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HYDERABAD: The death of a dalit research scholar at the University of Hyderabad snowballed into a major controversy on Monday with the police charging Union minister Bandaru Dattatreya and four others, including the vice-chancellor, with abetting the suicide and opposition parties demanding that the BJP veteran be sacked immediately from the council of ministers.Amid protests at the university and in Delhi, Union HRD minister Smriti Irani sent a two-member committee to ascertain facts about the suicide by Rohith Vemula . The 26-year-old had hanged himself in a hostel room on Sunday after desperate pleas to reverse a varsity decision to expel him and four other dalit students from the hostel and common areas failed to evoke any response.Besides Dattatreya, the Cyberabad Police booked vice-chancellor Appa Rao Podile , BJP legislator Ramachandra Rao and two student leaders of the university under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act even as a company of 200 Rapid Force Action personnel battled student groups protesting the suicide on campus. The police registered a criminal case against Dattatreya and others following separate complaints from the warden of the hostel and a student, Prashanth, who was among those expelled.In his complaint, Prashanth blamed Dattatreya for “forcing” Vemula to end his life. Vemula and his fellow research scholars, all members of a dalit group, Ambedkar Students Association, were expelled in December last year for an alleged brawl with activists from the rival Akhila Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad over the July hanging of Yakub Memon in the Mumbai blast case.A probe into the incident by the proctorial board in August last year, however, gave a clean chit to Vemula and his colleagues, saying there was no evidence to conclusively prove that the five dalit scholars were involved in the brawl. It was at this juncture that Dattatreya stepped in and wrote a letter to Irani, describing the university as a den of “casteist, extremist and anti-national politics”.“This could be visualised from the fact that the day Yakub Memon was hanged, a dominant students’ union, ASA, has held protests against the execution,” Dattatreya’s letter on August 12, 2015, to Irani reads. He asked for action against such “anti-national” elements, and charged the university with remaining a “mute spectator to such events”.Following Dattatreya’s letter and more BJP-ABVP protests on campus, the same proctorial board strangely found the five dalit students guilty and they were eventually expelled in December last year.As a mark of protest, the five students were sleeping in the open and the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS), which is facing civic polls in February, upped the ante against the BJP and urged the Centre to revoke the expulsion order.Things went out of hand on Sunday evening after Vemula committed suicide and left behind a passionate six-page suicide note, blaming the varsity administration for his death. Soon after, opposition parties tore into Dattatreya after news of his involvement in the issue went viral.Dattatreya told news channels that the suicide has no link to his letter. “I forwarded a representation given to me by ABVP activists. What HRD ministry has done with it, I do not know,” said Dattatreya adding, “There were anti-social and anti-national elements in the university who were assaulting ABVP members.”K Kavitha, TRS MP from Nizamabad and daughter of chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, said in an interim report, the university authorities were instructed to call leaders of both ABVP and AISF groups on campus and issue stern warnings to stay away from politics. “When ABVP students went to Dattatreya, he wrote a letter to Smriti Irani equating the dalit students with terrorists and anti-national elements after which the university once again suspended them,” she added.“Based on the complaint lodged by Prashanth, we have registered a case against UoH VC P Appa Rao, Union MoS Bandaru Dattatreya, MLC Ramachander Rao and two students under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and section 306 (abetment to commit suicide) of the IPC,” inspector J Ramesh told TOI.Meanwhile, Irani, who had to face big demonstrations outside her residence and office in Delhi, refused to get into the controversy saying the HRD ministry did not interfere in the day-to-day functioning of universities. She sent a two-member committee of Shakila Shamsu, Officer on Special Duty in the ministry and Surat Singh, a deputy secretary, to the UoH for a fact finding mission.“I will not make any political statement. I will rather wait for the committee to submit its report,” she said. The committee is expected to return to Delhi in the next two days.Ministry sources said Rohit's expulsion from hostel was the decision of the internal committee of the university. “In August last when a representation came from Bandaru Dattatreya alleging that UoH has become a den of casteist, extremist and anti-national politics, we merely forwarded it to the university authorities,” said an official.