Supply Sodium Cynanide and a Rope to every Dalit student-Rohit to the VC a month before he took his life

This letter, dated December 18, 2015 has not been so widely quoted nor has it gone viral. It is a comment on all of us, especially those of us in the media, that we failed to read the warnings or feel the anguish.  After all it is since August 2015 that the social boycott and ostracizing of Dalit students, including Rohith was systematically afoot. That is close to five months ago.

Nearly a month to the day that he tragically gave up the struggle to live and took his own life, on December 18, 2015, a hand-written letter from Rohith Vemula to Vice Chancellor Appa Rao says it all. Taunting and tragic, the note will now be read as a precursor of what was to come. In a hand-written scrawl that hints at acute desperation, he says, “Your Excellency (addressed to the Vice Chancellor Appa Rao) “make preparations for the EUTHANASIA for students like me from the Ambedkarite movement…and may your campus rest in peace forever.”

The letter traces the officially sanctioned “social boycott” of Dalit students after they took on a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) for his derogatory remarks to the Dalit students. “Donald Trump will be a Lilliput in front of you,” Rohith tells Appa Rao then offering a piece of chilling advice. “Please serve 10 miligram of Sodium Azide to all the Dalit students at the time of admission…Supply a nice rope to the rooms of all Dalits students..”The text of the letter can be read here and a scanned hand written copy seen here.

Now we know, and fret over the fact that his Rs 25,000 per month stipend (as of all his other suspended colleagues) was stopped after suspension and he had to borrow money, even from home, to survive the struggle. Now that he is dead we listen to the plight and anguish of his family. Why did we not listen before? As the isolation and anguish built up to make Rohith take a step so final that it signalled no return? Yes, we are all to blame.

“After the stipend was stopped, his family was struggling to support him. He borrowed Rs 40,000 from a friend and was living frugally. Almost every day, he used to say that his money was stuck,’’ said Velmula Sankanna, a fellow PhD scholar and one of the other five students who were suspended. “In December, Rohith wrote an angry letter to the V-C, sarcastically asking him to provide euthanasia facilities for Dalit students. Since then, he was scared to go to the administration building and ask about his stipend. He became silent and withdrawn. He said that he was falling into depression because he was being defeated by the system at every turn. He blamed himself, his caste, and the circumstances around him. He did not take much interest in anything except studies,’’ added Sankanna, a close friend.

We did not rise to feel, see or appreciate the seriousness implicit in the warnings. In August 2015, a questionable mode of ‘suspension’ of five singled out students of the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA) followed by the arbitrary stopping of their scholarship stipend, further followed by their being locked out of their rooms from January 4, 2016. Yet they fought on, sleeping out near the shopping complex in the cold. Awaiting fair hearing, democratic space for protest(s) and justice.

From the night of January 4, 2016 until today the sleep out protests continue.

After the tragic and unnecessary loss of the life of a budding science scholar, a proud Ambedkarite, will justice and fair hearing happen? Yesterday in a fully articulated representation to PL Punia, Chairperson of the National Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Commission, the Joint Action Committee for Social Justice, University of Hyderabad (UoH) has demanded:

• Punish the Culprits under the SC/ST Atrocities Act:
• Banadaru Dattareya, Union Cabinet Minister of State for Labour and Employment
• P Appa Rao, Vice Chancellor
• Professor Alok Pandey, Chief Proctor
• Susheel Kumar, ABVP President
• Ramchandra Rao, MLC
• Remove P Appa Rao from the post of Vice Chancellor
• Employ a family member of Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad and give his family Rs 50 lahs in compensation
• Drop the fabricated cases against five Dalit Research Scholars immediately and unconditionally
• Revoke the suspension of Students immediately and unconditionally

The Anger Spreads; Demands for resignation of Vice Chancellor Appa Rao

Anger and grief are potent combinations and both were visible in plenty at the mortuary of the Osmania Hospital on Monday, January 18 where Rohith Velumal lay, a day after he tragically ended his own life. His mother’s anguished cry says it all, ““I used to proudly tell everyone in my village that my son was doing PhD at Hyderabad University. Today, I have come to collect his dead body.’’ The family is from Gurazala near Guntur, his mother a tailor and father, Manikumar a security guard at the Hyderabad University. Rohith has two siblings, an elder sister and a younger brother.

Over 1200 students of the University of Hyderabad (UoH) participated in a rally on Monday evening and have resolved to protest on Tuesday, January 19 and not allow the university to function until the current Vice Chancellor, Appa Rao steps down. Before the rally, his close friends and colleagues, along with his family were present at the cremation of Rohith in Hyderabad. (see Image story)

Simultaneous and spontaneous protests continued through the day yesterday at Hyderabad, Vishakhapatnam, Mumbai and Delhi. The road outside Shastri Bhavan, the office of Smriti Irani, the Ministry for Human Resources Development (MHRD) was cordoned off akin to a war zone (see pictures). In Hyderabad, a visit from the chairperson of the Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribes Commission allayed feelings somewhat.

