A sinister pattern underway

The controlled voice of Ravish Kumar on a blackened screen and his stark report on NDTV India on February 19 made for a powerful statement. It brought back memories of June 28, 1975, 41 years ago, when The Indian Express published a blank editorial, making its point stronger than words could have. The two statements are distanced in time and differ in context. But the similarities stare us in the face — both are strong symbolic protests against the assault on the principles of the Indian Constitution.

Attacking the inconvenient

No party can afford to express its lack of faith in the Constitution — not even the Hindutva-vadi Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The art of doublespeak is a prerequisite of arbitrary power, and the BJP is using it in full measure. The pretentious statements made by the BJP on November 26, 2015 (Constitution Day) extolling the virtues of the Constitution ring hollow when measured against the acts of the party and its cadres on the ground. Issues such as “beef-eating”, “love jihad”, “ghar vapsi” are ratcheted up to a high emotional pitch, as a means to circumscribe cultural spaces, linking these issues to ‘patriotism’. Unruly elements unleash violence, and the ruling party ensures impunity for the perpetrators. This collaboration between the government and the ruling party’s cadres is clearly visible today from Delhi to rural Rajasthan, where the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) works.

Everything is projected through the lens of a narrow Hindutva definition of nationalism, leaving no room for tolerance and pluralism. Questioning the death penalty is attacked as anti-national; studying in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) is anti-national; being a human rights worker in Chhattisgarh is anti-national; the ‘right to report’ is anti-national; and asking for transparency and accountability is anti-national. The propagators of this nationalism see the Constitution as an uncomfortable impediment that must be challenged by undermining its institutions and targeting its defenders. This deliberate orchestration must help us understand that it is not just the inconvenient (‘sickular’) person or collective being intimidated; the Constitution is under sinister attack and our secular democracy is at stake.

Hatred in the hinterland

It is sometimes hard to understand where the attack will originate from — and why. On January 16, a yatra for accountability organised by the Suchna Evum Rozgar Ka Adhikar Abhiyan — a network of social sector organisations travelling across Rajasthan — was unexpectedly and inexplicably attacked by a violent mob in the small town of Aklera. The 30-odd members of the mob who beat men and women taking part in the yatra with lathis and bricks were led by Kanwar Lal Meena, the current BJP MLA of Manohar Thana (Jhalawar district). The yatra focussed on access to development and dignity for poor and marginalised communities. It is difficult to understand or explain why an accountability yatra of this nature should provoke such an attack.

It is becoming increasingly clear that anyone who dares to raise issues of freedom, justice and equality is seen as a threat. For the BJP, it appears as if democracy is becoming a problem, and the Constitution is ideologically inconvenient. In Hyderabad, Rohith Vemula strongly linked issues of caste with democracy through the Ambedkar Students Union. In New Delhi, Kanhaiya Kumar raised issues of class and poverty through the All India Students’ Federation. If you happen to be from a background that explodes the myth of social harmony and economic opportunity, your existence is inconvenient. The demand for dignity as established by the guarantees in the Constitution is deemed anti-government. Through contrived and planned campaigns, the BJP is doing its best to establish that being critical of its government is tantamount to being anti-national.

Aklera is accustomed to witnessing ‘engineered riots’ (pre-planned assaults unleashed on vulnerable minority communities). A cell-phone recording of the January 16 attack documents a local bystander explaining the attack to another by saying “they must be Muslims from outside”! The criminal record of the MLA who led the attack — accessed through RTIs filed — reveals more than 18 cases registered against him, including leading mobs into mosques, people’s homes, smashing property, forging documents and desecrating religious texts of the minorities. He has even been charged with holding a loaded pistol to the Sub-Divisional Magistrate’s head in 2006 while demanding the reversal of an election result. The MLA’s party membership and Hindutva politics explains his impunity. Manohar Thana is located in the Chief Minister’s home district, and her silence raises many questions.

Painted iron signboards in Manohar Thana similar to those found in the Narendra Modi-ruled Gujarat of 2002 proclaim: “Hindu Rashtra mein aapka swagat hai (Welcome to the Hindu nation)”. The first and obvious target is religious minorities, but Hindutva’s real objective is to destroy any opposition.

