Like Rohith Vemula, ex-serviceman Ram Kishan Grewal chose suicide as a form of protest

Last evening, India's national capital became a penal colony once again. It was under siege as subedar Ram Kishan Grewal's suicide over One Rank One Pension (OROP) sparked agitations - some spontaneous, some carefully timed - that made Delhi Police detain prominent leaders of opposition, making for spectacular TV.

Meanwhile, the ex-Army jawan's poison-debilitated body became a site of examinations, interrogations and point-scoring, taking it away from his own family members who were arrested, beaten up by New Delhi's ever-obliging cops.

The 70-year-old Ram Kishan Grewal took his own life at Jantar Mantar and his suicide note said he was doing this for the soldiers. The soldiers are who at the battlefield, at the borders, the soldiers who are manning conflict zones within India, the soldiers who have retired and are now called "veterans" but are stunned and stung and deeply humiliated by a system that has shorn them of any dignity, left them begging for their richly deserved post-retirement benefits.

Ram Kishan Grewal wanted to submit a memorandum to the defence ministry over OROP, but defence minister Manohar Parrikar was inaccessible. This is the same minister who had dubbed the Indian Army as a directionless Hanuman until Lord Ram in Prime Minister Narendra Modi guided its fumbling hands to the road to glory - the surgical strikes across the Line of Control.

In his suicide though, he has upstaged not only the utterly insensitive defence minister, but also the retinue of the current regime's rogue spokespersons who invoke the armed forces at every opportunity to cull debate, but subject the serving and retired members of the Army, Navy and Air Force to painfully slow and tortuous, deathly atrophy by disgrace, dishonour and financial deprivation.

Exactly the sentiments were echoed in Rohith Vemula's suicide note. We should read and reread it again and again today, but here are the lines that could have been equally about Ram Kishan Grewal and his decision to take the "extreme step".

"The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing."

What connects this 27-year-old Dalit PhD student to the retired jawan, two people who had lived different lives in vastly separated parts of India, is the deep sense of betrayal and being shattered by the State's institutional apathy, that manifests in myriad forms, and dehumanises its own citizens, entire peoples, to serve narrow "nationalist" interests.

It's the nationalism of the few, by the few, for the few, but which needs narratives of concocted greatness and glory and imposed, non-existent unity among severely disenfranchised peoples.

It's the same nationalism that wanted to erase and expunge Rohith Vemula's story - "my birth is my fatal accident" - the everyday brutalities of caste oppression when you're born/raised a Dalit in 21st century India.

His posthumously published online diary - Caste Is Not A Rumour - details the daily travails of a politically alert, beautiful idealistic mind that was chained to the manacles of its accident of birth, its "lower caste origins".

The series of events that led to Rohith Vemula's drastic step and the events that were caused by the enormity of its political statement are testament to India's caste-induced institutional rot that infects even a hallowed university, an institution of learning how to question and unlearning how to blindly believe.

But from the brutal crackdown of Hyderabad Central University students who demanded #JusticeForRohith, to the deplorable scene of the former HRD minister Smriti Irani lying under oath in Parliament, to the lynching of Dalit youths by gau rakshaks in Gujarat and the resultant uprising led by Jignesh Mewani, it is evident that Vemula's suicide was the lightening spark that set fire to a tinderbox of continued oppression.

Yet, when JNU students clubbed Rohith Vemula's death with those repressed and dying in Kashmir, refusing to see them separately, they were immediately branded as anti-nationals (in fact, so was Vemula when he was expelled by the university for his political activism). Vemula and JNU students were contrasted with soldiers dying at the border, at Siachen, particularly lance naik Hanumanthappa, as it made for an easy good versus evil narrative to serve the "nationalist" cause.

However, with Grewal's suicide, that distinction, so artificial and false, has fallen flat. Left without proper pensions under OROP, with their official ranks tinkered with and lowered compared to civilian bureaucrats, with their disability pensions dented - the soldier today has become an empty signifier of perpetual war-hungriness, a pawn in the game of militant jingoism. Bharat Mata ki Jai has erased the memory of Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan.

