Rohith Vemula | A Denial of Personhood, Even After He is No More

State institutions are not value-neutral and often reproduce anti-Dalit sentiments deeply embedded in society.

Rohith Vemula passed away on 17 January, 2016.

(Photo: Namita Chauhan/ The Quint)

The term injustice would fall far short in describing the casteist, humiliating treatment meted out to the family of Rohith Vemula all this while, by state institutions and sections of the media. It has been eight years since the institutional murder of the research scholar at Hyderabad Central University, which catalysed one of the largest anti-caste protests of the decade.

After all this time, recently, Telangana's investigating officers in their closure report have come up with a purely speculative and denigrating statement about the life of Rohith, arguing that his fear of having a fake caste certificate prompted suicidal thoughts. Such reports, which falsify the Dalit identity of Rohith, not only deny his personhood even after he is no more but also make a mockery of the collective life experiences of Rohith, Radhika Vemula, and Raja Vemula.

Amidst the extreme hardships of being Dalit and the immense pain of losing Rohith, the hyper scrutiny of their documents and the constant attempt to label them as liars, rather than holding BJP leaders Bandaru Dattatreya, Smriti Irani, N Ramachandra Rao, the then VC Appa Rao and ABVP leader Susheel Kumar accountable, is an outright denial of dignity.

The above-mentioned people were part of a chain of events that led to the tragic day of 17 January 2016. The timeline of events has been documented in detail by the Ambedkar Students Association since 2016 and is made available on their social media platforms time and again.

A Caste-ridden Society and State Institutions

This is symptomatic of the nature of state institutions as well as the Indian society at large, where injustices against Dalits are dissected and their claims are falsified. The two main objectives of this counterattack against Dalits are to deny the role of caste in events of violence and discrimination and to protect the upper caste perpetrators.

State institutions are not value-neutral and often reproduce the anti-Dalit sentiments that are already deeply embedded in Indian society. From Kilvenmani in 1968, Bathani Tola in 1996, Laxmanpur in 1997, to Hathras in 2022, counter-narratives against claims of Dalits have been a recurring phenomenon.

Even the stringent SC/ST POA [The Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989], which as per its authors, was supposed to protect Dalits from violent and discriminatory practices, gets manoeuvred and interpreted by police stations and courts in ways that deny and delay justice to Dalits.

Sandhya Fuchs, a scholar on the SC/ST POA, drawing on ethnographic material from police stations and courts in Rajasthan, has argued that “caste bias finds expression through selective translational and interpretative processes that produce official records of 'false complaints' in atrocity cases."

Demand for the Rohith Act

Many see January 2016 as a defining moment in the history of Dalit mobilisation given the scale and spread of the protests across the country. It was like a volcano that blew up, where years of simmering anger and discontentment among Dalit youths in higher educational institutions could no be longer contained and suppressed.

Not just caste in higher educational institutions, the Rohith Vemula protests brought new vigour and momentum to the conversations around caste in India's public discourse, newly emerging alternative media, as well as in academia.

Subsequently, the Rohith Act has been a demand raised by many student groups across universities in India to provide protective measures for SC/ST students in educational institutions.

Rahul Sonpimple, President of All India Independent Scheduled Caste Association (AIISCA) and an active part of the protests then, had quite succinctly expressed in Hyderabad Central University Campus in 2017 that Rohith closed his eyes and left this world, and that opened the eyes of many to see the repercussions of caste.

Thousands of Dalits hit the streets because they considered the loss of Rohith as one of their own, and no administrative reasoning has so far been able to dent that association.

The Delegitimisation of Dalit Protests

Soon after the Telangana State Police closure report was published, various right-wing media houses started making it about Congress versus BJP, by arguing that it was a ploy by the opposition to politicise Rohith Vemula's protests against the BJP.

It is almost as though the students and youths who came out on the streets to protest did not have a mind of their own and were being used by parties. Such tactics to delegitimise Dalit protests and student mobilisations are not new.

However, what is concerning is the response of Congress so far, because it is under their tenure in Telangana that the closure report has been published (although now the party has said that it has reopened the case). It claims to stand with the Rohith Vemula family and even promises to bring forth the Rohith Vemula Act, but so far there is no justice for Radhika Vemula and Raja Vemula, even under their tenure.

With the general elections ongoing, and political parties making promises to different social groups amidst the consistent failure of the Indian justice system for Dalits, it is worth asking a question — if such a large protest on the streets with political groups of different hues, civil society, and media coverage has failed to get justice to a Dalit family even after eight years, what does that say about ordinary cases of Dalits seeking justice?

(Sumeet Samos hails from south Odisha. He recently completed MSc in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford. He is a young researcher and anti-caste activist and his research interests are Dalit Christians, cosmopolitan elites, student politics, and society and culture in Odisha.)