Rohith Vemula

The very little that I have learned about him essentially comes from TV, some hearsay, and some more from print media. It is not much to go on, and it is not unique in affecting me so strongly and breaking me down; but there is enough here which I cannot fathom for the life or death of me, to fill my eyes, and whatever else in my system can cry, with tears. First there was only rage. Now there are only tears, and impotence. 

The facts of the matter (summarized from news reports):

Rohith Vemula, 26, was a second year PhD student at University of Hyderabad. In August 2015, Rohith and four other students were suspended for allegedly beating an activist from the BJP's student wing, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, during a protest on campus. The students were later cleared by the university, but in December, the university reversed its decision and took action against the students. Protesters allege that the university's decision was linked to a letter that Bandaru Dattatreya, the BJP parliamentarian from Secunderabad, 

 

wrote to Education Minister Smriti Irani, alleging that the university had become a "den of casteist, extremist and anti-national politics".  After Mr Dattatreya's letter, four letters went to the university from Smriti Irani's Human Resource Development ministry, asking what action had been taken. The research scholars were expelled from their hostel in December. They were denied access to hostels and other buildings on the campus except their classrooms, library and conferences and workshops related to their subject of study. Since January, they were forced to sleep in a makeshift tent on the campus. On January 17, 2016, Rohith told his friends that since his stipend was on hold, he was unable to give them “even a small treat”. Hours later, he hanged himself. Bandaru Dattatreya has now been named in a police complaint and has been accused of compelling the university to punish Rohith and his comrades. Smriti Irani has refused to comment on the Rohit Vemula suicide issue "until the investigation committee submits its report." (Link to a news video report on the case: http://bit.ly/1PdcPn4)

The text of Rohith's suicide note (in his language):

Good morning,

I would not be around when you read this letter. Don't get angry on me. I know some of you truly cared for me, loved me and treated me very well. I have no complaints on anyone. It was always with myself I had problems. I feel a growing gap between my soul and my body. And I have become a monster. 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.

I loved science, stars, nature, but then I loved people without knowing that people have long since divorced from nature. Our feelings are second handed. Our love is constructed. Our beliefs coloured. Our originality valid through artificial art. It has become truly difficult to love without getting hurt.

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 very field, in studies, in streets, in politics, and in dying and living.

I am writing this kind of letter for the first time. My first time of a final letter. Forgive me if I fail to make sense.

May be I was wrong, all the while, in understanding world. In understanding love, pain, life, death. There was no urgency. But I always was rushing. Desperate to start a life. All the while, some people, for them, life itself is curse. My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness. The unappreciated child from my past.

I am not hurt at this moment. I am not sad. I am just empty. Unconcerned about myself. That's pathetic. And that's why I am doing this.

People may dub me as a coward. And selfish, or stupid once I am gone. I am not bothered about what I am called. I don't believe in after-death stories, ghosts, or spirits. If there is anything at all I believe, I believe that I can travel to the stars. And know about the other worlds.

If you, who is reading this letter can do anything for me, I have to get seven months of my fellowship, one lakh and seventy five thousand rupees. Please see to it that my family is paid that. I have to give some 40 thousand to Ramji. He never asked them back. But please pay that to him from that.

Let my funeral be silent and smooth. Behave like I just appeared and gone. Do not shed tears for me. Know that I am happy dead than being alive.

"From shadows to the stars."

Uma anna, sorry for using your room for this thing.

To ASA [Ambedkar Students' Association] family, sorry for disappointing all of you. You loved me very much. I wish all the very best for the future.

For one last time,

Jai Bheem

I forgot to write the formalities. No one is responsible for my this act of killing myself.

No one has instigated me, whether by their acts or by their words to this act.

This is my decision and I am the only one responsible for this.

Do not trouble my friends and enemies on this after I am gone. [END]

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Not all people kill themselves, nor am I attempting to extol or provide absolution in the remotest possible way, to his suicide, which is one immeasurably tiny event, not only in the universal scheme of things, even in the world which mankind makes, fractures, breaks, diminishes, destroys; calling it progressive idealism, or civilizational enhancement.

I am not trying to give an illustration of the evils that prevail in our country, or in the rest of the world: worse things happen than this. I am writing because I cried last night as I do often, for events which take place anywhere in man's world; and I have continued to cry in the night.

So here is the small story, with its shortcomings arising out my ignorance of this subject. Perhaps very quickly it would escape from the world's attention, or get submerged to extinction under the zillions of occurrences that elbow their way to become news.

[NOTE: see my blogpost about Carl Sagan: http://bit.ly/1JeDgGx]