“People may dub me as a coward. And selfish, or stupid once I am gone. I am not bothered about what I am called. I don’t believe in after-death stories, ghosts, or spirits. If there is anything at all I believe, I believe that I can travel to the stars. And know about the other worlds.” – Rohith Vemula’s Suicide Note (Jan 17, 2016).
“I write this as a warning to the world,” thundered Wilfred Burchett; while reporting about Atomic Plague in Hiroshima, Japan (August 6, 1945). I presume this is the only sentence Rohith Vemula missed out in his suicide note. They say he committed suicide. No. It was a clear case of systemic murder.
Hailing from Guntur, Rohith always cleared the entrance exam for the programme of his choice in the open category (OC). Almost all the universities in this country have the tendency to label students with certain markers like * (SC), ** (ST), *** (Physically Challenged), # (OBC) among others, to ridicule students entering houses of learning. Very few students in the entire country clear CSIR and/or UGC research fellowships. Such is Rohith’s academic brilliance. He cleared both. And, what stance did the system take? Nip such brilliance at the bud. He was committed about social issues so much so that he relinquished his pursuit of becoming a scientist and became a social scientist. And what have we done? Just gave him an exit point in the form of death.
His death is not just a sign of one person’s anguish at having been institutionally ostracised and resorted to what the dominant social order would call an extreme step. It is also symbolic of punishment meted out to curtail, pin down, and dissolve the growing assertions the oppressed have made to existing knowledge systems and the norms producing them.
No wonder cutting across sections, regions, classes, castes and tribes; sensitive people are with Rohith and the cause. Why else would people from Sema, Angami, Ao, Lotha, Konyak, Tangkhul, Chakhesang among many of our fellow Nagas get concerned and agitated? There are no immediate answers. In his suicide note, resonating Walter Benjamin (one of the greatest Jewish thinkers and an anti-fascist, who also committed suicide), Rohith mentioned: “My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness.”
Behind this violence survives the grand brahmanic design trying to promote a Karmic order through Dharmic rituals of passage – which is to decide the contours of an individual’s capacities based on their birth into a community. This parasitic design has its centres of militia when it comes to propagating ‘their order’ as ‘the order’ in all the four estates of democracy; viz;, Legislative, Executive, Judiciary and our very own Press. While tragic deaths of the oppressed are quite evident, the Indian Universities top the list when it comes to latent scheming of plots against aspiring students from the Bahujan composite i.e. the Dalit, Adivasi, OBC, and allied Minority communities.
The oppressed have for centuries shouldered this violence from the oppressive castes who claim ownership over life, limb, and land. At times the oppressed had to surrender. Most times, they fought back and became martyrs of their communities. This has been the untold history of the Bahujans; a history of injustice; a history of struggle. For centuries these assertions were embodied in various forms, and sometimes, by killing the self to symbolize their right over their body and loosen the oppressor’s control and tutelage.
In this journey, from emaciation to emancipation; education played a critical role for the oppressed in pursuing livelihoods that were deemed by brahmanical agents as ‘unlike’ them. The oppressed pursued nevertheless, taking giant strides as they explored, challenged conventional and conservative ideas, and produced new knowledge systems not just for them, but even for the oppressors. The most scientific, social, and just ideas of cohabitation and cooperation have emerged from the Bahujans’ experience and teleology. While the brahmanic order is meant to oppress the Bahujan one is meant to liberate.
Being an alumnus of University of Hyderabad, I must confess that my visits proved to be very eerie. By taking his life, he created an emotion that the rest of us are lifeless and hopeless beings. A mere look at Rohith’s Smaraka Stupa is Kafkaesque. There lie reminiscences of a person who wrestled with his own self and the system. He loved to study ‘stars,’ and aspired to become a science writer but ended his life abruptly. Rohith may not have studied the stars, but he definitely did trigger the star wars.
Bhargav Nimmagadda is a doctoral scholar from University of Hyderabad. He worked with as a journalist with an English national daily. As a researcher, he presented papers and chaired seminars in many national and international avenues.
