Dalit activists, including the brother of Rohith Vemula, have objected to Union home minister Amit Shah mocking their movement seeking justice for the University of Hyderabad research student who took his own life over alleged caste discrimination.

A statement issued on Tuesday took objection to how Shah, in an interview with Republic TV, had “belittled the Rohith Vemula movement as politics of provocation and polarisation of SCs and STs”.

“Rohith Vemula is Dalit, to which no defence needs to be made as his life itself speaks of the quantum of discrimination and struggle which Amit Shah and the BJP bandwagon have no clue of as they represent dominant caste interests,” noted the statement issued by Rohith’s brother Raja Vemula and others.

In the interview broadcast on Saturday, Shah had described the Congress’s
Rohith Vemula campaign as “vacuous”.

The Cyberabad police recently filed a closure report declaring Rohith was not a Dalit and he perhaps took his life fearing repercussions for falsely claiming to be one.

The signatories to the statement released three different government documents to prove Rohith was indeed a Dalit.

“It was only after his death that the BJP initiated a false complaint stating Rohith Vemula is not a Dalit. It was filed by Darsanapu Srinivasa Rao, who went on to contest on a BJP ticket from the Vemuru Assembly constituency in 2019,” the statement said.

The statement noted that none of the BJP and ABVP leaders who targeted Rohith when he was a student had accused him of not being a Dalit. “In fact, they have committed atrocities because he was a Dalit and a Dalit who read Ambedkar.”

“The closure report filed in the high court by the Telangana police, which was to investigate the involvement of these perpetrators in the killing of Rohith, ignores all the evidence of the case only to peddle the narrative of him not belonging to the Scheduled Caste community,” the signatories stated, accusing the police of overlooking basic facts to “lie” before the court.