Freedom To Eat

The fight for beef as a Democratic right

- Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

“We would have felt proud if the Vice-Chancellor has told that we were suspended because we organized Ambedkar Vardhanthi, Babri Masjid demolition day and Beef festival in the last week,” Rohith Vemula wrote in a Facebook post on 18 December 2015. A day earlier, the administration of the University of Hyderabad, where Rohith was a Ph.D. scholar, upheld an earlier decision to suspend him and four other students for allegedly assaulting a leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the students’ organization of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. All five suspended students were Dalits and members of the Ambedkar Students’ Association. On 6 December, the anniversary of BR Ambedkar’s death and the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the ASA had held an event to mark both occasions and to publicly serve beef. This was a three-pronged blow to Hindutva politics: a celebration of a great anti-caste icon, a demonstration against the Hindu Right’s most iconic act of political violence, and an assertion of the right to freely eat the meat of the cow. It served as a forceful prelude to Rohith’s most potent political act—his tragic suicide in January 2016, leaving behind a note entitled “My birth is my fatal accident,” indicting the university authorities and the world at large for their treatment of him.