ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Rohith Vemula: Foregrounding Caste Oppression in Indian Higher Education Institutions In April 2021, a professor from the Indian Institute of Technology verbally abused students belonging to Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities. The incident brought to the fore conversations around caste and education. One is instantly reminded of how five years before this incident, in 2016, Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD scholar at the University of Hyderabad, died by suicide. Between 2016 and 2021 itself, India lost several students belonging to Dalit and Bahujan communities to suicide as a result of caste-based discrimination. That elite Indian higher education institutions practise caste-based discrimination is nothing new. But Vemula’s death sparked a political movement. This reading list attempts to understand how and why this came to be. “Rohith Vemula’s dream,” Anand Teltumbde wrote, “of becoming a science writer like his idol, Carl Sagan, ended abruptly at the altar of caste.” On 17 January 2016, Rohith Vemula, a Dalit research scholar from the University of Hyderabad (UoH), took his own life. Vemula’s death, an EPW editorial noted, came after months of “political and administrative persecution” by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-affiliated Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the Bharatiya Janata Party-led union government, and the UoH administration’s “opportunist pandering” of the union government. Two months and 1,000 kilometres away, in Delhi, another Dalit student in yet another elite higher education institution (HEI) died by suicide. Muthukrishnan, a Dalit research scholar from Jawaharlal Nehru University, took his own life on 13 March 2017. On the controversy surrounding Muthukrishnan’s death, P Thirumal and Carmel Christy wrote that elite ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 institutions in India openly display a “Brahminical form of embodiment” that keeps others from inhibiting the university’s space. Dalit–Bahujans, as relatively new entrants to this body that has been largely composed of savarna aesthetics and taste, are constantly made to feel alienated and discriminated. In May 2019, Payal Tadvi, a second-year medical student pursuing her master’s degree in Mumbai, was driven to suicide after facing repeated caste-based discrimination, harassment and threats from her senior colleagues. In their letter calling for justice for Tadvi’s death, members of the Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (JSA) and Medico Friend Circle (MFC) noted that there is “rampant ingrained casteism” in higher education institutions which must be acknowledged and addressed. Ramdas Rupavath, reflecting on Rohith’s suicide, wrote that, “most Dalit students in universities encounter everyday humiliation by the official administration on the one hand and elite academicians on the other.” Drishadwati Bargi observed that harassment is a “potent tool” for humiliation as it often cannot be proved. Besides, Bargi wrote, the “Hindu” mind’s hostility to reservations makes it reluctant in sharing a common space with Avarnas. For instance, the simplest, everyday practices of communication between the Savarna teachers and the Dalit students in the university space are often characterised with unrecognised power dynamic and prejudice; incidents that cannot be mapped easily. This is not because they are mystical but because their normalised status makes them unquestionable. In light of the violence against marginalised students by an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur professor over a video call in April 2021, P Thirumal made a similar observation, that caste discrimination in elite Indian HEIs has taken a more “prosaic mode” with teachers from privileged castes actively withdrawing from interacting with marginalised students. Undeniably, India’s elite HEIs are systemically casteist in nature. JSA and MFC’s letter also observed that Dalit and Adivasi students are known to drop out of pursuing and completing their higher education due to this systemic casteism. To put this institutional casteism in perspective, it must be remembered that Vemula was not the first UoH student belonging to the Dalit community to die by suicide. As Rupavath noted, since its inception in the 1970s, 12 Dalit students from the UoH have taken ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 their own lives. It must also be mentioned that the “institutional murders” of the three Dalit students mentioned here occurred within the last five years and in HEIs in Indian cities. That caste is a thing of the past and is experienced only in rural India is simply untrue. As recently as July 2021, when Other Backward Class reservations for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) was announced, debates followed on social media opposing the same. Vemula’s suicide, and his suicide note, sparked a political movement of resistance. His death exposed the “criminality” that stemmed from the inherently casteist nature of HEIs in India. This reading list