Rohith Vemula not a Dalit: Commission

New Delhi: Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar on Wednesday said that his Ministry had received in a "sealed" cover the Roopanwal commission report on the death of University of Hyderabad (UoH) scholar Rohith Vemula. He said the Ministry would implement its recommendations after studying them.

• Roopanwal Commission report is in contradiction to the report submitted by the Guntur district Collect Kantilal Dande to the National Commission for Scheduled Castes
• HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar refuses to comment on the report by saying that heis yet to study it
• He, however, says the Commission has disagreed with the claim that the scholar belonged to Scheduled castes

Asked about reports that the report had held that Vemula was not a 'dalit,' Javadekar said he could not comment as he had not read the report yet. The HRD Minister said the report was with the UGC and had come on Wednesday in a sealed cover. "The sealed report has been received and we will open it today to see what the recommendations are.

The main issue was that such incidents should not happen in the education world. No student should commit suicide and how such incidents should be prevented needs to be learnt. We will also share an action plan in this regard," Javadekar said.

Asked why the report was not directly submitted to the Ministry, Javadekar said it could be because the officer concerned, who was serving the Commission, was with the UGC. The HRD Minister, when asked about whether he had met Justice Roopanwal, said he had not.

The one-man judicial commission was set up by the Ministry of Human Resource Development to probe the circumstances leading to Rohith Vemula’s suicide at the UoH in January this year. Former Allahabad High Court judge A K Roopanwal, who was appointed by the then HRD Minister Smriti Irani, submitted his report to the University Grants Commission (UGC) in the first week of August.

The report’s observation that Vemula was not a Dalit is significant against the backdrop of the controversy fuelled by Union Ministers Sushma Swaraj and Thaawarchand Gehlot, who had questioned the student’s caste identity.

Both Swaraj and Gehlot had said that Vemula belonged to the Vaddera community a caste which falls under the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category and that his suicide was being projected as an issue of caste discrimination to fuel tempers.

The establishment of Vemula’s caste status is important because Union Minister Bandaru Dattatreya and UoH Vice-Chancellor Appa Rao were named in an FIR lodged by the police under the SC/ST Atrocities (Prevention) Act for abetting his suicide.

Vemula’s suicide note referred to his birth as a fatal accident. “My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness. The unappreciated child from my past,” the note recovered by police stated.

Incidentally, Justice Roopanwal’s observation is at odds with the report submitted by Guntur District Collector Kantilal Dande to the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC). The NCSC report, according to sources, is final.