Death of an 'Untouchable'
Death of an ‘untouchable’ - Matteo Miavaldi, NEW DELHI, India. The suicide of a young doctoral student has become a national rallying cry against discrimination toward dalits and other minorities in India, which seems to have sharpened in the two years of Narendra Modi’s government. In September, Rohith Vemula, 26, a second year science doctoral student at Hyderabad Central University, wrote a satirical letter of protest to the vice chancellor of the Indian academic system. “I ask Your Highness to act without delay in the establishment of an appropriate facility for euthanasia, dedicated to students like me,” he mused. “And I wish you and the entire campus to rest in peace forever.” In India, you might call that the ordinary, scornful dialectic of a young dalit “left-winger.” But that would diminish the political activism of a generation of so-called “untouchables” against the secular and systemic harassment perpetrated by high castes against the poorest of the poor — a diverse group that in modern India includes dalits, adivasis (tribals), Muslims, shudra (the “servants,” according to the Hindu caste system), Indians of the Northeast, women and homosexuals. They all struggle for social justice in the hierarchy of ultra-Hinduism. A few months after writing that letter, Vemula killed himself. The letter and the rope On Sunday, Jan. 17, Vemula’s lifeless body was found on the HCU campus, hanged, along with a letter that spread across the internet. He explained his dream of someday writing about science, “like Carl Sagan,” but instead took his life because he was crushed by the weight of a world where “the value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility.
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