 "Students wearing masks of Rohith's face")
Hamara V-C kahaan gaya? Honeymoon pe, honeymoon pe; Hamara V-C kahaan gaya? Honeymoon pe, honeymoon pe.
On the otherwise desolate campus of Telangana’s University of Hyderabad aka Hyderabad Central University (HCU), 40-odd students sit in front of a building, sharing the onus of ingenious slogans and calls for justice for a friend they have recently lost, Rohith Vemula. The guard sitting on the other side of the locked grill watches on wordlessly. He has lived this scene every day for close to two weeks now.
A little ahead there’s a makeshift platform covered in blankets and shawls. Like the batch of seven students before them, seven more sit on this platform now. After two straight days of fasting, they’re mostly quiet. A lone cardboard placard does the talking for them. “Hunger Strike,” it says.
Come nightfall, they’ll still be here, and joining them will be friends, about 50 of them, who will sleep out in the cold, away from their on-campus hostels.
Right next to this is another makeshift shelter, the velivada, which is Telugu for Dalit ghetto. This is where research scholar Vemula slept with four of his friends after they were thrown out of their hostel in November last year; this is where he lived before he went back to his hostel and hanged himself on January 17. Vemula would have turned 27 on January 30.
Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal expressing solidarity with the protesters
“It doesn’t matter what’s on the certificate, he always said that the Dalit community was his family and he lived a Dalit life,” says Kavyashree R, a member of Ambedkar Students’ Association (ASA) and the student-led Joint Action Committee (JAC) at HCU.
Vemula’s mother, Radhika, the daughter of a Dalit labourer, was ‘adopted’ into a Vaddera (OBC) family; Radhika and her three children were treated as household staff in their house in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh. This bit helps us understand where Vemula came from, in light of his slightly-cryptic suicide note that is making the rounds on social media.
Vemula and his friends were suspended for allegedly beating up a student called N Susheel Kumar. But they were targeted because they were top leaders of the ASA, and Kumar is affiliated with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), says Rupa Murala, another university student.
A long series of unfortunate events have led up to this point, events that have been broken down and scrutinised by every Ram, Rahim and Ronald across communities. HCU’s Vice-Chancellor Appa Rao Podile, who has now gone on leave, and Union minister Smriti Irani have been blamed for Vemula’s death.
“What the management really wanted was that Dalits shouldn’t sit in groups on campus. They just want us to come and go back quietly without speaking about the discrimination that we face,” says Kavyashree. “How long will you keep quiet if your family is talked about badly?” she asks referring to when the VC allegedly called them “goons”.
Picking on Dalits is a regular affair, chips in Murala. “If Dalit students wear new clothes, upper caste students look at us and laugh. And our merit is always questioned. It’s the same story everywhere we go,” she says.
The country’s reservation policies are at the crux of this conflict, opines educationist and economist BL Mungekar. “Educational institutes have become less of centres of education and more of centres of caste-based discrimination. As more Dalits opt for higher education and know their rights, the upper class is increasingly feeling threatened,” says the Rajya Sabha MP.
Students wearing masks of Rohith's face
English, which often serves as a bridge between worlds, has clearly emerged as a non-tangible player in a scene where a majority of Dalits are entering a stage previously unfamiliar to them.
And instead of giving students the extra attention they need, upper-caste teachers choose to limit their interactions with them, says Sripathi Ramudu, a professor at HCU and the spokesperson of the SC/ST Teachers Forum.
“About 60% of the faculty are Brahmins. There are a number of ways untouchability is practised on campus; discrimination and humiliating Dalit students is just one of them,” he says.
Over the past two decades, more and more Dalits have opted for higher education, and university education comes with greater access to literature that focuses on human rights, says Ramudu. And this is a time of increasing social consciousness, where Dalits have found solidarity with different groups.
Since HCU fills up all quotas, it explains why the Dalit movement here is so strong, opines another professor.
Education and betterment of Dalit students, explains Ramudu, is more often than not seen as an “unnecessary burden” on the country by upper caste teachers. “There’s no way to really measure how much discrimination students face after entering universities like HCU. And they often end up scoring far less than their peers,” he adds.
The other side
Look at the issue logically, says social media activist Suresh Kochattil. “There are no names on answer sheets, just codes, so how will a teacher ever know if the paper was submitted by a Dalit or non-Dalit? This is just politicisation of the issue.”
