'They' are the 'lower' caste individuals who routinely face abuse and discrimination, most often in rural areas, where such incidents are readily dismissed or forgotten after some initial outrage. The 'we' are those of us who cluck our tongues in dismay each time we hear of a Dalit being abused or discriminated against, who write editorials in national and international dailies with headlines nonchalantly announcing "India still needs to deal with its caste problem", before going back to our lives. After all the stories of blatant injustice and discrimination within universities, within the judiciary, within workplaces were 'their' stories, not 'our stories' or those of the nation.
At least until one bright, young Dalit scholar pursuing a PhD in science technology and society studies talked about stardust and Carl Sagan in his suicide note – one he wrote as an outspoken protest against the the value of a man being "reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of star dust."
Rohith Vemula was among five students who were suspended from the Hyderabad Central University hostel and barred access from public spaces including the administrative building. Rohith had grown up under difficult familial circumstances, after his father – from a slightly 'upper' backward caste – abandoned Vemula's mother. She supported Vemula and his siblings through school by working several odd jobs, including that of a low-income tailor. Vemula later worked as a daily wage laborer to support himself through university, where he not only asserted his caste but also fearlessly opposed the systemic discrimination against Dalits as a student activist.
Labeled an 'extremist' by university authorities, the monthly stipend of INR 25,000 (USD 370), of which he had been sending a major chunk home to support his mother, was stopped abruptly in July 2015. Then in December last year, shortly before his death, he was expelled. Hopeless and having accrued a debt of INR 40,000 (USD 600), Rohith Vemula committed suicide on 18 January 2016.