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“I think it’s a symptom of our illness. We are very- we are a very sick country”
— Alice Walker on Trayvon Martyn’s death
A five-minute walk from the politically vibrant University of Hyderabad (UoH) campus, the Shopping Complex where hundreds are demanding justice for the Dalit research scholar, Rohith Vemula, takes one to a quiet triangular park. On cement benches in the park — a regular hangout for students on winter nights — painted in blue are the words ‘Raju-Venkatesh Park’. A reminder of the history of Dalit suicides on that campus.
Dalit students (Pulyala) Raju and (Madari) Venkatesh, both academically and politically active in UoH had killed themselves in 2013, leading to probes based on the demands of student leaders — one of them was Rohith Vemula. Four others protestors, D. Prashanth, Vijaya Kumar, C. Seshaiah and V. Sunkanna, who were part of the Raju-Venkatesh solidarity committee have been sleeping in the open for over 20 days following their expulsion (revoked after Rohith’s suicide) from hostels.
As a thousand voices (not all in unison) now rise out of the UoH campus, similar stories of marginalised students ending their lives across educational institutions in the country are coming out as well. In 2014, a study done by the World Health Organisation revealed that India has one of the highest suicide rates among people aged between 19 and 25. But social backgrounds of the youth who took their lives in this country have not made it to the official statistical books.
An independent study done by Insight Foundation of New Delhi headed by Anoop Kumar, had in 2012 compiled a list of 19 suicides of students from Dalit-Adivasi-Bahujan communities who had killed themselves on various campus in the country from 2007 to 2012. And the numbers have only increased in the past few years.
A walk through various administrative, academic and hostel buildings that sprawls over 1,800 acres of university land brings to plain sight, a history of struggles on the campus condemning suicides. Posters against expulsions glare back at you and so do the wall paintings of yesteryears pledging solidarity with student agitations and movements for political and social causes that the country had witnessed. The University of Hyderabad which is now the centre of all angst, outcries and protests possible, is only a fraction of what has gone unnoticed for several years in our country’s academia.
Four years ago, Anil Kumar Meena, an Adivasi student from Rajasthan who was studying at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi made regular diary entries about the discrimination he faced within his environment: “These eyes scare me; they look with such inferiority/superiority complex @ you. They tell you everything (most of the time). Those eyes scare me. Those eyes make me a fool every time”. Anil committed suicide in his hostel room early 2012. Rohith Vemula, who said he loved nature and the stars, made this observation in his last note: “The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing.”
Different as these two accounts may sound, in reason and experience, both underline one thing: that our concept of oneness within the country ignored certain voices, experiences and histories, reducing these to numbers, ghettos or cornered identities.
The makeshift protest tent, vellivada or Dalit ghetto in the UoH, which has walls made of flexi-boards that display pictures of B. R Ambedkar, Jyotiba Phule and Savitribai Phule represents the crux of a long-ignored problem — not one of exclusion but of assertion of a political difference. The vellivada is a break away from the constructed abstract form of ‘oneness’ within the nation. Benedict Anderson writes in his essay titled Imagined Communities that the nation is an “imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”. Anderson explains, “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them or even hear of them yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”
Agitating students of various universities in the country are now calling it quits on this imagined oneness by bringing to notice differences that various communities have within and towards the large hubris of our nation. And they have managed to do that by raising questions on caste, religion and race that operate within modern institutions, even as they keyed down their agitation and sloganeering as a mark of respect for the Republic Day Parade.
But as they ask how a Namaz-e-Janaza (funeral prayer) performed to protest the hanging of Yakub Memon can be termed an ‘anti-national’ act, they mean to say certain forms of expression are considered unacceptable. Could they not have used a prayer protest to problamatise the hanging of a man, whose ‘terrorist’ credentials the country debated over before and after his hanging? When they ask how a protest against disruption of the screening of a documentary, Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai in Delhi University be called ‘anti-national’ they mean the same -- that the larger “communion” does not approve of certain forms of protest.
