The National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval, has obtained a secret report that has inquired into the Hyderabad Central University research scholar Rohith Vemula's antecedents. It has come out with the finding that the scholar was not at all a Dalit, as the students and his mother had claimed.
The NSA had talked to his grandmother, Raghavamma, and mother, Radhika, and the grandmother had convincingly told her inquirers that they were not Dalits. Indeed they belonged to the Vaddera community.
Rohith's mother, Radhika, continued to claim that they were Dalits. His father, Manikumar, on the other hand, reiterated that they were Vadderas.
Cases under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes Atrocities Act have been booked by the police against the Union Minister Bandaru Dattatreya and HCU Vice-Chancellor Apparao in connection with Rohith's suicide.
The Akhil Bharatiya Students Union leader, Susheel Kumar, whom Rohith and four other students had beaten necessitating his hospitalization, had all along been claiming that Rohith was not a Dalit at all.
Obviously, the NSA had obtained the testimony of Rohith's grandmother in connection with possible action against the Union Ministers. The fact that the NSA got interested in a purely students' affair points to the proportions the issue had flared up. In terms of intolerance, there are many, including the ISIS, who would like to project India as an intolerant country.
The testimony of Rohith's grandmother and mother have been attached to the NSA report.
The Vadderas are stone-cutters in the vocational caste system. The people are generally sturdy and bold. The community living behind the Osmania University Campus Arts College is peopled by the Vadderas. They had supported the Osmania students to lead the Telangana agitation, often giving them shelter from the police.
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