Though it is Rohith is the one who has made the most recent and most tragic sacrifice, the question is whether it will still open India’s eyes and hearts?

We read every other day not just of the social boycott of Dalit children in the mid day meal schemes. In ‘Dravidian’ politics ruled Tamil Nadu colour bands on Dalit students brand them with their caste. There is little political, social or cultural outrage. The television channels, packed as they are with ‘journalists’ most of whom sport a myopic caste consciousness of the elite Indian that simply excludes any mention of discrimination or exclusion while badgering home ‘the banner of tolerance’, rarely flag anti-Dalit atrocities as an institutional ill to be faced squarely then remedied.
In ‘progressive’ west India the discrimination takes similar forms, and examples abound. In Phugana, three young Dalit children, one a baby was burnt alive in a burst of Rajput rage.

Just like the Blacks fought (and have barely won) the Civil Rights battle in the West – last year’s incidents at Fergusson are evidence of how thinly layered this success is –it is privileged India, caste Hindus who need to hang their heads in acknowledgement, first, and the, shame.

We need to internalize what Dalit students experience when they enter schools, colleges and universities and break the glass ceiling and enter India’s famed institutions of higher learning, the IITs, the IIMs and Universities.

Not only is the percentage of Dalit students who enter higher educational institutions small. They are subject to insidious caste practices and exclusion that batters the hard earned self-esteem. A dangerous argument of ‘meritocracy’ cloaks well organized money and caste induced privilege.

This everyday institutional and societal exclusion and othering needs to be acknowledged squarely by each and one of us.

It is time we ask difficult ourselves some hard and uncomfortable questions.

What kind of history do we teach? Who are our heroines and heroes?
How many Dalits are there in the media, print and television?
How many Dalits in Institutions of power and governance?

The Dalit experience says that entering the corridors of elite educational institutions like Indian Institute of Technologies (IIT) and Indian Institute of Managements and Central Universities for scores of Dalit students is like walking into a living hell, where the fear of being shamed and humiliated hangs heavy on the heart and soul of every student.

Before Rohit, we lost Senthil Kumar and Nagaralu Koppalas, also in the Central University of Hyderabad. Have these earlier losses, deaths of young men in their prime been internalized and taught the UoH any lessons worth learning? The recent and continuing unfair suspension of Dalit scholars would appear to suggest that no lessons have yet been learned.

Is India willing ready and able to accept her Not So Hidden Apartheid?

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This article written by K.P. Girija (

All the three suicides can be read as statements of protest against the insensitivity of various institutions and the discrimination being practiced there. Still, there has been a tendency to depict these deaths as acts of desperation (of course, personal) of the students and their inability to cope with advanced studies, especially in the Sciences. One can see a clear-cut trajectory of these students’ lives, which lead to personal desperation and suicides. Could we assess all these as something that happened without any intervention from the world they were situated in?

When alive, not one of them could politicise their experiences of discrimination and raise it at a macro level. Yet, all of them would have experienced caste in its micro formations. The fact that Rejani’s primary confidant with whom she shared her humiliations seems to be a woman friend who happens to be a Dalit, is crucial. In his diary Ajay writes about “superiority/inferiority” gazes, which unsettle him in his laboratory, clearly suggesting caste humiliations. Senthil was part of Ambedkar Students’ Association, a Dalit students’ political forum in the University of Hyderabad and might not have been a stranger to the caste debates and its theoretical formulations.

Yet, none of them could raise the issue at a collective level. The structure, which accommodated them within it, did it only as a .compensatory allowance. While it provided representation, it definitely did not provide dignified representation and no space to ask for it, either. Thus, while alive, none of them could raise the issue of caste and discrimination in a way it would be heard. It is tragic that only death could bring out the discrimination towards the ‘Dalitness’ of a student in all three cases.

Dalitness in Modern Spaces
How did these students experience their ‘Dalitness’? A short examination of the immediate incidents just before their deaths is all that we have. (In Ajay's case we hardly have that also).The often threatening phone calls received at Rejani’s neighbor’s house by her or her parents from the N.S.S. hostel, to whom she owed her fees, are not sufficient enough to unwrap the acuteness of caste discrimination.

The continuous journey to one particular bank, more than twenty times, for getting an educational loan to which she was officially entitled under a Reserve Bank of India order – neither is this enough to prove the denial of a loan to a Dalit student. [From the statements of K.Santhakumari, Mother of Rejani, given before Justice Khalid Commission on 14.05.2005].