This sense of disapproval had often surfaced but gone unnoticed in the past. When Mudasir Kamran, a Kashmiri student of English and Foreign Languages University, killed himself in his hostel room, a group of his kin — several Kashmiri students from various campuses in Hyderabad — had mourned pouring out a deep seated loss. Sitting and standing around Mudasir’s body they had asked, “Why don’t you let us study? Why do you kill us.”
In a 10 day long campus protest that followed Mudasir’s death during which students of EFLU stalled classes, the questions raised by Kashmiri students were asked by many from Dalit-Adivasi-Bahujan-Minority Students Association (DABMSA).
“Why don’t you let us study?” Had Rohith too >asked the same questions ?
Did our assumption of ‘oneness’ that we boast of so often shut our ears to those shouts for justice that resounded in academic spaces for many years? Has our sense of ‘oneness’ or the concept of the nation come at the cost of silencing crystal clear voices of dissent and exclusion? Speaking about his Dalit identity at the time of his entry as a student to UoH in 1991, the year Mandal commission recommendations on reservation in academic institutions were implemented, Sukumar Narayana who is now an Associate Professor in Delhi University says. “At that time there were two different groups... we had the progressive students forum who supported the reservations and there was AMCF, which was Anti Mandal Commission Force by the others, the Brahminical forces… the affiliations started from the mandal agitations.”
The differences were always there and struggles had often surfaced. Questions were often asked. But were all these acknowledged? “Just admit, sir. Just admit that caste discrimination exists in this university,” D. Prashant of University of Hyderabad, had told the then Vice Chancellor of the varsity during a face-off between four scholars who were fasting unto death after Venkatesh’s suicide.
An acknowledgement that the institutions discriminate was once enough at a time of desperation.
But, not any more as all eyes have turned to campuses in the country. The collective memory of injustices has brought thousands of students from various campuses across the country: Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Indian Institutes of Science — Bombay and Madras, University of Calicut, Kerala, Jadavpur University, Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University to University of Hyderabad. In JNU and Jadavpur Universities, students have started an indefinite hunger strike, even as a second batch of seven students of UoH is continuing a fast-unto-death agitation. They say in unison, “No more education, unless the voices of those pushed to the margins of social exclusion are heard and acknowledged.”
The anger and hurt that is now pouring out from the spot where a stupa erected in Rohith’s memory — a monument representing instances of protest for justice, cries, laments and anger over the dead — can no longer be stopped with an admittance of guilt. The tipping point is long past. “If they want to brand us anti-national for asking for justice, let them call us anti-national,” says Thongam Bipin from Manipur.
In men’s and women’s hostels, doors remain open. One finds students embroiled in discussion on what to do next. The next is always a question. The next expulsion. The next police or court case. The next protest. The next suicide?
In EFLU that witnessed an uproar over student protests following the suicide of Mudasir Kamran, only one among the stencil sketches of his face the students had plastered on almost all the walls including the administrative building remains. The others were painted over even as a case of abetment of his suicide is still taking its legal course. But now, there are stencil sketches of Rohith’s face everywhere. There are T-shirts with his face on it.
Why did this death raise a storm within the country? In early 2000s, in this very city there were 20 to 25 men who had killed themselves, asking for special reservations for Madigas (a Dalit subcaste) within SC reservations. The men had immolated themselves in full public view — on roads, in front of the State secretariat and the Legislative Assembly. Will death or self harm alone open the ears and eyes of the ‘general’ public which looks at discrimination as a thing of the past? Is going to the grave the only option left for people who want their histories and their stories to come out?
Will Rohith too be reduced to history? Will his face representing the silencing and subjugation of a community be forgotten? Will his favourite slogan – ‘Jai, Jai, Jai, Jai Bhim, Phule, Ambedkar, Kanshiram’ — echo on campuses for long? The questions outnumber the answers, or at least the available answers. One of the student slogans on the UoH campus expresses an assurance, a promise — “Never forget, Never forgive”. They are not ready to forget Rohith and a long history of struggle. But will Rohith be part of the nation’s collective memory in the years to come or will his presence be limited to inscriptions on a park bench, a minar or a stupa ?
