Hyderabad research scholar’s suicide: TISS students boycott lectures, express solidarity
19, Jan 2016
By Pallavi Smart
Students from IIT-B, TIFR, Mumbai University and its affiliated colleges to follow suit tomorrow, term Rohith Vemula’s suicide an ‘institutional murder’
Protests condemning the suicide of Rohith Vemula, a research scholar from Hyderabad Central University (HCU), seem to be spreading like wildfire across premier educational institutes in the country, including Mumbai.
While students and research scholars at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) boycotted lectures and gathered on campus as a mark of protest yesterday, the act of protest will be emulated tomorrow by the students from Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B), Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai University and its affiliated colleges.
Protestors claimed that Vemula’s death was not a suicide, but an institutional murder and those responsible for it should be punished — starting from the HCU officials to politicians — who forced the research scholar to take the drastic step by labelling him and four others as ‘anti-national’, ‘extremist’, and ‘casteist’ elements.
