Rohith Vemula's suicide took the
nation by storm. A wave of outrage that began on January 17 when the news of
his suicide broke along with his intellectually worded suicide note. Since
then, the social media and the mainstream media have been all about the issue, giving
due exposure any such story deserves.
And then, there were elements in
place.
It was a prestigious central
university - University of Hyderabad.
A Dalit research scholar had committed
suicide in an educational institution where other eight Dalit students,
alleging caste discrimination, had committed suicide in the past decade.
Rohith's letters blamed his
university and social institutions.
Then there were letters by a
union minister from BJP and from a central government ministry, Human Resources
Development, led by Smriti Irani, in the case pressurizing the university
administration to take action against Rohith Vemula and some other students for
their alleged assault on an Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad leader (ABVP).
So, there was this angle of
student politics - touching the chords of national politics - in a metro city
that is one of India's Information-Technology capitals.
And above all, there was this
angle of Dalit Vs non-Dalit angle.
So, even if was a horror, that a
young student was forced to commit suicide due to administrative apathy, social
disparity and political interference, all elements were in place for every
stakeholder, including politicians, to squeeze the mileage that would suit
them.
Yes, apart from social media and
media outrage, and the subsequent social mobilization, it is pure politics.
And why it is pure politics
becomes clear from yet another social horror.
Three students of an allied
medial college in Villupuram, a Tamil Nadu district, committed suicide by
jumping in a well because they had lost all hopes for their future as the
college that had promised them a rosy future had duped them of their families'
savings. They alleged in their suicide note that the college administration had
imparted no skills in almost first two years of their college and there were no
facilities to train them. The college was busy in looting them, and at the same
time, was killing the students by denying them their option to earn livelihood.
The students wrote in their
suicide note that they were committing suicide hoping that it would draw
attention to their plight. Another girt student from the same college committed
suicide later.
These students were Dalit as
well.
Yes, we cannot and we should not
compare but it was another horror after Rohith Vemula's suicide that should
have rightly driven us mad on the sorry state of affairs in the our higher
educational institutions.
But it didn't happen after the
initial social media and media fury - and why?
To continue..
©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/
