Equity On Trial: When Accountability Is Called Persecution

The uproar over the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, is a revealing moment in India’s long and uneasy engagement with caste. Notified on January 13, 2026, the regulations—meant to curb caste discrimination in universities—were immediately challenged in the Supreme Court (and the court quickly stayed them), denounced on social media, and met with violent protests across campuses. The reaction followed a familiar script: any attempt to protect the marginalised was recast as an attack on the privileged. While open denial of caste discrimination has become untenable, opposition has shifted to the safer claim of ‘misuse’. Protective measures for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes are said to threaten merit and enable reverse victimisation. The irony is stark. These arguments come from social groups that continue to dominate university administrations, faculty ranks, regulatory bodies, and the higher bureaucracy, yet present themselves as besieged minorities. This is not the first time we have witnessed this theatrical performance of upper-caste victimhood. A few years ago, the same script was enacted when the Supreme Court diluted the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act in March 2018, claiming it was being ‘misused’. Nationwide protests by Dalit communities forced Parliament to intervene and restore those provisions through an amendment in August 2018. The Supreme Court, recognising its error, ultimately upheld the restoration in February 2020. To grasp the significance of the UGC’s updated equity rules, one must confront the conditions that compelled the UGC to act. It was forced by years of mounting evidence that caste discrimination in Indian universities is not episodic but routine and systemic. Students from SC, ST and OBC communities have consistently reported humiliation, academic isolation, denial of supervision, biased evaluation, and exclusion from the informal networks that determine academic survival. In several cases, these experiences culminated in suicide—each death briefly shocking the public conscience, only to be absorbed into institutional amnesia. Rohith Vemula’s death remains emblematic, not because it was exceptional, but because it exposed the ordinary workings of caste in a modern university. On January 17, 2016, Rohith, a 26-year-old Dalit PhD scholar at the University of Hyderabad, died by suicide after prolonged humiliation, ostracism and effective expulsion from campus life. Despite the nationwide outrage his death provoked, the institutional response was revealing. Instead of holding those responsible to account, the casteist establishment sought to discredit him—falsely alleging that he had produced a fake caste certificate and reducing his death to personal frustration. Subsequent inquiries and committees generated expressions of regret but no structural change. Equal Opportunity Cells and grievance redressal mechanisms existed largely in form, not function: they were understaffed, underpowered and often controlled by the very social groups whose practices were under scrutiny. Complaints were routinely dismissed as ‘misunderstandings’, ‘personality conflicts’, or individual psychological failures. Three years later, on May 22, 2019, Payal Tadvi, a 26-year-old postgraduate medical student from the Tadvi Bhil Adivasi community, died by suicide at Mumbai’s BYL Nair Hospital after enduring sustained caste-based abuse by her upper-caste seniors. These were not aberrations. From 2019 to 2021 alone, at least 98 students from SC, ST and OBC communities died by suicide in central universities and premier institutions such as the IITs, NITs, IIMs and IISERs. During 2004-24, 115 Dalit student suicides were reported, many directly linked to caste discrimination. In the 14 months preceding the drafting of the 2026 regulations, the courts took note of 18 suicides in higher education institutions explicitly attributed to caste-based discrimination. The UGC’s own data reinforces this reality. Complaints of caste-based discrimination rose by 118.4 per cent over five years—from 173 cases in 2019-20 to 378 in 2023-24. In total, 1,160 complaints were received from 704 universities and 1,553 colleges during this period. The Commission has cited this surge to underline the failure of advisory mechanisms and the need for enforceable institutional safeguards to ensure a safe, dignified, and inclusive academic environment for students, faculty, and non-teaching staff. It is also crucial that the 2026 regulations emerged from judicial intervention. In 2019, Radhika Vemula and Abeda Salim Tadvi—the mothers of Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi, respectively—approached the Supreme Court questioning why the UGC’s 2012 anti-discrimination regulations, which were merely advisory, had failed to prevent their children’s deaths. They demanded a “very strong and robust mechanism” to address caste discrimination in higher education. Acting on the court’s directions, the UGC was required to submit revised rules. The 2026 regulations are, in a direct and literal sense, the institutional response to that demand. To begin with, it is factually wrong. The regulations do not confine protection from discrimination to SC, ST and OBC communities. Regulation 3(e) defines discrimination broadly—on grounds of religion, race, caste, gender, place of birth, or disability—covering all students. The separate definition of “caste-based discrimination” in Regulation 3(c) merely acknowledges an elementary sociological fact: caste discrimination is structural and directional. It flows downward. Upper castes do not face systemic or institutional discrimination on the basis of caste. They may encounter individual hostility or conflict, but that is not caste discrimination. This script is familiar. In 2018, the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act was diluted on the ground of ‘misuse’, triggering nationwide protests and forcing Parliament to restore the law—a move later upheld by the Supreme Court of India in 2020. Significantly, the Court observed that “there is no presumption that the members of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes may misuse the provisions.” High acquittal rates under the Act do not indicate false cases; they reflect failures of investigation, prosecution and a judiciary overwhelmingly drawn from dominant castes. Yet, the myth of misuse persists, now transplanted to higher education. The protests that erupted across north India lay bare the deep hypocrisy of India’s institutions. Openly violent agitations by outfits such as the Karni Sena, Brahman Mahasabha, Kayastha Mahasabhas and several Vaishya organisations—now grouped under the Savarna Samaj Coordination Committee—were allowed to unfold with near-complete impunity. