Let me start with what might be seen like an overstatement, that Rohith Vemula’s tragic death marks an exit from the larger phenomenon of social death that Dalit students and teachers face through everyday forms of discrimination and worse, humiliation.
In the Indian context, social death gets defined in terms of the social stigma that Dalits, particularly students, are forced to silently suffer. The social stigma acts in stages. First it seeks to reduce a person or a group to a repulsive or undesirable other and then cancels out the severed other from all forms of human civilizational interaction.