Senior journalist Josy Joseph draws attention to this very discrepancy in the present regime's petty, utilitarian understanding of the soldier when he narrates the life and times of flight lieutenant MP Anil Kumar, who led most of his life as a quadriplegic after a brief stint as a bright and brilliant Indian Air Force combat pilot.

What is the role of a soldier in peacetime? He asks: "The story helps us reduce an entire discussion to a single question. Who is a better asset: a dead soldier or a living one?"

Joseph writes: "Modern history is replete with narratives of how nations that do not make enough efforts at peace, so that their soldiers can enjoy a normal lifespan to showcase their unique skills and abilities, will be reduced to chest-thumping jingoists in a land awash with forgotten war widows."

Grewal's suicide brought us back to the same question that Rohith Vemula posed in his suicide note. Where is the dignity in life? Where is the opportunity for the ordinary civilian who is born to a Dalit or a Muslim or working class family to lead a full life, a life pursuing higher goals than becoming a mere vote bank for others' scurrilous political ambitions?

Where is the dignity of a healthy, productive life for a soldier injured in battle or in non-combat related military accidents, given the latter outnumber the former by a significant margin?

Why must a soldier's life be a teleology of inevitable martyrdom, why must his death be the only monetised asset for the political elite, while his life outside the battlefield dismissed as a lumbering burden on the national economy and national interest, the very things he's giving his life and limb to protect?

Like Rohith Vemula's mother who was manhandled by Delhi Police, yesterday Grewal's family members, his sons, were beaten up by cops, arrested and held for hours. Tomorrow, if there's a protest by police personnel over grievances old and new regarding working hours, lack of proper training, seriously poor compensation, will the government set out the Army to tackle and contain the agitating cops? The spectacle of our members of law enforcement unleashed against the veterans of the battlefield is a grotesque one, which may have unintended consequences which we can only shudder to even imagine.

The twin suicides bookending 2016 are grave reminders of the injustices that emanate from each and every one of India's institutions. Of course, we need to add to the discourse the thousands of farmers who have taken their lives out of extreme economic desperation in distant Marathwada and other drought-affected swathes of the country, far from the public eye that stays glued to the dramatics of prime time television and episodes that make the sordid cut.

That our collective political myopia has led us to a juncture when a spectacular death has become the only effective form of protest against this republic of brazen tyranny, is telling. It's really the last warning, a screaming alarm bell asking us to wake the hell up when we still can.

Suicides have sparked revolutions. In the near past, 26-year-old Tunisian fruit-seller Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on December 17, 2010 and precipitated the cycle of political upheavals in Egypt, Libya, Syria and other African, Middle Eastern countries, upheavals now known as the Arab Spring of 2011. But what preceded that suicide was years and years of brutal oppression - economic, cultural, sociopolitical.

If Vemula's death set off the chain of events that saw the universities across India becoming sites of a reinvigorated students movement for equal rights and justice and dignity, Grewal's death might as well trigger a sepoy mutiny of sort, given the daily disgruntlement that the members of the armed forces are being subjected to at present.

The sheer hypocrisy of the political establishment is not lost to those who are the most selfless among us, and they are tired, absolutely fatigued to see their selflessness used and abused for unbelievably narrow political and electoral ends, dipped in the revulsive jargons of upper caste, upper class Right-wing religiosity, exactly that Vemula was fighting against till he breathed last.

Their suicides are, however, a jarring reminder of India's utterly squandered political will, its immeasurably broken and diseased institutions, its lamentable polity and its spineless elites.

Will they go in vain? How long until even the suicides - the ultimate and most desperate form of protest - too are routinised, normalised and airbrushed from a photoshopped India, the so-called world's largest, and may be even the loudest, democracy?

Also read - Modi government must see OROP through