Yet, we know that the Bank would have denied her loan precisely because of her status as both Dalit and woman though this was not hinted at anywhere except in the overall, tedious procedural approach. As a woman, the Bank would not be convinced that she would take up a career. They might not have been confident of her completing her course at all. Also, her coming to the Bank alone or sometimes accompanied only by another woman, her mother, might have destroyed her image as a ‘respectable’ woman.

As a Dalit, they would not have read her as ‘meritorious’ enough to gain employment, even after the completion of the course, and therefore loan worthy.

Due to her Dalit womanhood, the student life of Rejani seems to have become an endless knocking at various doors for financial support. The last straw seems to be the apparent denial of Transfer Certificate (T.C) from Adoor Engineering College. Rejani had got a chance to join Mary Matha College, which had promised her free education and lodging.

When she approached her college for a T.C, they sent her off to pay the dues. She was sent to the Entrance (Engineering and Medical courses) examiner’s office. It is here that she committed suicide by jumping out from the seventh floor of that building. The choice of her place of death was dramatic; it was the the Entrance examiner’s office. The act was charged with layers of symbolic meaning.

She, a Dalit, had gained her ‘entry’ into an inaccessible system by the impossible feat of passing the exam without attending formal coaching classes. Despite this, her entry was treated as ‘provisional’. In fact, with her death, we realise what Rejani would have constantly heard from the system that apparently gave her entry: “No Entry for Trespassers.”

When Rejani was alive, neither she nor the students’ union or caste organizations could bring out any of this. The deliberate tedium and drawn-out torture of an exasperating process as valid points of discrimination. There might have been protests at a personal level in a minimal way. More than protesting, Rejani had desperately tried her maximum to obtain a loan in order to cope with the situation, to continue her education, her only hope for a better future.

As far as Senthil was concerned, when he was alive, he could not point out the discrimination in the Physics department, which denied him a supervisor. This inability to politically voice his concern happens even though he was an active member of the Ambedkar Students’ Association. Failure in a subject in his course work was the determinant of his merit. Through his death, Senthil can be seen to raise doubts about the acceptance of Dalit students into the Science departments.

He evokes questions through his death on the formal acceptance of Dalit students in the higher academic studies and its true spirit. The ‘logic’, ‘rationality’, and the ‘merit’ that Science claims for itself need to be questioned, if the entry of a Dalit student creates so many ruffles within the system. The structure of the Science discipline was such that Senthil himself, at some point might have believed that he was not competent and meritorious at all to survive in the discipline.

The details of Ajay’s case are not known. Yet, his dairy notes and his status as a student who got twelfth rank in the All India Entrance, yet admitted to the institute as a reservation candidate, would have posed problems of the same Dalithood for him also. These Dalit students, or their existence and day-to-day encountering with their Dalitness (this is not as direct expressions of ritual untouchability, but denying access through new meanings of merit, untimely payment of dues, failure in many subjects/course work etc.) was something that could not be translated into a political process for agitation or bargaining for justice, when they were alive.

Yet, none of them could raise the issue at a collective level. The structure, which accommodated them within it, did it only as a .compensatory allowance. While it provided representation, it definitely did not provide dignified representation and no space to ask for it, either. Thus, while alive, none of them could raise the issue of caste and discrimination in a way it would be heard. It is tragic that only death could bring out the discrimination towards the ‘Dalitness’ of a student in all three cases.

Paradoxically, and tragically, the value of their death is much more than the value of their life to raise the various nuances of institutionalized casteism. As if death is the only elucidation to legitimize the worth of their life!

Refusal to Accept the Direct Meaning of their Deaths
There were instances to subvert the political reasons behind these suicides. For e.g., when Rejani committed suicide, there had been a demand to test the virginity of the girl. Lack of virginity, which pointed to the patriarchal world that she was not quite ‘moral’, was accepted as an overriding factor for a woman to commit suicide. But the fact of caste based harassment staring right into everyone’s face was not accepted or seen as one.

Also, it is strange that one was not thinking of analytically combining these factors – sexuality and caste. Sexuality, like many other categories, can manifest only in the context of other structures like caste. Her lack of virginity, as revealed in the test, assumes the primary importance in comparison to the obviously biased treatment from all corners that she knocked for help. Gender (together with her Dalitness) has played the role here as if her ‘immorality’ took away her right to protest against the caste-biased nature of the educational structure.

