The Centre for Dalit Studies and Officers’ Forum today called the Ashok Roopanwal committee report ‘illegal’ and ‘unethical’ for transgressing its terms of reference in the probe into research scholar Rohith Vemula’s suicide.
“We reject this report. Parliament should scrap it and institute another probe that will show what went wrong at the UoH and suggest remedial measures to prevent such instances,” said M. Laxmaiah, Centre for Dalit Studies.
Picking holes in the functioning and the conclusions drawn by the one-man judicial commission, the CDS said the probe into the caste of Mr. Vemula was unnecessary.
“TS and AP have a law passed in 1993 which lays out that only the Revenue Department can decide on community certificate. It has a negative prohibition that where civil courts cannot interfere or examine community certificates,” But here we have a strange case where the one-man commission decides to probe the caste status of Mr. Vemula which is beyond its terms of reference and selectively picks evidence to prove he was not SC,” said former AP Chief Secretary K. Madhava Rao.
Academic C. Ramaiah said hope of justice have been belied by the commission of enquiry. “The report is a political one to protect the Vice Chancellor of the university. Instead of creating measures to protect marginalised communities in the varsity, the report tries to find the caste of Rohith Vemula. It should have put an injustices in the varsity but has failed,” said Mr. Ramaiah.
Dontha Prashant, a research scholar of UoH said the report was an eyewash. “Nobody gets punished thrice for a single crime. Our life has been turned upside down for demanding an apology letter from an ABVP student leader. The one-man commission has whitewashed institutional murder,” said Dontha Prashant.