The Brief and Wondrous Life of Rohith Vemula

On a late February afternoon, several thousand Dalit, leftist, and liberal students marched through central Delhi. A forest of hands held aloft posters and placards with a photograph of a slender, smiling young man with a curly mop of hair whose name was Rohith Vemula. Radhika, his 49-year-old mother, walked with the students, a modest shawl draped across her shoulders. Her large brown eyes were misty. “I see Rohith in all of you,” she told the students.

Radhika had survived a violent, abusive marriage with a middle-caste man and raised her children alone, working as a tailor for about $50 a month. She had educated herself as she raised her family, eventually graduating from college. To get himself through college, Rohith Vemula had worked as a construction worker, made home deliveries for restaurants, and dropped advertising leaflets for stores. A college friend described Vemula’s life as “mostly about finding part-time jobs” and “reading about science on the Internet.” Vemula breezed into a masters program, and two years later, earned a spot in the science, technology, and society studies doctoral program at the University of Hyderabad. He won a highly competitive national scholarship, which gave him a stipend of about $450 a month.

To amplify their voice on campuses dominated by upper-caste students, faculty, and administrators, a group of Dalit graduate students at the university had founded the Ambedkar Students Association in 1994. The group was named after B. R. Ambedkar, the greatest Dalit leader of the twentieth century, who became the chief architect of the Indian constitution, and ensured that affirmative action found a place in the laws of the land. Affirmative action brought a degree of social mobility to the Dalits, but the inequalities, prejudices, and violence of the caste system remained entrenched. Informed by their experience of prejudice and the ideas of Ambedkar, the group developed into a critical forum for the rights of the Dalit students, formed progressive positions on national debates, and came into conflict with Hindu nationalist politics. Although Modi’s BJP and the Hindu nationalist mothership RSS co-opted Dalit voters in several elections, these organizations continued to be dominated by upper-caste men and held onto retrograde positions unacceptable to younger, educated Dalit men like Vemula.

Vemula, who wanted to be a science writer, spent his first two years at the university with the Students Federation of India, a moderate Marxist student group. Most of the Dalit students at Hyderabad came from government-run schools, where the medium of instruction was a vernacular language called Telugu. They barely spoke any English. Their inexpensive clothes set them apart from richer, upper-class students. “Within a few weeks, our classroom would be divided between the upper-class, urban students occupying the front rows and the poorer, Dalit and tribal students sitting in the back of the class. It is structural,” Gummadi Prabhakar, a Dalit doctoral student who had known Vemula, told me. “Our professors never bothered to explain anything in our own language.” In November 2013, Madari Venkatesh, a Dalit scholar researching “high energy materials” at the university, drank poison and killed himself after his multiple requests for a doctoral committee and supervisor were ignored for months. A probe into his death confirmed prejudice and neglect of lower-caste students. Seven other Dalit students had committed suicide in the past decade.

The experience of a largely segregated campus politicized Vemula, and he felt that other student groups were not responding to the urgency of caste discrimination, so he joined the Ambedkar Students Association. “Rohith was very active and articulate,” Prabhakar told me. “He wrote wall posters and pamphlets. Whenever there was a debate or a clash with the right-wing students, Rohith would be there.” Over the years, the popularity of the Ambedkarite group grew; they won student elections and grew more assertive. Vemula and his friends, with their instinctive understanding of structural injustices, extended support to other marginalized communities and expanded the debate beyond caste to speak out against the continuation of the death penalty, rights abuses in Indian-controlled Kashmir, violence against the tribals in central and southern India, and prejudice against Indian Muslims. Their positions pitted them against many Hindu nationalist students.

Modi’s victory in 2014 had legitimized hate speech and physical aggression against real and perceived opponents. Words that couldn’t be uttered at the dinner table were blared in the public sphere. Activists of the ABVP, the student wing of the RSS, backed by their seniors in the RSS and the BJP, displayed renewed aggression against critical voices on university campuses. In July 2015, a conflict between the ABVP, the student wing of the BJP, and Vemula’s group escalated after the Dalit students protested against the capital punishment of Yaqub Memon, a Muslim convicted of being involved in bombings in Mumbai in 1993 as revenge against the killings of several hundred Muslims by Hindu nationalist mobs. A month later, students in Delhi University organized a screening of a film called Muzaffarnagar Eventually, which documented the role played by the BJP in the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. The ABVP rushed into the auditorium and stopped the screening. In Hyderabad, Vemula and his friends protested against the disruption. An argument with Hindu nationalists students on campus erupted.

Nandaram Susheel Kumar, a leader of the ABVP at the university, filed a police complaint accusing the Dalit student group of assaulting him. A medical examination disproved his charges. Kumar, whose brother is a leader of the BJP and whose mother was a BJP candidate for municipal elections in Hyderabad, took his complaint to Bandaru Dattatreya, a Parliament member and labor minister in the Modi cabinet. Dattareya wrote a letter to Smriti Irani, then education minister. “Hyderabad University, Central University, located in Hyderabad has, in the recent past, become a den of casteist, extremist, and anti-national politics,” Dattareya wrote. “The purpose of my writing this letter is only to highlight the affairs in Hyderabad University. I earnestly hope under your dynamic leadership things will change in this campus for better.” A few weeks later, Dattatreya followed up with a second letter to Irani. According to The Indian Express, between September and November officers from Irani’s ministry sent five letters to officials at the university seeking information on the charges made by Dattatreya.

