– Gogu Shyamala
From the sea came a tsunami and carried away a child building castles on the shore. The child’s name was Rohith Vemula. But why would nature attack him so? He was a person who loved nature! [A mother’s question]
It is indeed a travesty to his memory that he has been painted as a traitor. Some examples of what, as a PhD scholar, as an intellectual, a patriot, Rohith wrote on Facebook: valuing women and men who reaped harvests and how they protected national food security; remembering the families of the soldiers who were the protectors of the distant national borders; focusing on how in the villages, many children do not have water to drink—if they had, that it was dirty; etc. A traitor?
Institutionalized domination
We know that institutionalized dominant forces—patriarchy, caste, religion always try to dominate the foundations of civil society and terrorize its members.
Today the dominant forces have intensified their brahmanical attack on educational institutions. If we ask what happens when government itself attacks institutions with their undemocratic practices,the answer is: People like Rohith Vemula die. The vice chancellor, the government and the administration together became the cause of Rohith’s death. It seems as if their determination was to put a stop to Rohith’s strong attempt to succeed as a scholar. Had he pursued ordinary employment writing various competitive exams; had he resigned to his failure in the university and become an activist or politician; or had he worked as a daily wage labourer in the city or village; nobody would have found it a problem. The only problem was that Rohith made an effort to stand up as a scholar and Ambedkarite intellectual. This is why the university closed access to the entire infrastructure (library, canteen, fellowship, class room access, etc.) that Rohith needed for his attempt. This institutional ostracism is clear from his first letter to the VC. The message to Rohith that becomes clear in these actions is “Die! Or leave the university!”
Rohith’s predicament was not unique. This has happened to several students: some died, many languish even today. All these occurrences have remained untold as minor incidents in the everyday life of the nation. The important thing is that Rohith’s unnatural death became the focus of a movement that brought critical issues to public debate.
Polarization
The student world accepted Rohith’s desires, thought, experience of discrimination and his life practice as its own.This is why they joined the movement as a wave of commitment with crystal clear demands.
Rohith was a mirror to society. There was a complete polarization. If on the one hand, the administration and the HRD ministry tried to categorize Rohith as a non-dalit, and his death as a suicide due to depression, on the other, the students were certain that his was an institutional murder.
If the students’ embraced Rohith, the local (Andhra and Telangana) BJP, the administration and some news channels (like Bharat TV) ranged against Rohith, descended to a new low and subjected his memory to indignity and humiliation, calling him a traitor. Did they not seek to murder the dead Rohith a second time?
What was depressing through all this was that Rohith, such a great soul, had to end his life. The act of suicide is completely against the spirit of Ambedkarism and self respect. In spite of having such wisdom and education, was Rohith trapped in the university’s web of deception? What does it mean when one who belonged to the historically conscious Ambedkar Students Association commits suicide? In spite of Rohith having many options and avenues to stay alive, why didn’t he use them? In the past, ASA students who were rusticated struggled against their rustication for long years and succeeded in building a career for themselves. Shouldn’t today’s ASA members learn from the experience of failure, struggle and success experienced by their predecessors? On the other hand, had the ASA had taken Rohith’s mother Radhika’s support perhaps the thought of suicide may not have entered his mind.
Radhika and family
It is worth stepping back and examining the life his mother Radhika lived. We see that she swam against the current from birth. Her birth-parents of the Mala caste (SC) informally handed her over to her adoptive parents of the Vaddera caste (BC) without her consent. Though her adoptive mother looked after her food and clothing, she did not get Radhika educated as she did her own children. Radhika who studied in an ordinary government school had to drop out and work as a servant in her adoptive mother’s house. Again, without her consent, the adoptive-mother (as her own responsibility) got Radhika married to a man from the Vaddera caste. The husband got to know within a few days of the marriage that Radhika belonged not to the Vaddera community, but was a Mala. With this, Radhika’s in-laws humiliated her. The husband beat and abused her saying “I have been burdened with a mala bitch!”
She withstood it all and stayed her ground, bearing three children. Her condition was known across the village. However, when Radhika saw her husband beat up his own mother, she decided that the influence of such a violent and cruel man on her children would be very harmful. She left his house and moved with children to the Malawada. Her new neighbours embraced her arrival saying that their child had returned. Raja, was barely two months old. The two elder children too were toddlers. She rented a room and subsisted as a tailor. She sent the two elder children to a nearby school. She got a caste certificate and brought them up as Malas.
