The quality of work done by the Indian Intelligence Bureau and the purposes for which the agency is used are made abundantly clear by a news report in The Times of India on Thursday and its regional language editions that quotes a“secret intelligence report” to National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, which says that Rohith Vemula was not Dalit.
A report from the ground in the Hindustan Times, published at least 12 hours before The Times of India report, establishes in chilling detail the complex story of Rohith Vemula’s life, his family and his caste. His mother is of the Mala caste, and was given up by her poor migrant construction worker parents. In law, he is a Dalit.
When a “secret intelligence report” that fits the government’s version falls into the hands of a friendly journalist and her report appears on the front page of a major newspaper, the phrase “calculated leak” comes to mind. Especially as the contents of the so-called secret report are much the same as reports that appeared in the media within a couple of days of Rohith Vemula’s death.
Useful leak
As the protests in Hyderabad and elsewhere continue, it seems, the government is determined to find proof for an assertion made by Minister for Human Resource Development, Smriti Irani that “this is not a Dalit non-Dalit issue”. It is more interested in denying the caste of the young man who died, than in fixing responsibility for or even just understanding the circumstances that impelled him to take his own life on the campus of a central university.
Comparisons with the government’s reactions to Mohammed Aqhlaq’s murder in Dadri are unavoidable. In the Dadri case, union ministers and state agencies were rather more interested in whether the dead man had beef or mutton in his fridge than they were in the fact that he had been dragged out from the safety of his home and lynched by a mob.
The motivation for the government’s conduct is simple: to undermine the enormity of the acts. To deprive them of the power they have to touch people’s conscience and hence mobilise support against acts of communal and caste violence and the role of Sangh Parivar organisations in perpetrating these forms of violence.
In Dadri, the effort in trying to shift the focus to the meat from the murder was to suggest that the motive of the murderers was not communal hatred but passionate bhakti, because they revered the cow as a god/mother.
Shifting the blame
In Hyderabad, by trying to prove that Rohith Vemula was not Dalit, they hope to say he was not a victim of the discrimination that he felt so keenly and which is reflected in his suicide note, and that Dalit political mobilisation is based on fraud.
In Hyderabad, as in Dadri, the role of groups that are part of the Sangh Parivar is at issue and the government’s defence appears to be to deny their responsibility. In Dadri, the main accused is the son of the local Bharatiya Janata party man with links to the Union Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma. In Hyderabad, the trouble started with a student leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, whose brother belongs to the BJP’s youth wing, and who had the support of the local BJP MLC and the Union Minister Bandaru Datatreya.
As Rohith Vemula’s story refused to recede from public discussion, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had directed his ministers to “put facts before the people and set the record straight” in order to distance his government and party from the case. It seems his government, and state agencies that it controls, are strenuously trying to produce the facts and create the record that lets them, the BJP and its affiliate organisations off the hook and bolsters their political narrative that denies the communal and caste violence.