Nine years ago, Rohith Vemula, a student at the University of Hyderabad, tragically took his own life on campus. His death sparked one of the longest protest movements in the country, with people demanding justice and the restoration of dignity for students facing discrimination.
Rohith Vemula was born on January 30, 1989, and was a 26-year-old PhD student at the Central University of Hyderabad. He committed suicide on January 17th, 2016 on the campus of Hyderabad Central University.
Rohit Vemula was a member of the Ambedkar Students’ Association, which advocates for the rights of Dalit (previously untouchable) students on campus.
He was among five Dalit students who were protesting their expulsion from the university’s housing facility.
According to the Indian Express, in July 2015 the university reportedly stopped paying Vemula the fellowship of ₹25,000 (equivalent to ₹38,000 or US$440 in 2023) per month after he was “raising issues under the banner of Ambedkar Students Association (ASA)”, though a university official denied the allegation of non-payment of scholarship, citing the delay on “paperwork.”
The Ambedkar Students Association (ASA) claims to have held a seminar or public gathering in early August 2015 to discuss the death penalty for Yakub Memon, a convict in the 1993 Bombay bombings, which murdered 257 people. However, the ABVP claimed, “Vemula and four ASA members held a funeral prayer”. ASA also opposed the ABVP’s protest over the screening of the documentary Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai at Delhi University.
On August 3, 2015, he and other ASA activists demonstrated on the Hyderabad campus. In reaction, Nandanam Susheel Kumar, president of the ABVP’s university section, called them “goons” on Facebook.
The five were accused of attacking a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
They all denied the accusation, and the university cleared them in an early investigation but changed its decision in December.
The five students were suspended in September, with the judgment affirmed on December 17, 2015. Meanwhile, Vemula’s family struggled to aid him, and he had to borrow money from a friend.
Following the suspension’s confirmation on January 3, 2016, “the five moved out of their hostel rooms to a tent they built up inside the campus and began a “relay hunger protest.”
On January 17, 2016, Vemula committed suicide.
In his suicide note, he blamed the “system” for his death. and said, My birth is my fatal accident.