Similarly, the University of Hyderabad authorities maintained, even before the post-mortem examination, that Senthil died of a heart attack. The SC/ST employees had to invoke the Right to Information Act to get the post mortem report, which stated poisoning as the cause of Senthil’s death.
Ajay’s father never got to know why his son committed suicide, when he went to Bangalore to collect his body. He had to wait for a whole month to know the details of the tense situation faced by his son, in the lab in IISc, till the IISc SC/ST employees union took up the issue as one of caste discrimination.

‘Conditional’ Representation in Modern Spaces
These cases are examples of how caste functions in a ‘modern’ space like the Higher Educational institution. The structure seems to apparently include Dalits through representational measures like reservations. By this very act of representation, the system claims its neutrality to caste. However, this act of inclusion/representation is coded within certain conditions that are very often invisible and built into the so called inclusive nature of the system.

Paradoxically, these conditions result in the exclusion of the Dalit herself. Dalits have the right to enter the system through reservation, a ‘compensatory discrimination’. Yet, they do not have the right to be treated as equal with the mainstream representatives of the system in all terms and in all situations. There are various determinants to decide this equality such as merit, performance, articulation etc.

There is inclusion through representation and exclusion through different ‘assessment’ and differential approaches. While the system might claim credit for the entry of students like Rejani, Senthil and Ajay and their very presences might be seen as their inclusion into the system, we can see that their subsequent suicides were also a result of the conditions/exclusions that this very inclusion threw up.

Science and the Notion of Merit
If we measure merit in terms of marks obtained, all the three students got very good marks up to their intermediate courses and began losing marks (their brilliance/merit) after joining for the applied science courses. Does it mean that these students were not capable enough to cope with professional courses or applied science courses? If so, does it also mean that there is something wrong in the environment and attitude (in essence, the structure) of the professional institutions towards Dalit students?

Rejani had failed in nine out of the ten courses in her first semester. Senthil too had to clear one paper from his course work, which was understood as a condition to allot a supervisor for him and continue his research in the Physics department. Ajay had problems to cope in the laboratory. His diary shows that he was scared of one or more faculty members.

In general, these can be read as the inabilities of the students to cope with the applied science department, which needs ‘talent’ and ‘hard work’. Yet, it also carries the hidden meaning of the inability of the high skilled department to generate a friendly atmosphere to a group of people who are yet to be familiar with its language, hierarchy and protocol. Science seems to see itself as privileging logic and would shun perspective.

Rationality is prioritized and this is defined as transcending individual experiences. With this logic, students are supposed to be modern individuals who want to become scholars or scientists rather than bringing their other identities – like that of caste, community or gender. This rational and logical frame itself places the subaltern as the ‘other’ in the science department. The attributes of irrationality, illogic and intolerance are not for the mainstream students; those are reserved for the subaltern communities.

Modern Secular Institutions embedded in Caste
There is a preconceived notion that our educational institutions are caste neutral. If at all caste is expressed or practiced there in any form, it is treated as existing only because of the insensitivity of certain individuals. In addition, people do not believe that there is such a thing as ‘institutional casteism’.

Therefore the cultural democratic space like an educational institution will hardly be questioned until some direct caste atrocities happen in those spaces.

Marginalized individuals also do not experience the hegemonic control of the knowledge over them as discrimination and a structural problem. For them, caste is experienced as an attitudinal problem – either from department heads, economical institutions or from authorities who represent the institutions.

He evokes questions through his death on the formal acceptance of Dalit students in the higher academic studies and its true spirit. The ‘logic’, ‘rationality’, and the ‘merit’ that Science claims for itself need to be questioned, if the entry of a Dalit student creates so many ruffles within the system. The structure of the Science discipline was such that Senthil himself, at some point might have believed that he was not competent and meritorious at all to survive in the discipline.

One could think about the environment of this higher education as a space where there is a mingling of different kinds of students from different castes and classes and religions. Irrespective of the caste and religious identity, anonymity to a certain extent is possible in these spaces.

Yet, within this anonymity, the determinants of caste, religion or region could be ‘read’ through language, lack of or command over English, submissiveness or assertion, articulation capacities, regional or urban nature, mode of dress, complexion etc. In other words, these determinants of Dalitness or upper casteness are much more practically applied than the details in official records.

Conflict in Dual Representation
Dalit students have to carry the mark of their community (not in terms of the name of their jati but in terms of their Dalitness). They are also modern individuals in elite higher educational spaces. In these spaces, they face humiliations at a very personal, individual level, yet those very humiliations happen due to their Dalitness as a community. None of the above mentioned students could communicate their humiliations to their parents.

The parents residing in faraway places were not able to give emotional support to their children. To some extent, the parents were not aware of the intensity of the humiliation of the modern spaces. The humiliation for a Dalit student comes in the form of lack of performance or rather lack of merit, not paying the dues in time etc. It never comes directly as caste discrimination.

