The closure report on the investigation into Rohith Vemula’s suicide submitted by the Telangana police eight years after the PhD student’s death is puzzling, to say the least. It reproduces allegations made by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad at the time of its conflict with Vemula and the Ambedkar Students’ Association in the Central University of Hyderabad. Vemula’s stipend was withdrawn and he was subsequently barred from the hostel and other public spaces with four of his ASA peers. His suicide followed. The ABVP had claimed that Vemula’s Dalit status was fraudulent as his father was from the other backward classes. This is the report’s central point too: Vemula’s suicide occurred from fear of exposure. There was no abetment. While making the young man into a coward and a liar, the report ignores the fact that Vemula’s mother is a Dalit, who brought him up in a Dalit environment as a single mother after his father’s desertion. The complicated construction of caste identities and the intense pressures on underprivileged students in universities are both ignored. The report absolves of responsibility the university, the vice-chancellor and the Bharatiya Janata Party bigwigs — a member of Parliament, a member of the legislative council and a former education minister, Smriti Irani — who were active in ensuring the ousting of the Dalit students.

Apart from projecting Vemula’s reasons for suicide as purely ‘personal’, the report says that Vemula never expressed any discontent with the university, ignoring his sarcastic letter to the vice-chancellor. How was such a report filed in a Congress-ruled state? Even if, as has been suggested, it was written earlier and was timed to appear after the Congress came to power and 10 days before the Lok Sabha elections, how did it slip the government’s notice? The chief minister’s promise of a new investigation suggests damage control, as does the promise of a law in Vemula’s name to protect underprivileged students. Can a new law help after the existing law protecting minorities has been ineffectual in the Vemula case? The BJP’s hierarchical approach to caste is well-known, but the Congress, too, must walk its talk of protection for Dalits. The case has shown up politicians’ caste welfare rhetoric as hollow. And by using Vemula’s suicide as counter, political parties are exhibiting greater inhumanity than the closure report.