revisits the events that led up to Vemula’s suicide, the government’s response to his death, the institutional casteism practised in India’s HEIs, and the impact of Vemula’s death on the future of Indian politics. Rohith Vemula’s Death In February 2016, Anand Teltumbde wrote that Vemula’s death was not just a “stray case of caste prejudice” but the result of a larger pattern of the upsurge of Brahminical and “Hindutva forces” in India. As mentioned before, 12 Dalit students have died by suicide in UoH since 1970, but nine of them took their own lives within the last 10 years. While the saga of crimes against Dalits is an ancient one, the roots of the current episode lie in the false police complaint lodged by the president of ABVP’s Hyderabad Central University (HCU) unit, N Susheel Kumar—who is also the organisation’s state committee member—alleging that 30 Ambedkar Students’ Association (ASA) members had beaten him up. Kumar alleged that the Dalit students had resorted to such violence to demand an apology for his remarks on Facebook, describing ASA members as “goons.” A day after Kumar gave his written apology, “he got himself admitted to a hospital, got photographed and filed a police complaint saying he was assaulted.” While the proctorial board of the UoH did not find evidence of assault, they remained suspicious of Vemula and his friends, D Prashanth, P Vijay Kumar, C Sheshaiah and V Sunkanna, for a whole semester. Then, Bandaru Dattatreya, BJP member of Parliament (MP) from Secunderabad, wrote to the then Union Human Resources Development Minister (HRD), Smriti Irani, alleging that the UoH had become the centre of “casteist, extremist and anti-national” activities of the ASA. Irani then wrote to the university’s vice chancellor, Appa Rao Podile, ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 asking him to take action against the students, and as a result, on 16 December 2015, Vemula and his four friends were suspended for a semester. An EPW editorial called the administration’s orders “outlandish” and “strange.” Four of the students (as one was a former student) were barred from staying in the hostel till the completion of their course—two of them enrolled in 2013, and the other two enrolled in 2014—which could mean that for at least two to three years they would have to live in expensive rented accommodation outside. The administration also said that these students can be “seen” only in their departments, the library, in academic activities relevant to their respective disciplines, and that they must not “enter” the administrative block and “common places” in groups. As a form of protest, Vemula and his friends slept in a public space near the university’s shopping complex. It was in the midst of this protest that Vemula took the tragic step of dying by suicide. Questioning Rohith Vemula’s Dalit Identity Teltumbde noted that when Vemula died, the police filed a first information report (FIR) under the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) (Prevention of Atrocities) Act against Podile, Dattatreya, and Kumar for abetting Vemula’s suicide. The Act warrants that the perpetrators are to be arrested immediately, but the police did not make any arrests. Instead, the BJP raked up a controversy around Vemula’s caste so that no such arrests could be made. Smriti Irani’s one-member judicial commission—former Allahabad High Court judge, A K Roopanwal—who probed into the circumstances leading to Vemula’s death, observed that Vemula was not a Dalit. But Guntur district collector, Kantilal Dande, had already confirmed in his report to the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC) that Vemula was a Dalit. In the case of inter-caste marriages, the caste of the child is decided based on the circumstances of their upbringing. On defining the rights of children born out of inter-caste marriages, the Supreme Court bench held that a child can claim their mother’s caste if they were brought up by the mother as a member of that caste. In Rohith’s case his mother belongs to the Mala community (a Dalit sub-caste), had separated from her husband who is a Vadera (Other Backward ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Classes–OBC) and brought up her children in a Dalit colony. The fact that Rohith grew up with Dalit consciousness, lived, suffered and even died as a Dalit, exemplarily confirmed to the circumstances the Court depicted. Teltumbde noted that the ​​fact-finding committee of the Indian People’s Tribunal indicted Podile for ignoring a letter Vemula wrote to him roughly a month before he took his own life. Then, a Joint Action Committee for Social Justice (JAC), formed to fight for justice for Vemula, demanded the dismissal and arrest of Podile. At this point, the vice chancellor fled the scene. But the HRD ministry sent Podile back to the UoH campus, promising to repress any resistance with “brute force.” When news of Podile’s return spread through the campus, protests broke out and the police lathi-charged students and faculty alike, rounding up 24 students and two faculty members and charging them under 11 sections of different laws.