Friday marked five days since Rohith Vemula killed himself. Five days during which the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has labelled the Dalit scholar at the University of Hyderabad and the organisation he was part of anti-national, impugned his caste identity, and suggested that he was part of a group that assaulted a member of the BJP student arm, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. Now Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants us to know he cares.
Delivering a convocation address at BR Ambedkar University in Lucknow on Friday evening, he said, between long pauses and his chin aquiver: “…when there is news that a youth of my country, Rohith, was compelled to commit suicide, what his family must have gone through! A mother has lost a darling son. There will be reasons, there will be politics but the fact remains, a mother has lost her son. I feel that pain”.
The Prime Minister’s expression of grief follows efforts by his ministers to deflect attention from the conduct of his party members, cabinet colleagues and the Ministry of Human Resources Development in what was a dispute between university students. These efforts failed miserably as the party and its spokespersons continued to malign Rohith Vemula: Modi's cabinet colleague the Human Resource Development minister Smriti Irani muddied the waters with half-truths and inaccuracies, leading to Dalit faculty members at the University of Hyderabad resigning their administrative posts.
Following a template
Dramatically delivered though it was, Prime Minister Modi’s private pain feels part of the pro forma responses that his government is now setting out to try to contain the fall-out of Rohith Vemula’s suicide and the politics that got him expelled from his hostel and excluded from parts of the university.
On Friday, Irani’s ministry announced that it would set up a three-month judicial commission “to review the entire sequence of events and the circumstances; and establish the facts and correctives in the context of the University”. This is a change from Irani’s position just 48 hours ago that the matters at the University of Hyderabad were in the hands of the police and the courts, and that is how they would be settled. But, the ministry would do well to set out clearly what it means by “correctives in the context of the University”.
The Human Resource Development Ministry has also announced a programme of re-education specifically for academic administrators; academics who are not administrators, it would appear, do not need re-education. This re-education will be via a “module”-based “orientation programme” aimed at “sensitising academic administrators about understanding and handling problems faced by socially, educationally and economically disadvantaged students”. This would be compulsory for all wardens, administrative staff and registrars. All Vice Chancellors and senior administrators would also be “sensitised to reach out to socially, economically and educationally disadvantaged students”.
Re-education, or that peculiarly bureaucratic usage “sensitisation”, is a fig leaf. It is the standard method that governments and large organisations use to produce measurable evidence that they have done something about a problem. A “sensitisation” module will be written, an orientation programme conducted attendance counted, certificates issued and the bureaucratic target will have been met. But, orientation programmes and sensitisation classes or re-education by modules do not change human behaviour.
Irani with all the evidence before her that Vemula and his companions who were punished by the university felt that they had been picked on because of their caste identities said emphatically that it was “not a Dalit non-Dalit issue”. No doubt the Vice Chancellor and senior administrators of the university, whom the Human Resource Development ministry wants to re-educate, felt the same way. Would that not be why the Vice Chancellor ignored Rohith Vemula’s letter telling him to give Dalit students ropes and poison ‒ aids to euthanasia.
Avoidance tactics
A sure sign that the ministry has cobbled together a list that will give the impression that it is responding to the problem is this: “A special mechanism would be set up at the Ministry for receiving and taking expeditious action on the grievances from these (socially, educationally and economically disadvantaged) students.” Does the ministry have the capacity (or the resources to create the capacity) to deal with complaints from the dozens of centrally funded higher education institutions? Or will its expeditious action amount to very quickly forwarding their complaints back to their universities and sending them regular reminders?
Caste discrimination in educational institutions – from pre-school to university – is endemic. And a first step towards trying to change this is acknowledging it to be true. An orientation programme for central university administrators is no acknowledgement of the problem; it is a way of sidestepping it. The manner in which the human resources development ministry casts its solutions underlines this. It talks of the “problems faced” by and the “grievances” of socially, educationally and economically disadvantaged students, rather than saying that the problem is that university administrators are very likely unselfconsciously castiest and discriminatory in their dealings with students.
Prime Minister Modi too, expressing his pain at Rohith Vemula’s suicide, was sidestepping the issue. He spoke at length about Ambedkar’s refusal to complain about the difficulties he faced and quoted his call to the oppressed to “educate, organise and agitate”. That is what Rohith Vemula and his friends were doing. But the BJP vilified them calling them “casteist, extremist and anti-national”. Modi said nothing to correct this.
