You Are Brave, Rohith

Farooque Chowdhury

Our heart goes with you, Rohith. You are brave. We love your courageous protest. Our love is with your protesting soul, with your resurrecting spirit, Rohit. Our dream goes with you to stars, to the star-studded life, your dreamland that humanity will reach one day.

We share your pain, Rohit. We share your humiliation. We, the millions of downtrodden in lands crossing plains and deltas, crossing mountains and ridges, crossing valleys and deserts, crossing forests and crop fields, crossing brooks and rivers have the same experience, have the same humiliation, same pain, same dispossession, same silence. It’s a silence imposed by power, a brute power, a power constructed by capital, a power sustained by a coalition capital constructs. This power buys in feeble souls, purchases opportunists, leases in opportunity-seekers. It’s the reality, a reality to be changed, Rohit.

But, we the downtrodden, dispossessed people in town shanties and city slums, in dark-dominated lower-middle class dingy rooms, in dust covered village huts are still alive as you are alive. You will remain alive as we will. You can’t die as we won’t. A spirit for justice, a spirit for equality, a spirit for a life with dignity can’t go dead. You personified those spirits. These are the spirits for liberation. These are our spirits also. So, you aren’t dead as we the people won’t be.

Rohit, you loved Science, Stars, Nature. (“Rohit Vemula’s Final Letter”, Countercurrents, January 18, 2016) These are our loves also. Rohit, you loved people. People love people. Bond of fraternity between peoples is thicker than blood. It’s a bond that grows up and develops over centuries of suffering, struggle and dream for liberation. It’s a long journey. No color, no custom, no creed, no other yardstick can install the dubious tales of division between peoples. These can’t and shouldn’t divide the peoples as everywhere people are in chains, people are exploited, people are subjugated, people are robbed of rights and just accesses to a fair life and dignity. So, Rohit, you and people stand together.

Science is taken away from peoples in lands. Rationality, scope for arguments and counter-arguments are taken away from peoples in lands. Science is made a tool for expanding the domain of profit and a tool to make gimmick so that peoples don’t understand science, so that peoples fail to identify contradictions, so that peoples fail to identify friends and foes, so that people live in dark dungeon. We all love science so that science comes up with its philosophy, so that trivial, unnecessary debates creating confusion and distraction are cast aside and real issues of life and dignity are discussed in an effective way. All advancements science makes are appropriated by the prevalent way of governance. Each foot-poundal science moves are snatched away from science by the prevalent system of governance so that peoples in lands don’t get benefit, so that they don’t get the illumination of rationality. This is done by narrowing down science to only into the world of physical/natural science, by ignoring social sciences. So we also love science, Rohit, as science helps us dissect the facts of rich-poor divide, the facts of exploitation and charity work, the facts of bond between all the exploited on this world.

Rohit, you would be around us always, in all our dreams for liberation from all forms of bondage, in all our struggles to get free from all forms of humiliation and indignity. Your letter is a live letter to us. It’s a song of life. It’s a song of pain.

We are not angry with you, Rohit. Rather, we are angry with our existing incapacity, with our misunderstandings, with division among us.

We know, you have no complaints on anyone of us. But we have complaints on the system that pushes Rohit, and many nameless-Rohits to many forms of death. It’s murder. The system commits murders. The murder has many forms, and the laws the system enacts don’t identify these murders.

Rohit, you always wanted to be a writer. You aspired to be a writer of science, like Carl Sagan. You are a writer, Rohit. You are a writer of one form of protest, one form of resistance. It’s not the last and only letter you have written. Your letters will be written each and every day in places of resistance, in all sparks of protests, in all risings like deluges.

The prevalent system has separated people from nature. You are correct, Rohit. “Our feelings are second handed. Our love is constructed. Our beliefs colored. Our originality valid through artificial art. It has become truly difficult to love without getting hurt.” (ibid.) A thin book said this also:

“It has degraded personal dignity to the level of exchange value; and in place of countless dearly-bought chartered freedoms, it has set up one solitary unscrupulous freedom – freedom of trade. In a word, it has replaced exploitation veiled in religious and political illusions by exploitation that is open, unabashed, direct, and brutal.

“[….] Doctor, lawyer, priest, poet, and scientists, have become its [the capitalist system] wage-laborers.

“The bourgeois has torn the veil of sentiment from the family relationship, which has become an affair of money and nothing more.” (Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto)

We, the wage-laborers, are victims of capital. It terrifies, it snatches away dignity, it blocks access to education for all. We are victims of the system. The system stands before us as an obstacle to humane attainments.

You are correct, Rohit, as you write “The value of a man was 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. In every field, in studies, in streets, in politics, and in dying and living.” (“Rohit Vemula’s Final Letter”) We are nameless, we are faceless, we are subject of charity, we are bank capital’s tools to expand capital. We are numbers to NGOs, which mobilize us in the vast rural areas and in urban slums to secure status quo.

Rohit, you were not wrong as you were always rushing. All of us have promises to keep. So all of us are rushing, trying to rush. All of us are, as you said, “Desperate to start a life.” (ibid.)

Your birth is not a fatal accident. It’s an output of historical circumstances. Childhood of all from poor, powerless families is actually full with loneliness. All the children from these families are unappreciated. It’s a loveless childhood, it’s a childhood-less childhood.

Rohit, you are not coward. You are not selfish, or stupid. It takes courage to protest, and protest takes many forms, and circumstances influence forms of protest. We exactly don’t know the circumstance that compelled you to resort to this form of protest. We don’t encourage the form. But we feel the pain activating the form, the desperate circumstance that compels one to resort to such form of protest. Organizations will grow up to have a better form, to have a scientific form.

We understand the burden of debt, Rohit. We see it in village after village, in slum after slum. Student loan, in many forms, is not only an India-scene. In the US, thousands of students are burdened with billions of dollars of student loan. The total amount, probably, of the student loan is more than a trillion dollar.

Rohit, your silent funeral will blossom with our pain, with our untold pain, with our tears. Pardon us friend, we can’t stop shedding tears.

The system is responsible for your act of killing yourself. The system has instigated you, we know, dear friend.

Rohit, our beloved brother, you will travel to the stars as you aspire. Our love will be travelling with you.