Reclaiming the Constitution

The dream of India was born with the clearly articulated concept of freedom — of speech, worship, assembly, and freedom from discrimination, want, inequality, and injustice. The modus operandi of using everything including state power to crush and intimidate any action that may arise from a different world view is the death knell of democracy. Before another hollow celebration of Constitution Day this year, the ruling party must be held to account for the unjustified acts of its cadres supported by the state —in the University of Hyderabad, in JNU, in the Patiala House courts, in Jagdalpur, in Aklera, and in places across the country. Nationhood in India is inextricably connected to the uncompromising commitment of the state to secularism and its constitutional principles. When these orchestrated acts of violence and intimidation are implicitly supported by a partisan state, the very fabric of the nation is undermined.

In Aklera, Mr. Meena destroyed the camera used to shoot the yatra. However, videos shot on smartphones, now with the police, show him leading a gang and thrashing prominent MKSS activist Shankar Singh with a lathi. And yet the MLA has not been arrested. Even the BJP MLA from Delhi, O.P. Sharma, and many of the lawyers who beat up journalists and others in Patiala House continue to enjoy the implicit support of the government. The happenings in the Patiala House courts demonstrate that neither the law nor proof, not even the Supreme Court matters when you have the state on your side.

The responsibility vests in the government and the ruling party and they are accountable for acts of omission and commission. As for the rest of us, the time has come to understand that the freedom won so hard, and with so much faith, is under threat unless we collectively protect our constitutional rights. We need to understand that those who struggle in order to establish constitutional principles of equality and justice are the architects and builders of a free, strong, and democratic India.

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The annihilation by caste

Even as we come to terms with the death of Rohith Vemula, we are witness to the unprecedented churning that he set in motion even as he left — educating, agitating, organising in death as in life.

From all his writing and his associations, there is no doubt whatsoever that Rohith identified himself as a Dalit son of a Dalit mother; as a Dalit Ambedkarite scholar and organiser; and as a co-traveller encountering the oppressions, discrimination and exclusion experienced by his Dalit compatriots on the university campus and outside. For those uneasy with his erudition, his performance, and his total identification with the Dalit identity, there had to be some way to discredit his politics in death.

Searching for this crucial flaw was even more important because what Rohith’s treatment amounts to, resulting in his death, comes within the meaning of caste atrocity, under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, and has grave implications for those named in the FIR registered after his death. Whether or not Rohith named people in his suicide note is not material at this point. What is important to consider is whether the chain of events leading to his death gives reason to presume the possibility of discrimination based on caste coming within the meaning of atrocity and leading to his death by suicide.

Caste as the core

There is no dispute about the facts. Contrary to what Ministers Smriti Irani or Sushma Swaraj might assert, this entire issue has to do with discrimination based on caste — the struggles of the Ambedkar Students Association; Rohith’s political and personal struggles; the institutionalised discrimination that Dalit students have been subjected to at the University of Hyderabad; curricular and co-curricular neglect of the social basis of discrimination in institutions of higher education; constant and disproportionate punitive action against Dalit students; their academic neglect and isolation; the simultaneous stigmatisation of “reserved” candidates and the vilification of Dalit students like Rohith who qualify in the open category but persist in identifying themselves as Dalit; the unusual and excessive interest of the Union government in the criminalisation of Dalit student activists who organise as Dalits on campuses; and most importantly, the institutionalised humiliation of Dalits in academia. Ministerial ignorance cannot be excused.

Dalit or not?

Officers and reporters have ferreted out his father and paternal family in an overzealous attempt to roll back the demand that this is a Dalit issue. The old patriarchal argument that since his father was Vaddera, he was Vaddera, negates Dalit women’s struggles in a caste order. In this case, it obliterates the experience of struggle against bondage, violence and humiliation of two generations, Radhika Vemula and her children — their fortitude and determination to defeat the oppressions of caste at all costs. And when they are on the threshold of an unimaginable victory, we witness, yet again, annihilation by caste. An injustice compounded and bolstered by the institutional and political denial of discrimination or atrocity.

There is no need to labour the point about whether the actions that led to Rohith’s suicide prima facie attract the provisions of the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act. All that is needed at this point is to understand whether the act of suicide by a Dalit points to abetment by a non-Dalit. A complaint may be registered invoking the Act if this fact is established. If the police refuse, the court can intervene. Rohith has a non-Dalit father and a Dalit mother. While there has been a long line of cases in the various high courts and the Supreme Court on this question, the most recent one, decided by the two-judge bench of the Supreme Court consisting of Justices Aftab Alam and Ranjana Prakash Desai, is the law. In Rameshbhai Dabhai Naika vs State Of Gujarat & Ors. (decided on January 18, 2012), the question before the Supreme Court was “what would be the status of a person, one of whose parents belongs to the scheduled castes/scheduled tribes and the other comes from the upper castes” (para 1).

