Rohith Vemula-Kanhaiya Kumar Link Irks BJP As It Brushes Caste Under The Flag

Muzaffarnagar: When JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar spoke of caste inequality and called Rohith Vemula his “icon” after his release on bail for sedition, he didn’t have to connect the dots for his audience.Kanhaiya’s arrest in JNU came just short of a month after the Dalit student committed suicide in his room on the Hyderabad Central University campus. Like Kanhaiya, Rohith had also been labelled “anti-national” — for having demonstrated, under the banner of the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA), against the death penalty to Yakub Memon. The ABVP’s fingerprints are visible in both episodes — it invited the government into its face-off with the ASA, even as it first raised the flag, or alarm, over the February 9 meeting in JNU.As Kanhaiya and Rohith get twinned in the political discourse, what is also becoming visible is this: This linkage is causing discomfort in the BJP-ABVP.In conversations with the rank and file of the BJP-ABVP in UP, in Varanasi, Ayodhya-Faizabad and Muzaffarnagar, The Sunday Express found that those who are aggressively using the JNU episode to draw harder lines between “Us” the “desh bhakts” and “Them” the “desh drohis”, downplay, at the same time, the reality of caste discrimination that Rohith wrote about in his suicide note.The tidiness of the new faultline after JNU, which invokes the Hindu vs Muslim cleavage, seems to depend on a disavowal of the reality of caste discrimination of the kind Rohith suffered. This, by a BJP that has, ironically enough, Mandalised itself relatively successfully in UP since the 1990s, even as it continues to run into problems with backward caste assertion in neighbouring Bihar. In his ground-floor office in the imposing sprawl of the Varanasi Nagar Nigam headquarters, mayor Ram Gopal Mohley, former BJP district president, says the JNU row has exposed “so-called secularists and progressive forces”, those who are “propped up by foreign funds”, of “Dawood, bin Laden”, to destabilise a “rashtravadi (nationalist) government”. Mohley dismisses the suicide of Rohith as a “personal issue”. “There were more serious incidents under previous governments. As PM Modi has said, ek maa ka laal gaya”, one mother has lost her son. About 2 km away, in the Jan Sampark Karyalaya, which functions as the PM’s parliamentary office in the city, Kedarnath Singh, MLC, talks of “jan aakrosh” or people’s anger over the “anti-national” activities in JNU. “Yeh door tak jayega”, this issue will stay with us, he says. On Rohith’s death, he says: “The BJP has governments in many states, and the Dalits support our party. In UP, of course, they may not be as much with the BJP. But this (Rohith’s death) was blown up, politically. It was a university matter, nothing to do with government.” S K Tripathi, state coordinator, training, links the two events: “The same anti-national elements are misguiding Dalits like Rohith and Kanhaiya in JNU,” he says. But he also dismisses the issue of caste discrimination — and offers his own reading of Rohith’s suicide note: “It shows aatma glaani (self-loathing). (Rohith felt) I am a Hindu and I organised a beef party, commemorated Yakub Memon? What did I want to be, and what have I become.” In a bare room off a cavernous hall in the Kashi Vidyapeeth, Ayushi Shrimali, president of the university’s students’ union, active member of the ABVP, talks of “vyaapak” or widespread student mobilisations, protest marches and effigy burnings, to protest “anti-nationalism” in JNU. “Such activities are not new in the red bastion. But it is only because of the ABVP that this has come to light now,” she says. “These people should be stripped of their citizenship”, or else “the fire will spread from JNU to AMU and then everywhere”. About Rohith, Ayushi, who takes pride in being the first woman president of the university’s students’ union, asks: “Was he even a Dalit? So what if his mother was one? We live in India. It’s a patriarchal system.” His suicide note, which speaks of his anguish at being reduced to his Dalit identity, “could be a conspiracy”. His death “is a sad event. But it shouldn’t be seen as political,” she says. Veteran Varanasi Cantt MLA Jyotsana Srivastava shares young Ayushi’s indignation on JNU, and denies the issue of caste discrimination in a more fundamental way. Srivastava contests the politics of meaning as constituted in the term “Dalit”, or the oppressed. “I think Dalit is the wrong word. India is an ancient civilisation and there could be some distortions in culture, like sati. But you cannot call people Dalit, or SC or ST. These are divisive terms. If a Brahmin can be called a Brahmin, why cannot a Chamar be called by his caste name?” Across the state, in Faizabad, Anuj Srivastava, general secretary, Saket Mahavidyalaya Chhatra Sangh, and coordinator, ABVP, puts the onus on Dalits: “Why do they consider themselves small and backward?” As for Rohith, “He could have belonged to any caste or community,” he says. For Anuj, the issue is also the policy of reservation. “Why does everyone want reservation? What about vikas (development)? The ABVP believes that reservation is needed, for now. But my own view is it should be stopped, it only fuels divisiveness.” In Lucknow to attend the assembly session, Vimla Solanki, BJP MLA from Sikandrabad, also denies the pervasive scandal of caste discrimination. “I studied in Vanasthali, we didn’t know everyone’s caste.” While fellow legislator Raghunandan Singh Bhadauria, BJP MLA from Kanpur Cantt, says: “It was a suicide, it happens. There has been a suicide even in my own family.” Both Solanki and Bhadauria are united in their call for the strictest punishment for the “anti-national” JNU students. In Muzaffarnagar, newly elected BJP MLA, Kapil Dev Agarwal, who demands a “high-level probe to uncover the conspiracy behind the support for JNU students”, has this to say on Rohith’s suicide note: “When you reap benefits from the system, you don’t say you are a Dalit. Why is it that you remember your Dalit identity only when you want to cry injustice or are being punished for some wrongdoing?” His colleague in the party, Sanjay Agarwal, district general secretary of the Muzaffarnagar BJP, sums it up: “I don’t think discrimination against Dalits is a problem. If there is any, it is only in small villages, not in the cities. This (the controversy over Rohith’s suicide) is only politics.”

Source: The Indian Express