It never acknowledges itself as the inability of the system to assimilate some social groups. How to translate these kinds of approaches into caste discrimination and communicate it to the parents who stayed away from the modern institutions would be another painful task. It would be difficult for the children to tell the reality to the parents very often; whose only hope would be these kids.

In most cases, the parents/family did not get any hint of the desperation from the part of their daughter/son. Communities could overcome the humiliations in their togetherness in sharing and laughing out, negotiating and sometimes protesting too. Individuals have their own limitations to take the burden of these humiliations.

These students tried to negotiate and struggle their best, but after a point they couldn’t bear it anymore. Simultaneously, they were forced to shoulder the dual identities – that of a modern, educated individual (as science students, rational, logical etc) and at the same time, as a merit less Dalit. The contradiction was too much for them to bear. Finally it ends in their suicides through which they tried to question or destabilize the structure in whatever little way they could through their deaths.

They had all proved that they were ‘capable’ and ‘meritorious’ for this very educational system till their intermediate/degree courses. In that case, would they ever think about turning back and do some menial labour there after coming through the long 12-15 years of education?
In their aspiration to become modern educated individuals with better jobs, they fitted neither in the higher educational system nor in their villages. The long and excruciating journey from a remote village to an urban secular space lead them to a nowhere place.

Inherent Structural Tensions
Dalits or Tribals have entered the system mostly through representational measures like reservations. But, this is seen as an ‘excessive’ presence and hence ‘threatening’ presence to the system. That is why a bank manager is reluctant to sanction a loan to a poor Dalit girl for her higher education instead of thinking about the possibilities to grant it. That is why the University stopped the scholarship of Senthil Kumar instead of formulating a new approach to deal the situation. (Even though there is no law of the university which states that scholarship is connected to passing or failing in exams).

When the structure has been destabilized or questioned in a minimal way (only) through the death of the Dalit students, immediately it tries to retain its status quo, often using compensatory measures. In Senthil’s case, the University had granted an amount of Rs five lakhs to Senthil’s family. Here, it was the cost of a Dalit youth’s life and hope which was burnt in a University. Another ‘compensation’ was the immediate allotment of guides to two Dalit students. In Rejani’s suicide case, the State immediately enhanced the amount of monthly stipend for SC/ ST students from Rs 315 to Rs 1000.

These temporary compensations or welfare measures would pacify the troubled situations. It would also help various institutions to wash their hands off from the crime of pushing the students to suicides. Through compensation or some welfare measures the institution or the State is admitting its inability to assure distributive justice to the subaltern communities. Through these compensatory measures it is also trying to reinstate the status quo by reducing tensions though temporarily.
 

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Senthil Kumar, a Tamil student hailing from an interior region in the state, admitted for PhD in the School of Physics, University of Hyderabad, took his life on 24th February 2008.

Ajay Sree Chandra, a Telugu boy and an Integrated-PhD scholar at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, committed suicide the year before, on 27th August 2007.

If one were to look for similarities that bind these three disparate incidents, we find that all were doing courses in Sciences and admitted to prestigious institutions. They all were also in the prime of youth. Rejani and Ajay were both just 21 years of age at the time of their death. Senthil was 27.
Their youth might have been mixed with hope and an equal measure of uncertainty about their future. However, the most striking feature, that binds all these deaths, would be the caste of the deceased. All the three students were Dalits.

No suicide can perhaps be seen only as a result of .personal frustrations, least of all, Dalit suicides. These personal frustrations have visible connections with the context around them. They are political, cultural and social and therefore need special attention. Hence it becomes important for all concerned to analyse whether these suicides were intrinsically connected to the power structure of the higher educational institutions and the entry of Dalits into it.
 
Senthil Kumar
In 2007, Senthil Kumar came all the way to University of Hyderabad, from a village of Salem district in Tamilnadu. He was admitted for his PhD in the School of Physics. He belonged to the panniandi caste, which is traditionally involved in pig rearing and is at the bottom of the caste-hierarchy.

Both his parents are illiterate and are devoid of regular income. He was the only person in his family as well as in his caste to register for PhD. After completing his M.Phil from the Pondicherry University, he had to discontinue his studies for quite some time due to financial constraints. Since his graduation days, Senthil had been supporting his parents through his scholarships.

On February 24, 2008, just after one year of his admission, Senthil Kumar committed suicide in his hostel room. University authorities immediately claimed that he had died of cardiac arrest. But the postmortem report gave the cause of death as poisoning. Surprisingly, this report was kept as a secret until the Dalit students started demanding an enquiry and compensation for his family.