The concluding paragraph of the judgment is self-explanatory: “In an inter-caste marriage [i.e., a marriage between an SC/ST person and a non SC/ST person] the determination of the caste of the offspring is essentially a question of fact to be decided on the basis of the facts adduced in each case. It is open to the child of such marriage to lead evidence to show that he/she was brought up by the mother who belonged to the scheduled caste/scheduled tribe” (para 43). Did his father’s non-Dalit status give him an “advantageous start in life” or did he suffer “the deprivations, indignities, humilities and handicaps like any other member of the community to which his/her mother belonged?” Additionally, was he treated like a member of the community to which his mother belonged not only by that community but by people outside the community as well?

Rohith suffered the exclusions, humiliation and discrimination along with other Dalit students on the campus and in the wider community. Yet, he refused to allow caste to break or confine him — and that was his most poignant struggle. The most important aspect of this struggle — its defining feature — was that it carried forward the tenacious struggles for a life with dignity for her children by Radhika Vemula, who pointed her children to the stars daring them to dream. In a moment of utter collective regret, irreparable loss and grief, this family points the way to the annihilation of caste.

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Rohith Vemula could not do research as he was embroiled in probes

Rohith Vemula, the research scholar who committed suicide on the University of Hyderabad (UoH) campus, was known as a bright doctoral student who had secured a CSIR-Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) and also as a fiery Dalit leader of the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA). The day, January 17, that he hanged himself using ASA’s banner, he was on the 14th day of a sleep-in strike against the authorities following his expulsion from the hostel after a series of incidents and probes which took place on campus dating back to June 2015.

Soon after he completed his one year PhD (Science Technology and Societal Studies) coursework in June 2015, Mr. Vemula could neither pursue his research nor political activism because he had been tied down by three ongoing investigations, one conducted by the Gachibowli police, and two by the university authorities, based on a complaint lodged by an Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) student leader of the UoH campus, N. Susheel Kumar.

The investigations and proceedings which began in August were based on a complaint made by Mr. Kumar that five Dalit scholars of the ASA including Mr. Vemula had physically assaulted him leading to his hospitalisation. Mr. Kumar had also accused the ASA of leading anti-national activities on the campus, including protests related to Yakub Memon’s hanging.

Going by The Hindu’s investigation, the following are the facts in the case:

Mr. Susheel Kumar, who was hospitalised on August 4 following what the university’s security officers on record have called a “scuffle”, had sustained no major injuries. As per the report signed and submitted by the physician who examined him on August 4 & 5, Mr. Kumar’s condition was stable and no evidence of assault was found on him, except for a bruise on the shoulder. However, based on the complaint filed by Mr. Kumar at the Gachibowli police station, the Cyberabad police had booked the students under four serious Sections.

Mr. Vemula was already deeply embroiled in multiple probes soon after his research proposal on molecular microbes was approved and set for review of literature. He could not pursue his research and spent most of his precious time worrying, sharing his anger and concerns on Facebook and with his friends as two different committees set up by UoH probed and prodded into the assault claim over an extended period of time.

“[Rohith] put up a great fight for all of us. But it had started looking like a never-ending fight. When five Dalit research scholars were sleeping in the open at Shopping Complex, the Vice-Chancellor did not even bother to turn up. We had to lay siege to the administrative building on January 13 to get him to talk to us sometime,” said Dontha Prashanth, a fellow expelled student.

The Proctorial Board found no instance of assault or harm done to Mr. Kumar by a 30-member “mob” of ASA students who had approached his hostel room on August 3-4 night/morning.

However, the PB penalised all five students with a one semester suspension on the same grounds in its report submitted on August 31. What followed in the lives of Mr. Vemula and others was another round of protests supported by the ASA and some student outfits.

A faculty member and general secretary of University of Hyderabad Teacher’s Association (UHTA), P. Thirumal, asked, “Why was the matter referred to the EC subcommittee. The matter was dragging on and the lives of all the students were getting tedious. The university silenced even their political, rightful voice. Could the matter not have been resolved fast?”