When there were close to nine suicides in HCU in the previous regime, most of them from Dalit backgrounds, no one came to the university, opines Kochattil, adding that ASA’s “violent reputation” is an established one, much like ABVP's.
Interestingly, Vemula went from “Lal Salaam” to “Jai Bheem” as he switched from being a Communist Party of India (Marxist) loyalist to a firebrand leader of ASA that professes to look at issues beyond Dalit identity.
“Many people are just trying to milk the incident now. What pains me today is that SC/ST professors are now demanding the resignation of Smriti Irani and the VC,” says Kochattil. “I can understand students putting up protests, but instead of guiding them, teachers are also propagating the idea of caste-based divisions and that’s ridiculous.”
Vemula’s family has rejected the Rs 8 lakh that was offered to them, saying they wouldn’t take even Rs 8 crore from HCU. What they want is justice for Vemula. He made only one request in the note he left behind, that his fellowship money, which hadn't been paid for the last seven months and amounts to Rs 175,000, should be cleared.
At the university, more and more teachers pour in to show solidarity with the students because, as Ramudu says, students aren’t the only ones facing the brunt of caste-based discrimination. A casteist mindset permeates all levels of our educational institutes and this kind of discrimination is a “psychological disorder” that boils down to the smallest of things, says Ramudu.
“When an upper caste head of department (HOD) enters the room, the attending peon, who’s also of the upper caste, gets up to acknowledge the HOD’s presence, but when an SC/ST or Dalit HOD enters, there’s no acknowledgement. And there’s no fraternity between teachers at all. We have very limited interactions between teachers of lower and upper castes,” he says.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi with Rohith's mother Radhika
Sowjanya Tamalapakula of Tata Institute of Social Science, Hyderabad, concurs with Ramudu. “My parents are both university graduates, and I teach at TISS. But still, for most people, my Dalit identity comes before my merit,” she says.
Initially, 15 HCU teachers had resigned in solidarity with Vemula and his friends. On Thursday, four teachers also joined students in their hunger strike at HCU.
Ramudu points to the nexus between politics and academics as the source of all trouble, citing political appeasement as the management’s agenda. “All this is because of ideological differences — ASA’s students are fighting caste and ABVP, which has been empowered after the new government came into power, is the one propagating a caste system.”
If the university really wanted to sort out what’s happening on the campus, would it really have appointed Vipin Srivastava as the interim V-C, questions Ramudu. Srivastava was the chairman of the committee that had recommended the suspension for Vemula and his friends.
The past isn’t kind to him either. When Salem’s Senthil Kumar, another research scholar at HCU, committed suicide in 2008, Srivastava was one of the people who had allegedly harassed and provoked him.
Stories pour in
Answering the call of solidarity given out by JAC, students from across the country showed up at HCU last week. Some came with words of condolence and support, others with banners that demonised Irani. What they had in common were stories of discrimination, snippets from lives of other Rohith Vemulas — like the case of Aniket Ambhore, the IIT-Bombay student who jumped to his death in 2014.
Unlike Vemula, Ambhore didn’t leave a letter behind, but family and friends attribute Ambhore’s death to the over-used yet understated phrase of ‘caste-based discrimination.’
“It’s a really sad thing if someone has to die for everyone to acknowledge this,” says Kavyashree as she checks on fresh water for those on hunger strike.
As student union representatives take turns to speak at HCU, a JAC volunteer interrupts, putting a Mumbai-based student on speaker. “This has just happened in Mumbai where students were leading a solidarity march,” he says.
A poster at HCU
Breaking the silence is a slew of slogans that range from “Jai Bheem”, “Hum ek hai,” “Jeena hai toh marna sikho”, “Awaaz do, hum ek hai” and “Rohith Vemula amar hai”.
Even as caste-driven politics continues to be closely intertwined with education, it is undeniable that the events in Hyderabad have given soil to the seeds of discontent that have been festering in the country.
The student have demanded the promulgation of ‘Rohith Act’, on the lines of Nirbhaya Act, to ensure legislative protection for students from marginalised communities in higher educational institutions.
The protests in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Aligarh and Lucknow are just some of the instances where Vemula’s death has directly triggered a chain of events, a reaction that has knitted student minorities together. As winds of change blow, the choice is between building windmills and walls. After all, ours is a society in transition.
