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Remembering Rohith, for right to dissent

A young life was extinguished a year ago, to the day! By all accounts, a beautiful mind, a thinking mind; equally, a sensitive mind. To what end, one may well ask. It is tempting to be pessimistic and sigh and shed a tear.

Remembering Rohith, for right to dissent

A candlelight demonstration over Rohith Vemula’s death at the University of Hyderabad. PTI file photo



Karthik Venkatesh

A young life was extinguished a year ago, to the day! By all accounts, a beautiful mind, a thinking mind; equally, a sensitive mind. To what end, one may well ask. It is tempting to be pessimistic and sigh and shed a tear.

When Rohith Vemula took his own life on January 17, 2016, he left behind a poignant suicide note and shattered friends and family. His note was a rumination on the state of being Dalit in India. It spoke of ‘the fatal accident of his birth’ and his pain at the value of ‘a man being reduced to his immediate identity’. It was a searing indictment of Indian society and the skullduggery that is Indian politics. It was a statement on the death of hope.

In the weeks following his suicide, that the powers-that-be squabbled over whether he was ‘actually’ Dalit or not proved Rohith’s point a hundred times over. A young man had taken his life on account of the doings of a craven and unthinking university administration. That alone should have bothered everyone concerned. Instead, a bureaucratic wrangle over his caste was conducted shamelessly in full view of an uncaring public. The irony was all too evident.

But, in the past year, what has transpired? Have things changed since? Can we allow ourselves a modicum of hope?

In the weeks following Rohith’s passing came perhaps the most serious challenge to the government’s credibility in the form of student demonstrations at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). An unlikely hero emerged in the form of Kanhaiya Kumar.

A Ph.D. scholar like Rohith, Kanhaiya too was from an impoverished background and had come up the hard way. He too was of an inquiring disposition, prone to taking dissenting stands that rattled authority figures. In JNU’s environment that looked favourably at such stances, he flourished. In Hyderabad’s stifling environment, Rohith’s life was brutally stubbed out. Hyderabad is where a craven Vice-Chancellor, Appa Rao Podile, works. A few years ago, he thought nothing of plagiarising academic papers and passing them off as his own, and as the Rohith incident demonstrated, he also harassed and continues to harass students with impunity.

Since then, both Kanhaiya and Appa Rao have moved on. Kanhaiya has campaigned in elections, spoken at several forums and published his life-story in book form. Appa Rao has, meanwhile, hung on to his post, done the bidding of his saffron masters, scuttled a fair inquiry into Rohith’s suicide and been awarded a Millenium Plaque of Honour for “his outstanding contribution in the field of biotechnology and also for his work in higher education”, no less. Both trajectories are illustrative of the contradictions of India.

Enough space still exists in this country for dissenters to continue to dissent and fight their battles. Kanhaiya is one example. He has continued to speak his mind despite all efforts by the administration to silence him. Jignesh Mevani, the Dalit activist from Modi’s own state of Gujarat, is another individual who has continued to cock a snook at the ruling dispensation. Post the reprehensible Dalit beating incident in Una in July, he was able to mobilise across Gujarat a considerable number of people who came out into the streets to protest Dalit atrocities. Soon, Jignesh had also emerged as a more thoughtful and erudite critic of the much-touted ‘Gujarat model’ in a way that the likes of Hardik Patel, with his reductionist demands for reservation, can perhaps never hope to be.

But equally, space has been created in institutions like Hyderabad Central University and JNU for sycophants to flourish. The award given to Appa Rao cannot be condemned enough. Equally, the actions of another ‘parachute’ candidate — M. Jagdeesh Kumar of JNU — are just as terrible. His consistent efforts to club his students into unthinking silence are beyond belief.

What rankles most of all are his efforts to introduce new admission regulations in the university with the unstated agenda of denying admission to students from impoverished backgrounds. ‘No more Kanhaiyas’ is the goal. A sheep-like student body that silently marches to class every day is the purported ‘final solution’.

Even as beacons of hope like Kanhaiya and Jignesh co-exist with the likes of the Appa Raos and Jagdeesh Kumars, the need for constant vigilance remains. The opaqueness of the demonetisation exercise and the suffering that it has wrought highlights this need more than ever. The danger of yes-men overtaking public policy and inflicting lasting damage to the body politic and the public at large are constant dangers. In no time at all, the RBI has been reduced to a lumpen institution with a spineless head who thinks nothing of crawling before his political masters.

Now more than ever, the public at large needs to view every move that the government makes with all the attention that it can command. Party loyalties have to be put on the back burner. The issue at hand needs to be the locus of concern. Equally, the public’s focus cannot be on the short term. It has to be on the long-term future of this country.

That Kanhaiya and Jignesh have emerged as our conscience keepers is a wonderful thing. The middle-aged and senior citizens would also be well-advised to pay closer attention to these bold, young men. It’s all too easy to be cynical and adopt a ‘been there, done that’ attitude. But that is a coward’s response.

Rohith’s death was not merely an indictment of the way that the current government and some of its higher-ups conducted themselves. That they deserve condemnation is not a matter of dispute. But equally, Indians of all shades of political opinion need to examine their attitudes towards the deprived. His death is a clarion call to reshape our attitudes and re-examine our prejudices. The country’s independence was won on the strength of high ideals and great sacrifice.

Those ideals and sacrifices are worth being bought back... for Rohith’s sake.

The writer, an educationist, is a Chennai-based consulting editor with Westland Books.

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