The legacy of Rohit Vemula empowers not only to question establish Brahminical order but also it’s oppressive seeds in liberal left organisations

Some story shapes revolution and brought oppressors their knees. Those stories are worth repeating, sharing and memorizing. Rohit Vemula at the age of 26 left this world two years back, but the memories are still fresh. His mentioning of ‘growing gap between soul and body’ still haunts and reminds of the situation where a scholar aspires to become a writer like Carl Sagan forced to kill himself.

My body still trembles and mind go into shock whenever read his letter, he wrote ‘life is itself a curse. My birth is my fatal accident’. ‘The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and the nearest possibility’. Imagine the pain he would have been carrying while writing this.

The friend and comrade once who use to inspire his mates through his activism to fight against the Brahminical order of oppression now after his death left a huge legacy of resistance against the same.

Nahas Mala, President of Student Islamic Organisation of India, said that “Rohith will remain an icon for all the resistance movements now and in future. His suicide was a political act, far more than a physical and emotional one which ignited new fires for the Bahujan, minorities and other marginalized sections in India. It strengthened the visible emergence of the then communities into the mainstream space. And the future belongs to such political movements.” (The Companion)

The fact that the very perpetrators against whom Rohit stood until his death are active and dominant in the social spaces proves that the struggle has a lot more distance to go.” – Nahas Mala.

The fact is true, the perpetrators have now become more active and functioning through the establishing setup of democracy. Perpetrators who took away the precious life of Rohit are now everywhere. They are in colleges, universities, Parliament, and in the judiciary. The media houses and bureaucracy is filled with such perpetrators. They are now on the streets and everywhere one imagines.

Unfortunately, the forces which could have been aligning together against the Brahminical forces are also polluted with the same section of perpetrators.

Discrimination of Bahujan and students from minority section in the university has become a normal affair. In fact, the dominant left campuses don’t shy away from radicalizing them if they stood against what Rohit calls ‘reduce to immediate identity’. Recall how left unity of JNU treated BAPSA when they tried overcoming from the ‘shadow leadership’? The story repeated in the previous HCU student union election. The Alliance for Social Justice registered its victory against ABVP. SFI which is happened to be one of the alliance partners shamelessly tried to radicalize SIO – MSF, which were also the part of the grand alliance.

Brahminical perpetrators have its seeds in all such claimed ‘liberal and secular organisations’ which cannot tolerate the identity of ‘Rohit’ other than a victim. Whenever Rohit tries to be his own voice, all these Brahminical seeds come together to radicalize him, to suppress him, so that he forced to follow ‘shadow leadership’ of these institutions.

The left organisations who carry the Brahminical seeds have shamelessly used the plight of Bahujans and minorities for their own political gains. They talk about the rights of the marginalised, but deny when comes to giving space to these communities to represent themselves.

Yes, Rohit Vemula has left the world but his legacy empowers to questions and challenges not only the Brahminical empires but also its seeds.