LEARNINGS FROM A COWARDS DEATH

On 17 January 2016, 27-year-old PhD. scholar Rohith Vemula committed suicide at the University of Hyderabad campus. We all know how the events unfolded after this incident. This matter is back in news with a one member panel constituted BY MHRD submitting its report on the incident.  This made me reflect back on the whole incident and I could only draw one conclusion out of it.

“Let me put it bluntly – For a guy who was also an activist, often in conflicts, to be committing suicide for merely being thrown out of the University hostel is nothing short of cowardice”.

Instead of being a coward, Rohith should have learnt from his idol Dr BR Ambedkar. Despite being exceptionally talented, even Ambedkar had to undergo discrimination and humiliation before emerging as the icon for independent India. There are often these “poetic” gathering of morons at campuses who refer to themselves as Ambedkarites. The only thing these morons accomplish is sloganeering, this is because, unlike our inspirational Ambedkar, who put in his sweat and blood for the causes he believed in, these delusional poets only dream.

In his suicide note, Rohith requests his pending seven months scholarship of Rs 175000 to be given to his family. This is one more gem of a line as it teaches an important lesson of life. “One should work hard on helping and changing his/her own family conditions before taking a plunge into solving world’s problems”. When you don’t even understand this basic covenant of existence, well, you are doomed from the start. There is no perfect example to prove this than the Rohith episode. If he was a pragmatist instead of being a coward, he would have thought about his family, especially mother, who struggled poverty and social discrimination to ensure a good education for him.

“Even after 67 years of Independence there are class differences and caste discrimination but we should ‘Love our Nation'. If you are a Muslim, it is better to not get into an argument with a Hindu and if you are a Dalit, never look at any Savarna personh eye-to-eye. All this might trigger massive communal violence. ‘Independence Day Greetings!'. You should love your country and your love for the country is gauged with your hatred for other countries. Just curse a fellow Pakistani and you will be regarded as nationalist,” reads Rohits post on August 15, 2013. This establishes one thing beyond reasonable doubt, which is the idiom “Easier said than done”. If he was man of actions, learning from his icon Ambedkar, who fought poverty and social discrimination to ensure equality, Rohith Vemula should have preferred to fight the system instead of quitting. 

In conclusion, a coward called Rohith Vemula commits suicide at Hyderabad University and Sickular policitians and media pimps run to Hyderabad to scavenge over his dead body and engineer a national calamity by calling it “murder” and “murder of democracy”. Some of them went till the extent of glorifying suicide and immortalising a coward who took his life instead of fighting for what he believed. The media should stop being Jaundiced and prejudiced against anything that does not suit their sick agenda, because, there were tons of such suicides and never did the media romanticize so much with them. The one thing that media and Rohith Vemula family should remember here is, no mother in this country would want her child to give up without a fight like Rohith did and all they would remember him for would be his cowardice.