The Hyderabad Central University, which has been on the boil for quite some time following the suicide by dalit research scholar Rohit Vemula, has constituted a committee to negotiate with the agitating students to bring the situation to normality. The campus witnessed unprecedented violence last week and brutal police lathi charge, when the controversial vice-chancellor Podile Apparao resumed office after going on long leave.
His resumption of office, unmindful of the opposition from the Telangana home department, revived the agitation by the students. Students laid siege to the VC residence and some even vandalized the office. Police entered the scene and resorted to lathi-charge in which many students had sustained injuries. About 25 students and a couple of professors had been arrested. Today, the students and professors have secured conditional bail from a court in Miyapur, Hyderabad. University has appointed the committee against this background to bring order on the campus.
The seven-member Committee is headed by Prof. B. Kamaiah, Dean, School of Economics. The other members of the committee are: Prof. G. Sudarshanam (Head- Dept of Political Science), B. Chandrasekhar Rao (Head – Centre for Human Rights), Prof. N. Sudhakar Rao (Dept of Anthropology), Prof. Saratjyotsna Rani (Dept of Telugu), Prof. Meena Hariharan (Head – Centre for Health Psychology) and Dr. Niyaz Ahmed (Head – Dept of Biotechnology & Bioinformatics).
Registrar of the university M. Sudhakar, said the committee would hold dialogue with the students’ representatives about the matters that are negotiable from the list of demands they had submitted to the university. The committee has invited two members from each JAC for Social Justice, and the Students’ Union to the meeting. The Committee will submit its report in six weeks.
In the meantime, former union home minister Susheel Kumar Shinde demanded the removal vice chancellor Apparao, who, Shinde alleged, was responsible for the suicide by Rohit and ongoing unrest on the campus. He said he would take the matter to the knowledge of President Pranab Mukherjee. Shine arrived this morning to meet the students, who were lodged in in Cherlapalli Jail, and Radhika, mother of Rohit. He alleged that BJP government was trying to gag the voice of dalits across India. “JNU and HCU incidents bear testimony to this nefarious design,” he alleged.