In September 2015, Irani appointed Appa Rao Podile, a professor specializing in plant disease control, as the University of Hyderabad’s vice-chancellor. Podile came from an influential upper-caste community of landlords in the state, and The Times of India reported that Podile had close connections with top leaders of the BJP. Podile also had a bitter history with Dalit students. In the early 2000s, when he was the administrator of the university’s dorms, some Dalit students overstayed in the residence halls after graduating from the university. “They didn’t have the money to rent a place as they looked for work,” Prabhakar recalled. “Appa Rao Podile would raid the rooms of Dalit students at 3:00 a.m. and throw them out with their bags.” During a dispute over the running of student kitchens, an angry Dalit student slapped Podile in the face. Ten Dalit students were expelled from the university for two years.

In December, Podile announced that Rohith Vemula and four other Dalit students were suspended. Vemula responded by writing a sarcastic letter to Podile suggesting ways to contain the growing political activism among Dalit students. “Please serve 10 mg Sodium Azide [a highly potent poison] to all the Dalit students at the time of admission. With direction to use when they feel like reading Ambedkar.” Vemula’s second suggestion sought another accessory for suicide, “Supply a nice rope to the rooms of all Dalit students…”

On January 3, Vemula and his friends were barred from entering most university administrative buildings and student dorms, participating in campus politics, and eating in hostel mess. Their rooms were locked. In a photograph capturing the banishment, three Dalit students are walking, carrying their cotton mattresses, a few bags, and a large portrait of their great leader B. R. Ambedkar. Banishment from most of the university spaces carried the bitter echo of untouchability, when Dalits were not allowed to drink from common wells, enter temples, eat in restaurants, or live within the boundaries of a village.

The five suspended students slept in the courtyard of a small shopping complex by the university gates, which Vemula described as a “Dalit ghetto.” University officials froze his stipend. Vemula, who had been sending most of his $450 monthly stipend to his mother, was living off loans from friends. His younger brother, Raja Vemula, a geologist by training, worked an entry-level job at a research institute in Hyderabad, where he made around $250 a month. He had rented a place in the city and moved their mother to the new home. A few days before his official banishment, Vemula visited his brother and mother. “Rohith was very clever. He could deal with any problem. But that day when I saw him, he said there was no hope of being able to complete his PhD. He felt that they would not allow him to do it. He talked about the case filed against him and the pressure from the ABVP and the BJP,” Raja told me. “That was his last day with us. That was my last conversation with him.”

On January 18, Vemula walked into a university dorm, entered a friend’s empty room, and hanged himself from the ceiling fan with the blue flag of the Dalit movement. He left behind a suicide note. “I always wanted to be a writer. A writer of science, like Carl Sagan. At last, this is the only letter I am getting to write.” Vemula claimed sole responsibility for his suicide and requested his friends and enemies be left alone. Yet his letter would be shown on the front pages of newspapers, prime time television, social media, and even quoted during debates in Parliament. “The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of stardust. In every field, in studies, in streets, in politics, and in dying and living.”

In the following weeks, Hindu nationalists fought pitched battles in the public sphere, trying to disprove that Vemula was a Dalit. Police began investigating his caste status. Sushma Swaraj, India’s foreign affairs minister, declared that Vemula was not a Dalit because his father, who had left the family when Vemula was an infant, came from a lower-middle caste of stonecutters, which is labeled as Other Backward Class but is technically not designated Dalit by the government. “We lived like Dalits and they want to deny us that too,” Raja told me, recounting how Radhika, a Dalit, brought them up by herself. “Our mother raised us, educated us. Nobody else cared.”

Four days after Vemula’s death, then education minister Smriti Irani organized a press conference to speak on the issue. She insisted that Vemula’s suicide had no relationship with caste discrimination, that her letters to the university had followed standard procedure. “There has been a malicious attempt to ignite passion and present this as a caste battle. It is not.” She even claimed that Vemula could have been saved but was deliberately allowed to die for political aims. “No one allowed a doctor near this child, to revive this child. Instead, his body was used as a political tool. No police were allowed till 6:30 the following morning. Who tried to help this child?” Modi tweeted a video of her speech to his 18.5 million followers with the Sanskrit words “Satyamev Jayate”—“Truth alone prevails.” University doctors disputed the claim, saying that a doctor had arrived within four minutes of the discovery of Vemula’s body, and by that time he was already dead.

Modi’s social warriors refused to give up. I even noticed that Kashyap, the IT professional from Hyderabad whom I had met in the days after Modi’s victory, was engaging in fierce arguments about Vemula’s suicide on Twitter. He denied Vemula belonged to the lowest caste, and even suggested Vemula had converted to Christianity. “So a young ‘scholar’ who wanted to f**k Hindutava [Hindu nationalism] ended up f***ing himself.”