The final blow was delivered by the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s letters and reminders to the university. With Minister of State for Labour Bandaru Dattatreya referring to the “assault” case on ABVP leader and “anti-national, casteist and extremist” activities on the campus, the matter had already taken a political turn.

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Ancient prejudice, modern inequality

On Sunday, January 17, Rohith Vemula (25), a doctoral student at the University of Hyderabad, reportedly committed suicide by hanging himself from the ceiling fan in a friend’s hostel room. His death has brought to a head a long-simmering conflict between progressive student groups, and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the students’ wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), present on campuses across the country and increasingly belligerent in the prevailing climate of Hindu right-wing dominance.

Rohith, a Dalit, had been involved in campus activism on diverse issues: Ambedkarite politics, protests against beef bans, the persistence of the death penalty in the Indian criminal justice system, and communal violence in Muzaffarnagar in August-September 2013, which left many dead and thousands displaced, mostly Muslims.

Along with four other Dalit students, Rohith had been evicted from his hostel accommodation about a month ago, his monthly research stipend suspended, allegedly for subversive activities. The university administration as well as the State and Central governments all appear to have been strong-armed by the reactionary ABVP into expelling these five individuals on dubious charges, characterising the victimised students as “casteist”, “extremist” and “anti-national”. All of them belonged to the Ambedkar Students Association, a body similar to the Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M), a group that had also faced harassment and intimidation from campus authorities in the summer of 2015.

Caste and the Hindu Right

The conflicts in both the University of Hyderabad and the IIT-M illustrate a deep fracture between the Hindu Right and Dalit-Bahujan ideologies, particularly those of the Ambedkarite strain, a fault line that cannot be papered over by electoral alliances of convenience and occasional instances of power-sharing between the two sides. The Sangh Parivar at every level, from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party down to the ABVP, stands against equality, whether between castes, religious communities, or the sexes.

Instead of egalitarianism, the Hindu Right believes in an archaic arithmetic of adhikaar and bahishkaar, entitlement and exclusion, based on caste, religion and gender. If the Indian Republic is built on a plinth of equal citizenship, the Hindu Rashtra would be founded on ritual hierarchy and patriarchy as laid out for centuries in the caste system. Onto this unequal social order of considerable vintage would be layered a deadly neo-Fascist majoritarian politics that arises out of the Hindutva imagination of the modern nation.

This is why, when the Ambedkar Students Association supported the screening of Nakul Singh Sawhney’s film Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai on the University of Hyderabad campus, the ABVP attacked the Dalit activist-students, driving them out of their classrooms and hostels, eventually to the limit where Rohith took the irreversible decision to end his life. Photographs he posted on his Facebook page in 2014 of his parents’ home in the small town of Guntur — a prized red refrigerator in which all the neighbours kept their water bottles, a gas burner, a fan he wryly described as “solar powered” — suggest the great distance from poverty and hardship travelled by this young man to become a doctoral student at one of the most prestigious universities in India. His journey ended violently and abruptly.

But the ostracising of the Sudra and Dalit student from the institutions of education and employment, knowledge and power, is a very old theme in Indian thought on social structure and moral order. The figure of the outcaste student appears in some of our oldest texts that reflect on the relationship between self, society and sovereignty.

In the Mahabharata, Ekalavya, a talented archer prince of the forest tribe of the Nishadas, goes to Dronacharya, the master who teaches young men of the Pandava and Kaurava clans how to wield their weapons. Drona will not admit Ekalavya on account of the tribal status that makes him an outsider to the caste system. Ekalavya goes away, makes an image of Drona, secretly watches him give lessons to Arjuna and the other royals, and teaches himself archery, treating the mud-and-clay Drona as a stand-in for the recalcitrant guru.

When Ekalavya turns out to be a better bowman than the Kshatriya prince Arjuna, Drona asks for his right thumb as tuition fee. Ekalavya agrees, but not without understanding that he is being discriminated against yet again. Ekalavya’s initial disobedience (which makes him a secret apprentice) as well as his later compliance (which costs him his thumb) shame both Drona and his favourite pupil, the supposed beneficiary of this blatant act of prejudice, Arjuna. The story of the Nishada prince shows Drona up as a caste bigot whose classroom reeks of nepotism, even if he knows how to teach his students well, at least the high-born ones he favours.

