january 23, 2016

Death by Discrimination
Systemic discrimination on caste lines in Indias higher education institutions remains unaddressed.

ohith Vemula, a young Dalit research student of the University of Hyderabad who was also a leader of the Ambedkar
Students Association (ASA), took his life in a friends hostel
room on 17 January 2016. Rohiths death comes after almost six
months of political and administrative persecution by the Akhil
Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the Bharatiya Janata Partyled union government, and the opportunist pandering of the central
government by the University of Hyderabad administration.
Rohith, along with four others, D Prashanth, P Vijay Kumar,
C Sheshaiah and V Sunkanna, had been accused of attacking the
ABVP campus president on the intervening night of 3 and 4 August
2015. An enquiry by the chief proctor let both groups off with a
warning to desist from violence. However, for some unexplained
reasons, the university instituted another proctorial enquiry which
found these five students guilty and recommended punishment
which was finally ordered through an executive committee resolution on 16 December 2015. As media exposes have shown, the
office of Smriti Irani, Minister of Human Resource Development,
sent four letters to the university demanding to know what
action had been taken against these students. This was a followup to a letter from Bandaru Dattatreya, Union Minister of State
for Labour and Employment, claiming that the University of
Hyderabad had become a den of casteist, extremist, and antinational politics, and that the ABVP activist was beaten for disagreeing with ASAs protests against Yakub Memons hanging.
The orders issued by the university administration are outlandish. Four of the students (as one was a former student) were
barred from staying in the hostel till the completion of their
coursetwo of them enrolled in 2013, and the other two enrolled in
2014which could mean that for at least two to three years they
would have to live in expensive rented accommodation outside.
The administration also said that these students can be seen
only in their departments, the library, in academic activities
relevant to their respective disciplines, and that they must not
enter the administrative block and common places in groups.
This strange order was, as many have pointed out, nothing short of
a social boycott in bureaucratic jargon. The onslaught of administrative action, police cases and legal and quasi-legal processes
are themselves punishing, and the toll they take is never small.
The Joint Action Committee for Social Justice, comprising ASA
and 12 other student organisations, had protested the order. The
four suspended students started sleeping in a public space near
a shopping complex in the university as a form of protest. It was
in the midst of this protest that Rohith took the tragic step of
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

january 23, 2016

vol lI no 4

committing suicide. His death has catalysed protests not just in

the University of Hyderabad but has spread countrywide, as
students from institutions across the country have come out in
solidarity with the memory of Rohith. The media and various
political parties have responded like never before, much more
than to past suicides of Dalit students at this university and in
others. Several politicians visited the university in solidarity, and
demanded action against the vice chancellor, and the two union
ministers seen as complicit.
The Dalit student movement in the University of Hyderabad has,
over the years, created a substantive space for political articulation
of issues of caste and discrimination. This is a unique and commendable achievement. It is, therefore, telling that the universitys
order of 16 December 2015 ensured that five leaders of this Dalit
student movement were barred from political activity, and
their doctoral studies endangered. Institutional prejudice and
discrimination along caste lines have for long been the ugly reality
of Indian campuses. It is a reality assiduously denied by both
university administrations as well as by central and state governments. What else can explain the fact that no government or university administration has taken any initiative to implement the
recommendations of the Thorat Committee, which a decade ago
had been constituted to look into suicides by Dalit students in the
All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, and had
documented systematic and systemic discrimination. Even at
the University of Hyderabad, a committee was set up in 2014 to
look at caste discrimination on campus, partly to address suicides
by Dalit students. But its findings of systemic discrimination and
prejudice were contested by many in the faculty itself and nothing much came of the report.
What is most disquieting in this case, however, is that a frontline activist of the student movement has committed suicide, not
someone waging a lonely battle. Even as Rohith was a part of a
collective struggle, the note he left behind indicates that he was
fighting another battle, a lonely one; he needed support to address
what he was dealing with. Many may view Rohith as a martyr for the
cause, but we must be cautious lest suicide be considered a legitimate tool of politics. After this particular battle over the victimisation and social boycott of Rohith and his comrades, it will be up to
the progressive student movements to understand why a wellaccomplished Dalit student and leader came to end his life. Even
as we rage against the injustice of Rohith Vemulas death, we
need to find new forms of political protest which do not lead to
such a tragic loss of life among young men and women.