After the political intervention from the Tamilnadu MLA. Ravikumar, the University of Hyderabad had appointed an internal fact finding committee under Prof Vinod Pavarala. From the batch of 2007, Senthil was the only student who has not been assigned a supervisor till his death. In this batch, initially four students had not been assigned a supervisor.

Out of these four students, two eventually left the programme as dropouts and one got allotted a supervisor. Obviously, all the four students were from the reserved categories. Does it mean something? Was it an evidence of the inability of the School of Physics to accommodate the Dalit students in its culture of hierarchy?

Senthil failed in one of the four required courses. He failed the same course in the supplementary exam in January 2008 also. He had the provision of writing the exam again in March to clear this backlog. The students with backlogs, stop receiving fellowships as per the University of Hyderabad guidelines. Hailing from a poor family, the University fellowship was the only source for him to support his family and his own survival.

The University changed the rule of curtailing the fellowship to the students who had to clear the backlogs, a week before Senthil’s death, but did not make it public. Prof Pavarala committee made very clear in its report that, “All the Physics students that this Committee could meet have reported their sense that the School was acting against the interests of the SC/ST students.” Still, there is no culprit who led to the suicide of Senthil Kumar.

 
Rejani. S. Anand
Was a student of Institute of Human Resource Development Engineering (IHRDE) College at Adoor in south Kerala. She got admission on 6.11.2002 in the government quota seat under merit. The Scheduled Caste (SC) Department had remitted her fee. On 22nd July 2004, she committed suicide by jumping from the seventh floor of the Office of the Entrance Commissioner (Medical and Engineering courses) at Trivandrum.

The sequence of events that could show the immediate trajectory that led her to take her own life is as follows – Since her college had no hostel facilities, Rejani was staying in a nearby N.S.S (Nair Service Society) hostel. The government had been paying an amount of Rs 315 as a monthly stipend to the SC students that was not sufficient for Rejani to meet her hostel fee of RS 1000 apart from transportation charges, cost of books etc.

Her father was a daily wages labourer and was unable to support her education. Rejani and her parents tried to get a Bank loan to meet her essential financial requirements. She first went to Indian Oversees Bank (Puzhanadu branch) for the educational loan. The bank manager was reluctant to even give her the application form.

Then Rejani and her mother went to the local M.L.A. Thampanur Ravi and asked him to intervene. It was only then that the application form was given to her. When she presented the application for loan in the bank, she was told to come after two weeks. Later, Rejani together with her mother went to the bank more than 20 times to enquire about the status of her educational loan application.

Finally, she was told that she was not eligible for an educational loan. Her family had no property other than their 2.5 cent land and a hut, and that was not valuable enough for the bank to sanction an educational loan. It seems that her gender and caste together played an important role towards this refusal of loan by the bank. In Kerala, a woman going to a bank without her father, brother or husband would be normally ignored.

Rejani could not afford to take her father along for the necessary .respectability.. Her father was a labourer and his daily wages were essential for the family. She had applied for an educational loan, which does not require surety, legally. According to the Reserve Bank of India’s circular on the educational loans – any merititorious candidate could avail herself a loan of up to Rs 4 lakhs for one course without furnishing security and without accruing interest on the loan until she gets employment.

Here the non-secured ‘future’ of a Dalit woman might be an obstacle for the bank manager to sanction loan. As a woman, there was no guarantee that Rejani would complete the course; she might have dropped out of her studies if she were to get married. As a Dalit girl, there was no guarantee of a good job even after the completion of the course.

These points might be bothering the non-Dalit manager and in that case, how can a bank grant the educational loan? Afterwards, Rejani went to the State Bank of Travancore but here also she was denied the loan. Then her parents approached Thampanur Ravi (the local MLA) for financial assistance.

Though he immediately made the promise but never bothered to fulfill it. They went to the Block Panchayat for assistance but were told that it had no such financial assistance programme and funds. They went to Pazhavangadi Scheduled Caste office but were returned empty handed.

She could not go to her college for more than two months as her hostel authorities were threatening her to deposit the hostel fees. The last straw seems to be the apparent denial of Transfer Certificate (T.C) from Adoor Engineering College due to the non-payment of the fees. Rejani had got a chance to join Mary Matha College, which had promised her free education and lodging. When she approached her college for a T.C, they sent her off to pay the dues. She was sent to the Entrance (Engineering and Medical courses) commissioner’s office. It is here that she committed suicide by jumping out from the seventh floor of that building.
 

Ajay Sree Chandra
On 26th august 2007, Ajay sree Chandra commited suicide in his hostel room. Ajay had a middle class background, as his father is a faculty at the Government Polytechnic College in Hyderabad. He belonged to madiga community and hailed from Malipuram village, Nalgonda district of Andhra Pradesh. Ajay was a second generation literate from a Dalit family and was ‘meritorious’ enough to compete with the normative ‘value’ of merit. Yet, as a Dalit he had no choice except to commit suicide!

