Editorial: Rohith Vemula's ghost

When, in the thick of the election season, the police of a state reveal the conclusion of a much-delayed investigation of a politically-sensitive case, it is reasonable to suspect their political motives. In Telangana, as in all other states, the police tend invariably to be their master's voice. So, when it came to light that they had filed a closure report on the Rohith Vemula suicide case last month, eyebrows were raised over its startling conclusions and the interests they seem to serve.

The police brief in the case was to investigate the circumstances that led to doctoral student Vemula committing suicide, in January 2016, in a University of Hyderabad (UoH) hostel. He and his fellow students, all from subaltern social groups, had been mistreated by an administration that questioned their right to protest on campus, withheld their scholarships and then expelled them from their rooms. In a stirring burst of creativity, Vemula and his friends pitched camp on common grounds and named it the Veliwada, an allusion to the Dalit localities adjacent to every Indian village. The protest, and the self-extinguishment of a very becoming young man, brought home the apartheid that hides in plain sight in India, and the silky discrimination practised in our high-minded academe.

Indian police probes aren't known for sensitively dealing with suicide cases, and not much was expected of the Telangana police. However, even by those standards, the conclusions drawn in the closure report are staggeringly insensitive. Instead of delving, with the assistance of competent professionals, into the unrest in Vemula's mind in his tragic last days, the investigation goes to great lengths to determine whether the boy was a Dalit in fact. And having found, or purporting to find, that the caste certificates held by him and his family were iffy as to the Dalit status, the investigation jumps to the kangaroo conclusion that the university administration could not be blamed for his suicide. Some marsupial hops are required for this feat of logic: Vemula was not a Dalit, so was afraid of being outed, and so committed suicide, and vice-chancellor P Appa Rao's administration played no part in this tragedy.

Abetment to suicide cases are hard to nail. However, it's important to understand the context within which this tragedy occurred. This was early 2016 when the Union Human Resources Ministry of Smriti Irani became possessed by a resolve to rid campuses of subaltern student challenges. The overreaction to Vemula's protest at UoH was the first of the crackdowns on campus protests that we have seen in the past eight years. It was this case that supplied the trope for subsequent campus authoritarianism at JNU, AMU and BHU: A peaceful campus debate (Yakub Memon/Afzal Guru) is trumped up as a seditious challenge to the state, fake videos are circulated, the right-wing lexicon (anti national/casteist/tukde tukde) is applied and the police are called in.

The clean-chit given to the saffron-tainted UoH administration in the Vemula investigation was contrived and kept under wraps before the present Congress government came to power. So the question arises why a report that absolves BJP leaders was allowed to be presented now. The answer can only be that the Revanth Reddy government wanted to bring the report to the electorate's attention just so that it can then very ostentatiously order it to be withdrawn and redone. This is par for the course. A new master, a new tune and the police as the chorus line of the state.