The politics and protests, discussions and debates on who really killed Rohith Vemula, the Dalit research scholar of Hyderabad Central University, will rage for some time. After all, in our caste-ridden society, what better hunting ground for politicians than capitalising on the snuffing out of a promising young life.
Who cares for the hopes and aspirations of the young man who had known only one thing from birth — a class and caste-ridden society, which brought childhood loneliness, sorrow, pain, and poverty.
Rohith, along with some other students, was first suspended from the university and later expelled. It had to do with his being part of a small protest against the disruption of a film screening at Delhi University on the Muzaffarnagar riots. His stipend was halted. Friends say this was because he raised uncomfortable issues under the banner of the Ambedkar Students’ Association. The university denies this.
It is gut wrenching to read Rohith’s suicide note … the focal point of the poetic prose being, “My birth is my fatal accident”. What hits you is the stark clarity with which he describes how it was impossible for somebody like him in today’s India to realise his dream.
The beauty and power of that note are the many home truths of a general nature that many of us can relate to; we can use bits and pieces of his statements to describe our own struggles, battles, frustrations, disappointments.
For instance, when he says “I have no complaints on (sic) anyone. It was always with myself I had problems. I feel a growing gap between my soul and my body”, it almost feels like somebody showing you a mirror.
He says he always wanted to be a writer, a science writer like Carl Sagan. “I loved Science, Stars, Nature, but then I loved people without knowing that people have long since divorced from nature. Our feelings are second handed. Our love is constructed. Our beliefs coloured.”
Rohith’s letter makes us — at least the privileged amongst us — hang down our heads in shame. Of course we feel his anguish, but we cannot be absolved of blame, be it minuscule or massive, for his tragic end. The cocoons or bubbles that we build around ourselves are normally strong structures. They don’t disrupt or burst easily, allowing us to sail along merrily in our lives and vocations, without feeling any responsibility for any of the evil, wrong or injustice that happens around us all the time.
After all we are “good” people… law abiding citizens who don’t lie, cheat… at least in big ways. How can we be held responsible for the grievances of others, the wrongs being done to them? It is that horrible entity called the government, system, society — call it what you will — that is responsible.
Caste surveyLet’s pause and look at the results of one of the biggest caste surveys in India, done across 42,000 households, by the National Council of Applied Economic Research and the University of Maryland in the US. The results, published in November 2014, threw up surprises.
That 30 per cent Hindus admitted to observing the caste system wasn’t really a shocker. What did shock was that so deeply ingrained is this evil in our psyche that 18 per cent Muslim and 5 per cent Christian households admitted that they practised untouchability. Conversions don’t change mindsets nor root out deeply ingrained prejudices. Period.
Returning to Rohith’s suicide, what is most difficult to digest is that in not blaming anybody for his death, Rohith has blamed all of us. And the shades of shame he leaves us with are varied.
Had he not ended his life, or left behind such a scathingly honest note that throws the mirror at us, it would’ve been just another suicide. After all. thousands of them take place, not only in India, but across the world. This was just another one.
But the circumstances of his death… and his life, too short, too tortured, and spelt out in his suicide note with such chilling clarity that experts say comes near the very end, compels us to own at least part of the responsibility.
For aren’t we all collectively culpable when “the value of a man is reduced to his immediate identity. To a vote. To a number. To a thing”?
And how can you not shed a tear, or at least get a lump in your throat, when he says that his seven-month stipend, ₹1.75 lakh, should be given to his family and some ₹40,000 he owed to one Ramji, “who never asked for it”, be returned?