by ButterflyEffect

The events leading to Rohith’s suicide date back to July 2015, and reflect ongoing conflict between Dalit student politics, predicated on demands for self-respect and equality, and intolerance of progressive politics on college campuses across India. Twenty-five year old Rohith was a science student at the Central University of Hyderabad, and a member of the Ambedkar Students Association.4 In addition to fighting for the rights of Dalit students on campus, the ASA protested capital punishment, and challenged efforts to censor a film screening about murderous attacks on Muslims in the north Indian town of Muzaffarnagar in 2013. An altercation with members of the ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad), the student wing of Hindu nationalist forces, including an alleged attack on one of its members, followed. Similar conflicts between the ABVP and progressive student groups, especially those committed to anticaste traditions of radical equality, have taken place across college campuses. For instance, members of the Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle at the prestigious IIT Madras (IIT-M) also faced harassment and political intimidation by campus authorities in the summer of 2015. Ambedkarites’ commitment to constitutional equality is at odds with Hindu nationalists’ doublespeak regarding their investment in upholding caste hierarchy, while paying lip service to an anemic concept of social inclusion: hence the agonism between the student groups.

lil and humanodon, I'd be interested in hearing your response to this article. Not because of the cultural take of India, but because you are both involved in higher education.

What Rohith wrote above the postscript to his note is even more devastating. It implicates the social order that has excluded him, and prevented the dreams of this radical humanist. He notes that he had always wanted to be a science writer, “like Carl Sagan,” but that his suicide note is “the only letter I am getting to write.” He mourns the fact that “The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. … Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of star dust.”