By Jigna Kotecha:
Rohith Vemula’s suicide is evidence that caste and privilege are exclusively mutual in India. An evidence that caste is a promise of rights, social status, power, security, an easy life, hence privilege. An evidence of our silent comfort with the same caste privilege; silence that had the capacity to kill Rohith and Mohammad Akhlaq, and rape Kawsi Hidme and Soni Sori. And an evidence of our intolerance towards any change in caste hierarchy that might limit our privileges.
Complexities of social stratification in India starts with religion, branches into caste and further splits into sub-castes. For instance, if I am a Dalit and I convert to Islam, I will still remain a Dalit and will be addressed as Dalit Muslim. So, there is no escape from caste status because of social beliefs, lack of acceptance, and an entrenched superior-inferior mindset.
Approximately, 16 percent of India’s population is Dalit, excluding the population of Dalit Muslims and Dalit Christians. Larger population is living below poverty line. But, hate for reservation and love for management quota continues. According to the data compiled by National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, a crime against Dalits happens every 18 minutes — three women raped every day, 13 murdered every week, 27 atrocities every day, six kidnapped every week, but everything became more visible only after Rohith’s suicide.
[envoke_twitter_link]For Rohith, death was a refuge; refuge from caste, from atrocities, from discrimination[/envoke_twitter_link], and from the war that even Ambedkar could not win. A refuge away from cultural-religious determinism and closer to nature. He wrote that caste has reduced human intelligence to “immediate identity” (identity assigned by our ancestors who thought that the Sun revolves around the Earth) and “nearest possibility” (aping the age-old caste system keeps us from thinking of better possibilities for social reform). He wrote that man is a mind, not a vote, or a number. Still most of us will vote for a candidate of our caste, community or religion in elections and would take pride in representing a ‘number’. And, I think, it was dangerous for Rohith to carry caste and science – horror and hope – together.
A Brazilian friend was sitting beside me when I was reading the headline – “Silent cremation of Dalit student Rohith Vemula,” and she said, “I know about Dalit. They are untouchables, right? I know it from soap opera ‘Caminho das Indias’, a love story of a Dalit man, whose parents were burned at the stake for accidentally touching their master, and an upper caste girl, whose parents arranged her marriage with an upper-caste rich man. But it was in 2009. Are Dalits still punished for transgression?”
The simple answer was yes. But I don’t know why I felt the need to explain the complex social stratification of caste in India to her.
Finally, I asked her, “Do you know Gandhi?”
She said, “Yes!”
Then I asked, “Do you know Ambedkar?”
“No,” she replied quickly.
It is true that we are born with caste specifications in India. We grow up accumulating a lot of unscientific hunches about evolution, religion, and caste from our surroundings. But we are taught both history and science; history, to understand the wrongs committed in the past, and science, to falsify irrational beliefs and progress. We educate ourselves to learn and unlearn. However, every new generation is taking shape using the old mold of predetermined caste structures.
[envoke_twitter_link]Rohith’s death has led to a dissemination of the atrocities perpetrated against Dalits[/envoke_twitter_link] in every part of India.
It should be a catalyst to unleash revolution for social reform, to uncover the sick and irrational beliefs, and to end caste determinism.