With this minimal shelter and support as a Mala woman, Radhika worked incessantly to ensure her children’s future. All the children studied well, but Rohith was exceptional. Seeing how the children came up in life, Radhika forgot her own troubles. Thus was Radhika, with no support from childhood, the mother who overcame obstacles at each step, the woman who gave birth to our Vemula Rohith Chakravarty. Rohith’s hardworking and honest nature came from Radhika alone.
She would make it a point to tell her sons each day, “Live among all with love and responsibility, my precious ones. But most important, have responsibility to your family. Only if you see of your mother with love and tenderness will you learn how to take care of your wife with love. You should never become like your father who beat his mother”.
Neelima the eldest finished her intermediate, Rohith entered the PhD programme and Raja finished his Masters in Science. With her children’s encouragement, she enrolled in the Ambedkar Open University and completed a degree. The process of Radhika getting her children and herself educated, nurturing her family and protecting it from violence are all crucial.
Absconding father
The father had no role. He showed no responsibility to the children Radhika bore him. He was a patriarchal despot who destroyed his family. Despite being born to the Vaddera community, he inherited neither their philosophy of community labour, nor their civic responsibility and instead manifested a dominant caste masculinity. The fact that his wife was a Mala woman, disturbed him, and he took it out on her. What then was his children’s crime that he abandoned them? If he was so nauseated by Radhika being a Mala woman, why did he have children with her? After these children were born, he married yet again and led his life apart from Radhika and her children. From that point on, even until the moment Rohith died, he did not consider Radhika’s children as his own.
Having lived for so long as a complete stranger, he suddenly surfaced in the media claiming to be Rohith’s father. I wonder what the ethics of the religion that embraced him was, that tutored him to conduct himself in such a manner! Why did the media and the BJP find his irresponsibility so attractive? “Rohith was my son. We are of the Vaddera community. Rohith is not an SC”, he declared. The BJP publicized this relentlessly.
Caste and patriarchy
The BJP located and brought the hitherto unknown father for this single purpose. Why did Radhika who bore Rohith, nurtured him and brought him to the university remain invisible to the BJP? This may be our, or at least my, naïve question, because the BJP’s Hindu brahmanism values the father and devalues the mother so much that they brought this absconding drunkard on the media stage atop a bottle of ‘dollar whisky’. Everybody knows that they did this to have key officials at government and university levels, and important politician escape the provisions of the SC/ST Atrocities Act. Clearly, the BJP has tried to use its authority to get a certificate that Rohith was not an SC and used this technicality to escape laws that have been the hard won outcome of dalit struggles, and further to deny the democratic community rights of Rohith and his mother.
Why did the local TV channels ignore Radhika and foreground the useless father? Had the channels focused on her story, it would have been an inspiration to so many single mothers, dalit, non dalit and those in inter-caste marriages. Television’s modern casteist and patriarchal values can be seen in the case of Radhika if we contrast her invisibility with the publicity and recent fanfare around INFOSYS Narayanamurthy’s letter to his daughter. In this letter, he says that it is her mother (his wife) who took the great responsibility of instilling qualities in her. Is it indeed not a shame, that the story of the struggles of this mother, Radhika to instill values in her children and nurture them, have been silenced by the media? Is it not the fact that Narayanamurthy was a member of the successful brahmanical elite that gave his absolutely mediocre letter of parenthood such praise, and that the intense life struggle of Radhika a poor dalit mother was ignored?
Dalit student struggles and the community
It is in this context that we should understand the establishment of a ‘veliwada’ in the university campus by the ASA in opposition to the anti-dalit acts. In hindsight, I think it was critical for the veliwada students to have kept their parents, and especially Rohith’s mother Radhika, informed of events. It was equally essential that these students involved different organizations in their own communities like the Ambedkar Youth Organizations, Phule Youth Organizations, etc., and thus extended the struggle. Perhaps Rohith did not tell his mother that the university effected a social boycott on him and were harassing him, fearing her ability to withstand the shock. This was the first mistake. Absorbing the humiliation himself, and committing suicide was his fatal mistake.
If these students were not of the ASA, it would be possible to think that they were not aware of dalit struggles against humiliation, not aware of Ambedkar ideology, not aware of other democratic movements in the Telangana and AP States. This was not the case with either Rohith or the ASA. Had the parents and communities been involved, they would have joined the students in their veliwada protests. Dalit communities would have come together. Would not the events would have taken a different turn? This is not only a problem of the ASA. Most dalit and left movements have functioned on the basis of male leadership and individualized participation. The ASA has simply followed this trend.
Perhaps there are some lessons to learn from this.
Gogu Shyamala works at Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies and may be reached at gogushyamala@gmail.com