Ajay was meritorious (in terms of marks secured) enough to get a seat in IISc in the general quota. He was one of the top twelve in India, to get into PhD course in Biological sciences at IISc Banglore. Still he was admitted in the reserved category. Labels are labels and one could not even symbolically discard them just because of ‘merit;!

The diary that Ajay maintained was possibly tampered with at the time of his death and it is quite probable that this must happened at the behest of the institute with the help of police. The suicide note had disappeared.

The only clue of the circumstance that would have led him to commit suicide is given in his diary where he described the atmosphere of his lab in the following word-“Those eyes, they scare me, they look with such inferiority/superiority complex @you. They tell everything (most of that time). Those eyes scare me… those scares me a lot. My legs are paining…”

According to his friends at IISc, Ajay was undergoing tremendous mental torture by couple of professors, who are non-cooperative and often humiliated him on caste lines. But according to the Institute, Ajay commited suicide, because of his ‘personal’ stress.

When informed by the IISc authorities, Ajay’s father came there to receive the body of his son and at that time he did not had any clue about caste discrimination. Later, after some time when the SC/ST union from the institute informed him of the caste discrimination, he was shocked.

As a middle class student, Ajay had all the tools to be a meritorious student, to compete well with the mainstream upper caste students. But failed, as merit is not the percentage of marks one secured, it seems to be the mark of caste.
 

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About an hour back, about 3.30 pm on Thursday January 21, 2016 agitating students if HCU were informed that the highest body if the university, Hyderabad Central University (HCU), the Executive Council has revoked the suspension of five students including Rohith Vemula who committed suicide on January 17. The text of the resolution can be read here.

Agitating students see this hurriedly taken decision as a response to the cross country protests against what is being increasingly viewed as the institutional murder of Rohith. 

Rohiths scathing letter to Vice Chancellor Appa Rao dated December 18, 2015 is a precursor to what happened.

Agitating students representing the Ambedkar Students Association and the Students Federation of India see this as a placatory measure meant to diffuse the demands for  fair probe. The conduct of the Vice Chancellor and ministers of the Modi government in the targeting of these students has raised serious questions of improper exercise of executive power.

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Dalit Students as Victims of Institutional Casteism in India

Re published from http://routesblog.com/2016/01/19/dalit-students-as-victims-of-institutional-casteism-in-india/
 
India’s unparalleled revolutionary leader B.R.Ambedkar’s infamous dictum is ‘Educate, Agitate, Organise,’ none of which the Indian Brahmanical state wants the 200 million Dalits (former untouchables) to do and this intentional objective of the state was exemplified in the death of an young Dalit scholar Rohit Vemula of University of Hyderabad who aspired to become a scientist like Carl Sagan.

His only fault was that he was a Dalit, that too someone who was conscious of his identity and followed the footsteps of Ambedkar involved in the construction of a Dalit selfhood and claimed himself as a Dalit-Marxist, a political category propagated and made famous among the student community by comrade Chittibabu Padavala.
 
As president of Ambedkar Students Association, Rohit worked hard to forge a Dalit-Muslim solidarity and fought against food fascism by organising beef festivals a visibly upsetting political exercise for right wing Hindutva forces in the state who had earlier in another educational institution of higher learning had tried hard to foil the establishment of a study circle on Ambedkar but in vain. A whole young generation of conscious Ambedkarites is the most threatening factor for these right wing forces.
 
What followed was arm-twisting by the Hindutva politicians and the casteist university administration, which succumbed to it and expelled five Dalit students. The expelled students continued their protest by staging a sleep-in-protest within the campus, however as a result of deep inflicted psychological pain, one of the students committed suicide leaving a note depicting the cruelty of caste, he wrote, “The value of a man is reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility to a vote, a number to a thing, never was man treated as a mind.” This evaluation of what is being valued it is not mind but identity which in practical terms does count in the most hierarchical society in the world leaves us with what Gopal Guru[1] famously formulated as the Theoretical Brahmins and Empirical Shudras where the latter is a matter of mere numbers while the former is associated with cognition.
 
The Brahmanical state follows certain uniformity when it comes to dealing with the Dalits, they practice humiliation to an extent that is disgusting. The state, which was not able to provide a dignified life to Dalits at least should guarantee a honourable final journey. More like the recent incident that happened in Tamil Nadu where a 100 year old Dalit man whose funeral procession was prevented by caste Hindus despite a High Court Order which finally saw the police instead of implementing the HC Order were found carrying the body doing the cremation.
 
