Hyderabad: Union minister Bandaru Dattatreya and four others, including the vice-chancellor of the University of Hyderabad, were booked on the charge of abetting the suicide of a Dalit research scholar of the university amidst opposition demand that the BJP leader be sacked immediately from the council of ministers.
Amid protests at the university in Hyderabad and in Delhi, Union HRD minister Smriti Irani sent a two-member committee to ascertain facts about the suicide by Rohith Vemula. The 26-year-old had hanged himself in a hostel room on Sunday after desperate pleas to reverse a varsity decision to expel him and four other Dalit students from the hostel and common areas failed to evoke any response.
Besides Dattatreya, the police booked vice-chancellor Appa Rao Podile, BJP legislator Ramachandra Rao and two student leaders of the university under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act even as a company of 200 Rapid Force Action personnel battled student groups protesting the suicide on campus. The police registered a criminal case against Dattatreya and others following separate complaints from the warden of the hostel and a student, Prashanth, who was among those expelled.
In his complaint, Prashanth blamed Dattatreya for “forcing” Vemula to end his life. Vemula and his fellow research scholars, all members of a Dalit group, were expelled in December last year for an alleged brawl with activists from the rival Akhila Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad over the July hanging of Yakub Memon in the Mumbai blast case.
A probe into the incident by the proctorial board in August last year, however, gave a clean chit to Vemula and his colleagues. It was at this juncture that Dattatreya stepped in and wrote a letter to Irani, describing the university as a den of “casteist, extremist and anti-national politics.”
Following Dattatreya's letter and more BJP-ABVP protests on campus, the same proctorial board strangely found the five Dalit students guilty and they were eventually expelled in December last year.
Things went out of hand on Sunday evening after Vemula committed suicide and left behind a six-page suicide note, blaming the varsity administration for his death. Soon after, opposition parties tore into Dattatreya after news of his involvement in the issue went viral. Dattatreya, meanwhile, told news channels that the suicide has no link to his letter.
