressed and unexpressed contents of Rohith Vemula’s suicide letter leave little doubt that he was in love with life, nature, science and humanity. But the oppressive social reality and the discriminatory university broke his spirit and snuffed him out in the prime of his life.

In his death, Rohith Vemula has left behind a grieving mother, a devastated family and a larger family of millions of enraged and empathetic Dalit-Bahujan, Leftist, Feminist and other activists who should now come together to fight a decisive battle against the ruling dark forces of caste, brahmanism and Hindutva.

http://www.countercurrents.org/mani190116.htm