Let's face it: Branding Rohith 'anti-national' took his life

Rohith Vemula's "suicide note" has already become literature. It is now part of the canon, as it should be. It must be read by everyone because here is a story of a young man who wanted to be known as a mind, and not by who he voted for, or what his birth name was. Rohith Vemula wanted to break free, but shackles - gigantic, sociopolitical and institutional shackles, stinking of generationally passed down privileges - held him back, until they finally snuffed the life out of him.

As political necromancers descend on University of Hyderabad campus to foretell the future wherein we have made peace with Rohith Vemula's suicide and moved on, where his death too has become mere statistics to cite when a TV debate rages on our primetime shouting marathons, let us look at what all have been assigned as the possible causes for his untimely and extremely tragic end.

Union minister of state Bandaru Dattatreya's letter to Union HRD minister Smriti Irani, asking the latter to take action against the five students of University of Hyderabad, a "den of casteist, extremist and anti-national politics", is one of them. Another is the everyday, invisible, innocuous evil of anti-Dalit bias that not just Rohith Vemula, but every lower caste student faces everywhere. Just look around and say "reservation" out aloud to see the effect it has on the "general quota victims".  

However, the fact remains that had Rohith Vemula not killed himself, had he not made his exit into a glaring political supernova that no one can miss even if they wanted to (most do), he would have remained the expelled "extremist, anti-national", exploiting his caste origins and indulging in ruckus, "polluting the campus".

Had Vemula not died, no one but his friends in the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA), would have worried about the blocked stipend that the 26-year-old second year doctoral scholar had not received since August last year. No one would have linked how the daily tangle of mundane economics, that of simply obtaining the duly-earned fellowship money on time, becomes life-altering and life-stopping issues when it comes to a Dalit student from a poor background, for whom making it to a university, battling discrimination and non-access at every point, is a milestone in itself.     

Because Rohith Vemula killed himself by hanging from the ceiling fan using the ASA banner for rope, there's just too much volatile symbolism for us to bathe in to dutifully ignore. TV anchors who ritually bash "ugly student politics" on university campuses, who shoot down any scholar from north, east, west or south of India with halting English, today want to claim justice for Rohith Vemula. (Some have called him Ranjit on their show: that's another matter.)

Rohith Vemula's immortal line, "My birth is my fatal accident", is a brutally matter-of-fact takedown of India's caste system, which, despite having an OBC prime minister at the helm, hasn't magically vapourised into thin air. There have been a number of Dalit deaths in the University of Hyderabad alone in the last decade, while many more have been reported from other, premier institutions. We have heard how production, dissemination and control of knowledge within academia are firmly under the thumbs of the privileged classes. (Most of the institutions in media and academia are owned by Vaishyas while sporting a natural bounty of Brahmin and Kshatriya practitioners.) We have witnessed how any aggressive assertion of identity, through proud Ambedkar and Jotiba Phule banners especially, accrues organisational ire, derision and consequent punitive measures.

However, it was not for caste alone that Rohith Vemula and his friends were targeted by the University administration. It was also for building solidarities among and across the other marginalised. Rohith Vemula, and his four friends of the Ambedkar Students Association - Sankanna, D Prashanth, Vijay Kumar and Sesu Chemudugunta - were suspended not just because they allegedly "beat up" ABVP's N Susheel Kumar (previous proctoral report said they didn't), but also because they dared to condemn how ABVP members prevented the screening of Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai - a scathing documentary of the 2013 UP riots, in which a number of BJP members were involved.

Because Rohith Vemula and his friends of the ASA protested against the hanging of Yakub Memon on July 30 last year, which many, including those in the media and academia, dubbed a "state murder", an "execution to satiate a lynch mob". Because Rohith Vemula and his ASA friends were clearly unhappy with how Students Federation of India (SFI, the Left's student wing) repeatedly mishandles and dilutes Dalit issues and pulls a blinder over its hysterically upper-caste Politburo.    

It is the coming together of the traditionally oppressed that is most loathed by those whom Arundhati Roy calls the "saints of the status quo". It is the ability to see intersections, associations, echoes, resonances, imprints and shadows of one brutality over another that most scares the establishment. Hence, the arbiters of justice today want you to see Rohith Vemula in isolation, as a single atomised unit of grievance, as an insular tragedy.

But please don't.

Firstly, don't pay attention to ridiculous clarion calls of banning student politics altogether because that would be tantamount to having Parliament without democratic debates. University education and academic space are the hallowed zones of dissent, of divergence of ideas, of intellectual innovation, of cerebral anarchy to re-inject life blood into years of musty knowledge. University education is dynamic and must respond to external stimuli of proximate and distant politics. Hence, an #OccupyUGC in Delhi University in the lines of #OccupyWallStreet. Hence, solidarity marches in JNU over the protracted FTII row, or to protest the rigged appointments of incompetent former vice-chancellors of Presidency and Jadavpur universities.

Student politics is the vascular system of the organism that is the University. Rohith Vemula did not die because of student politics, but because his political activism was deemed "anti-national". Because the picture of nationalism that is drilled into our collective minds since inception (through nursery rhymes, school textbooks, newspapers, magazines, television shows, movies, popular music) is something that excludes and omits several other histories. It is difficult to find extensive chapters on BR Ambedkar in the erstwhile Nehru-Gandhi-Vidyasagar-Vivekananda filled school books that most of us read, happily oblivious.

Secondly, Rohith Vemula and his ASA group of scholars questioned the "idea of India", not just of the Akhand Bharat variety recently espoused by BJP's Ram Madhav, but also the nicer, "secular" India of the Nehru-Gandhi type, which nevertheless is caste-blind in a pathetic, blinkered way. And any questioning of the "idea of India", whether this or the former regime, is automatically stamped "anti-national". Reason why a 90 per cent paraplegic assistant professor of English at Delhi University's Ram Lal Anand College, GN Saibaba, who has been deemed a "Maoist" by powers that be, is imprisoned at the solitary Anda Cell of Yerwada Central Jail, after his interim bail ran out and appeal was rejected by Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court. This, despite Kerala HC's earlier judgment that merely adhering to an ideology, no matter how corrosive, is not "anti-national" by any stretch of law.

Obviously, this run-in with the law happens only when dissenting academics are not murdered in broad daylight. The blood-curdling assassinations of Narendra Dhabolkar, Govind Pansare and MM Kalburgi happened under different regimes, but by the same kind of goon squads that feel ideologically emboldened enough to carry out such blatant displays of disregard for the law.

Rohith Vemula is dead and his burnt corpse has been "Peepli Lived" by media and politicians alike. Are we waiting for Professor Saibaba to finally die?