Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday urged Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah to enact the Rohith Vemula Act in the state to tackle caste-based discrimination and protect the right to education of Dalits and other marginalised communities.

“It is a shame that even today, millions of students from Dalit, Adivasi and OBC [Other Backward Classes] communities have to face such brutal discrimination in our educational system,” Gandhi said in a letter to Siddaramaiah.

Vemula, a PhD scholar at Hyderabad Central University, died by suicide in January 2016. In his suicide note, he had alleged caste-based discrimination and harassment by the university.

He and four others had been suspended on the complaint of a leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

In 2023, the Congress passed a resolution stating that it would enact a special Act named after Vemula to protect and safeguard the right to education and dignity of Dalits, tribal communities, Other Backward Classes and religious minorities if the party was voted to power in Karnataka.

On Friday, Gandhi told the Congress chief minister that “the murder of bright young people like Rohith Vemula, Payal Tadvi and Darshan Solanki is simply not acceptable”.

Tadvi, an Adivasi student at TN Topiwala National Medical College in Mumbai, died by suicide in 2019 after facing alleged casteist abuse while working at the hospital.

In 2023, Solanki had died by suicide at the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay. His family had alleged that he faced caste-based discrimination at the institute.

It was “time to put a firm end to this”, Gandhi said in his letter on Friday. “I urge the Karnataka government to enact the Rohith Vemula Act so that no child of India has to face what Dr BR Ambedkar, Rohit Vemula and millions of others have had to endure,” he added.

Gandhi said on social media that he wrote the letter to Siddaramaiah after he recently met students and teachers from the Dalit, Adivasi and OBC communities in Parliament. “During the conversation, they told me how they face caste-based discrimination in colleges and universities,” he added.

“Babasaheb Ambedkar had shown that education is the only means by which even the deprived can become empowered and break the caste system,” the Congress leader said. “But it is very unfortunate that even after decades, lakhs of students are facing caste discrimination in our education system.”