How Gandhian ideals were martyred with Rohith Vemula

Hyderabad University scholar Rohith Vemula’s birthday and Mahatma Gandhi’s death anniversary happen to coincide today. Odd as this coincidence may be, the events that led to Rohith’s suicide even out for us telling similarities with the regrettable death of Gandhian ideals in the country.

Sixty-eight years since the Mahatma’s death, what one conjures up as the great inherent principles of India - civil disobedience, self-rule, peace, truth and non-violence – have become forged narratives of a nation that has relegated him to the past and whose only remaining value is that on our currency. An India that plunges readily into the shadows of oppressive ideologies and the blatant misuse of power that comes with them has long rejected Gandhian thoughts of social and political nation building.

And Rohith Vemula’s suicide is only one case in escalation.To start with, it was never illegal to watch Nakul Singh Sawhney’s Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai if one wanted to. The documentary that allegedly hurt communal sentiments was always open for public viewing except when supporters of right-wing politics got it formally "blocked" at the institutional level. It may have been imperative for Rohith and his friends to screen it at their university to assert their collective identity and reiterate their combined socio-political struggle. In many ways, it was a mark of civil disobedience against the ideology of the ultimate oppressor as Rohith saw it.

Perhaps he saw truth differently when he allegedly protested Yakub Memon’s death sentence. But that did not matter since his truth and ways of resistance dangerously challenged the State that spent years to make-believe its own sanctioned versions of the same. In return, he faced hooliganism from rivals and was withheld from any kind of expression till he was rendered mute and lifeless. Not much has changed since Gandhi’s own quest for self-empowerment, truth and, above all, the freedom to express, was suspended repeatedly by forceful incursion and imprisonment by British rulers.

Gandhi’s avant-garde concept of Swaraj (self-rule) envisioned governance to be non-hierarchical with complete political decentralisation. In the same nerve, the University of Hyderabad is one of the many autonomous institutions which is guaranteed total jurisdiction of its own matters, under the Central Universities Act 2009. In simple terms, Swaraj is the core philosophy of this provision allowing no government or political entity to impose its hierarchical authority or hold.

But even this law was cleverly arm-twisted in Rohith’s case and all it took was a distressed senior Member of Parliament, a panopticon-like human resource development ministry and a paranoid University administration among others. The oversight of the privileged and the powerful robbed Rohith of his own Swaraj as he was denied stipend, barred from entering his hostel premises and from contesting student union-elections.

Rohith and his friends had no other choice but to camp in a make-shift tent, braving cold winter nights and "colder shoulder" mornings. They decided to register protest by going on a relay hunger strike, an act that bore uncanny resemblances to Gandhi's 1943 hunger strike while serving prison term for the Quit India movement. Fasting was the most potent political tool for both Gandhi and Rohith to make ends meet in their own contexts – to call the oppressor’s bluff and gather unequivocal mass support against injustice.

While Gandhi’s struggle for freedom ended with India’s independence, Rohith decided to project the pain and helplessness of living in a difficult postmodern India by ending his destiny. His Satyagraha perhaps continues in a better place.

Ever since the mainstream media laid its hands on news of Rohith’s death, more than a dozen political leaders visited the University and delivered rapid-fire rhetoric of opportunism. Two different panels for interrogation, a hostile government, a shouting spree on primetime debates and a biased set of popular opinion - the stakeholders are aplenty and facts distorted.

Truth is forever out of reach and peace a distant dream with rising cases of institutionalised violence across the country against the oppressed - the irony of Gandhi’s tribute lurks us all.