Ekalavya’s dismembered digit, a bloody and visceral embodiment of caste consciousness, has haunted the Hindu schoolyard from time immemorial. It can be read as quite literally a thumb in Drona’s eye, a jab at our conscience that is as painful for us to experience as it must have been for Ekalavya to lose the very source of his hard-earned skill. He is denied access at every stage: he cannot become Drona’s pupil, but neither is he allowed to become a great archer through his own efforts.

The story of Satyakama Jabali from the Chandogya Upanishad is more complex. Satyakama has no father, and takes his mother Jabala’s name. He goes to the hermitage of the sage Gautama, and wants to be admitted. When asked about his parentage, he acknowledges honestly that he does not know his father’s name or caste. Gautama admits him nevertheless, and performs the initiation ritual to pronounce him a twice-born Brahmin, after which his education begins in earnest.

In the ancient text of the Upanishad, Gautama is willing to entertain Satyakama as a potential pupil because of his honesty: he takes the boy’s love of truth (which is the literal meaning of his name, satya-kama) as proof of his essentially Brahmin nature. Once the teacher has assessed the applicant’s innate worth, he then translates his positive assessment into an upanayana (bestowal of the sacred thread on the boy’s body), naming Satyakama a proper Brahmin and proceeding to educate him accordingly.

Satyakama’s Brahmin identity is clearly attributed to him; it cannot be proven to be intrinsic, since his mother Jabala cannot identify his father. Gautama seems to suggest that ‘Brahmin is as Brahmin does’, i.e., Satyakama has the lakshana (characterising feature) of a Brahmin (because he speaks the truth), even though he does not have the gotra (lineage) of a Brahmin (because his mother was unmarried).

For a modern reader, this is a confusing account. Does Gautama make an exception and admit a non-Brahmin pupil into his hermitage, or does Gautama accept Satyakama because he thinks he recognises him, despite appearances, to be a genuine Brahmin? The exchange between Satyakama and Gautama at the threshold of the ashram, as it were, raising fundamental questions about identity (Who are you? Who am I?), about rights to entry into the portals of the academy, about rule and exception in the caste system, and about the entailments of caste in the strongholds of knowledge and seats of power, is again a moment that has not left our collective conscience for two millennia. Dr. Ambedkar himself reminds us of both these characters, Ekalavya and Satyakama, who for him are damning evidence of the stubborn longevity of caste in Indian history.

The more things change…

Ekalavya did not die and neither did Satyakama, but Rohith did. This sad fact could lead to various conclusions. It is a reflection on the unexpected cruelty and the adamantine ideologies undergirding the modern state and its institutions of higher learning. Drona and Ekalavya, Gautama and Satyakama could to some extent negotiate the terms of their relationship. Rohith ostensibly had the might of the Indian Constitution behind him — his fundamental rights as a citizen, reservations policy for students of his socioeconomic background, and the empowering discourses of the Ambedkarite student group which gave him a certain political awareness and the radical energy to fight for the equality he fully expected and deserved, but never got. And yet, when he was rusticated and ousted from his hostel, when he and his companions felt pushed to stage a “sleep-in” outside the university gates; when his stipend was withheld and he had to borrow money, and when he finally felt like he had hit a wall and had no options, Rohith was far worse off than his metaphorical brothers in the ancient literature.

His heartbreaking suicide note states the piercing truth, the skewer that caste ideology drives into every heart filled with hope: “My birth is my fatal accident.” Yes, this is the human condition: our birth, all birth, is an accident. We do not choose our father or mother, our group or community. But only in India, only in caste society, and only for Dalits does this accident of coming into an unequal life become the fatality of either living with relentless inequality and enduring its cruelties, or dying a terrible, unfair, premature and unredeemed death.

Anil Kumar Meena, a first-year Dalit student at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), India’s premier medical college, had hung himself from the fan of his hostel room in March 2012. In Rohith’s poignant Facebook photos, his family’s meagre possessions now stand witness to a life whose promise was extinguished. He had posted that before he got a Junior Research Fellowship, his mother’s humble sewing machine had supported the family.

Like December 16, 2012, the day marked by the horrendous rape and murder of a young woman Nirbhaya, let January 17, 2016 too go down in this country’s history as the dark day of the death of a student, Rohith Vemula, who was promised a chance at dignity and prosperity by our founders, and whom we abandoned, to our eternal shame.

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