The Brahmanical Anxiety To Explain A Dalit Death: Manu Joseph’s Psychiatric Doctrine

By Mithilesh Kumar

29 January, 2016
Countercurrents.org

Caste: Rajput

Diagnosis: Bipolar 2

Medications per day (at the time of Rohith Vemula’s Death):

1. Lithium Carbonate: 1000mg

2. Bupron: 150 mg

3. Quitipin: 75-100 mg

4. Thyronorm: 50 mcg

5. Lonazep: 0.5-1 mg (in emergency)

Major episodes (recent): 2013 and 2014 in succession

Attempt at Suicide: At least 2.

So, this will be my profile and identity according to Manu Joseph’s psychiatric doctrine of death. There is a little empirical trouble though in this formulation. I am not a Dalit like Dr. Rohith Vemula (yes he would have earned the title if not for the powers-that-be). I cannot even pretend to understand the depth of his feelings and ardour of his political commitments. I have lived an upper-caste, middle-class life of privilege and I have never been at the receiving end of the most brutal and inhumane oppression of our social formation. Perhaps that explains, according to the Joseph’s psychiatric doctrine, why I survived my suicide attempts. You see, in the Josephian universe I was ‘clinically depressed’ but not oppressed enough.

Several people have written with perception and anger on Joseph’s egregious article on Rohith Vemula’s death. Some of them do have the condition of being ‘clinically depressed’ while others wrote with passionate anger informed by the very politics that Vemula stood for. The falsity of the claim Jospeh makes and his simplistic not to say patronizing attitude has been well established by several authors. My intention here is to understand the inherent casteism built-in the ideology of upper-caste liberalism in India and how Vemula’s death has ruptured any veneer of respectability that it might have had.

What Joseph’s article demonstrates is the anxiety, nay fear, to understand the death of Vemula. It is that obscene desire to understand what has to be oppressed, controlled and governed. This impulse is colonizing and the same impulse to colonize the Dalits and preserve the bastion of knowledge controlled by the upper-castes which gives rise to this anxiety of the unknown. The sheer number of articles in the corporate media is an indicator that the upper-caste opinion makers are all at sea. Also, one can detect a sense of betrayal in the upper-caste knowledge-making around Vemula’s death. Here is a Dalit young man, obviously bright and articulate. Wasn’t he the one who got into the university through reservation? This is how he abuses our benevolence by doing radical politics that too of Ambedkarist variety. The puzzle is simply too much to solve. All they can ask in amazement, disgust, trepidation is why did he do it. It is interesting to note that Vemula’s comrades and everyone in solidarity for demanding justice do not ask this question. It is plain to see why he did it. It was an act that was to open the fault lines of our society anew. It was no longer containable. It was a political act.

A singular act of suicide has been used as a political tactics for long. We all know about the heroic act of Mohamed Bouazizi that sparked the Arab Spring. Then there are the examples that Joseph himself has cited in his article. Then what is so different in Vemula’s singular act? I think it is to do with the fact that it was done in solitude. Other acts of suicide including that of Bouazizi were in the ‘political space’ outside while Vemula decided to commit his act away from that political space which he was occupying. In that he was more akin to Walter Benjamin than Bouazizi. Vemula was up against similar kind of political forces that Benjamin was confronting. And both were being persecuted for what they were born as. However, scribes of the Josephian universe took it as an act done in the moment of weakness. Isn’t an activist supposed to be macho, unfeeling, unemotional, in short, a Man? She has to sacrifice all desires, follow a principled path of righteousness, kill if she has to but never flinch or show signs of indecision and wavering. This seems to be the stereotype of the political activist in the mind of upper-caste intellectuals. It has to be Gandhian or Savarkarian and even if you are in the enemy camp you have to be tough. Needless to say it is a patriarchal version of a political activist. To them the act of Vemula will be weakness. He was supposed to suffer, abused and hounded out by the authorities. And yet there is something much more significant in the act of Vemula. If one remembers the act of self-immolation during the anti-Mandal agitation in the 1990s it becomes clear that Vemula’s was denying the state the spectacle. The anti-Mandal agitation to preserve upper-caste privileges was based on the principle of spectacle. It was exclusively male phenomenon and the audio-visual propaganda material distributed during the agitation made no attempt to hide its patriarchal tendencies. It was to re-establish the upper-caste male figure that is aggressive and virile out to kill the recalcitrant so-called lower-castes. Clearly, Vemula would have none of it. This politics is based on the fact that the state has denied the privacy which is his right and pushed him into the open on the street. It is based on the fact that the state will never recognize the full rights of his identity. He will have to carry his political act from the solitude of a room not his own.

We now come back to Joseph. It appears that Joseph is using ‘clinical depression’ as an analytical category and not as a clinical condition no matter how much he remonstrates. If clinical depression is the root cause of farmers’ suicide the state would do well to distribute lithium instead of stopping the debt cycle. In fact, all problems could be solved by proper medication. However, we can fault Joseph only so far and no more. It will be futile to expect people of that class to understand the politics of Vemula. The politics will be an enigma. In the absence of either a shared politics or a shared struggle there could only be an attempt at homogenization. This is the only way to make sense of Vemula’s act. It can be explained only through some sort of biologism sprinkled by pseudo-social science. This formulation of Joseph denies Vemula the identity of being a Dalit for whose liberation he so heroically fought. It is the same flattening of identities that is at the heart of neoliberal enterprise. They want automatons for just-in-time productions instead in Vemula they found a passionate political person. As I said in the beginning I do not pretend to understand Vemula's life and struggles but as a fellow research scholar who has struggled with the academic world and his work due to the condition that Joseph has alleged, as a person who is political but not a political activist and who shares the same dream of liberation I want to claim that Dr. Rohith Vemula is my comrade.

Mithilesh Kumar is a PhD Candidate at Western Sydney University, Australia. His interest is in the issues of logistics, migration and labour, political philosophy and theory. He wants to work on the nature, evolution and innova of the Indian state with respect to social and political movements in India. Email: [email protected]