In Rohit Vemula’s case too, the state after seeing the students assemble in huge numbers sensed that they would showcase the anger towards state secretly without a grain of respect for the departed soul hurriedly performed the cremation.
 
The educational institutions in India are largely nothing but an extension of rural life marked by caste rigidity for most of the Dalit students, the only difference is caste is tangible in the latter case while in the former it is a combination of visible forms of caste practices and also in more subtle forms. The caste discrimination starts from the level of primary schools where once can cite numerous cases of Dalit kids being asked to clean toilets to use separate utensils to eat and drink.
 
And, it is also a common phenomenon to witness the social boycott of Dalits as mid day meal programme cooks. Citing ritual pollution the caste Hindu parents would make their children go hungry than eat food cooked by a Dalit. In a recent incident, a Dalit kid was asked by his teacher to remove faecal material in front of fellow students using bare hands. Ashamed by this act the child has developed a psychological disorder, an obsession to constantly wash his hands. Suspecting reasons for this change in his behavior, when parents probed the child to find out what had happened, and it was only after strong protests that the caste Hindu teacher was arrested. This is one among numerous cases we see unfolding in what are called “spaces of learning.” Coloured wrist bands as a form of identification of their respective castes is a common feature in most of the schools in the rural and semi urban pockets of southern Tamil Nadu and a few areas in Northern Tamil Nadu.
 
You can pick any random Dalit and inquire with him about caste discrimination in classrooms prevalent there. There would be many tales to tell, the perpetual psychological fear of being discriminated against and humiliated based on their identity is a lived experience that every Dalit has to undergo inside educational institutions in India. Many are in fact living their lives masquerading their identity for want of caste discrimination.
 
As deftly put forward in a recent piece by Meena Kandasamy,“ Education has now become a disciplining enterprise working against Dalit students: they are constantly under threat of rustication, expulsion, defamation, discontinuation.” By restricting social interaction the Dalit students are thus faced with deprivation of capabilities, a common feature practiced and perfected by caste Hindus in educational institutions to maintain and safeguard their caste privileges.
 
The percentage of Dalit students who enter higher educational institutions are meagre in number and even they are not spared. In the name of accumulated privilege over centuries in the form of both cultural and social capital the upper caste Hindus function within an invented realm called meritocracy. Entering the corridors of elite educational institutions like Indian Institute of Technologies (IIT) and Indian Institute of Managements and Central Universities for scores of Dalit students is like walking into hell, the fear of being shamed and humiliated based on birth status hangs like a Damocles sword above their heads. After years of relentless struggles in their everyday lives they reach these institutions only to get caught in the entanglement of the most-unfair game of caste based micro power politics. It was no wonder why given nature of its exclusivity the IIT’s were dubbed as Iyer and Iyengar Technology, a stronghold of Brahminical supremacy.
 
Root of the Problem
 
The root of this problem definitely lies with the caste Hindus who are nurtured and brought up within a feudal mindset and even the progressive among them carry a patronizing self as pointed out clearly by Ambedkar,
 
It is usual to hear all those who feel moved by the deplorable condition of the Untouchables unburden themselves by uttering the cry. We must do something for the Untouchables. One seldom hears any of the persons interested in the problem saying, ‘Let us do something to change the Touchable Hindu.’
 
It is invariably assumed that the object to be reclaimed is the Untouchables. If there is to be a mission, it must be to the Untouchables and if the Untouchables can be cured, Untouchability will vanish. Nothing requires to be done to the Touchable. He is sound in mind, manners and morals. He is whole; there is nothing wrong with him. Is this assumption correct? Whether correct or not, the Hindus like to cling to it. The assumption has the supreme merit of satisfying themselves that they are not responsible for the problem of the Untouchables.
 
The idea of caste Hindus to empathise and sympathise with the Dalit cause needs to be shunned, instead they should all question their own selves and accept the bitter truth that they as part of this Brahmanical structure indeed failed not only to see annihilation of caste as a praxis but used it as a mere rhetoric. The guilt as practitioners of the most carefully planned hierarchichal system should haunt them as they in a way by remaining silent also played a part resulting in the death of Rohit Vemulas, Senthil Kumars and Nagaraju Koppalas. Ambedkar both as a symbol and an ideologue remains as the ‘weapon of the weak’ in India and carrying his ideals let us march forward to brazen out the social distinctions, inequalities and injustices of a caste-ridden society.
 
References
 
[1]. Guru Gopal (2002) How Egalitarian Are the Social Sciences in India? Economic and Political Weekly 37: 5003-5009.
 
(The writer is a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on caste processions and commemorations in Tamil Nadu, and his interests include, identity politics, social movements, caste and class, film studies and urban studies. He was previously working as a Correspondent for The Hindu Newspaper in India)
 
 

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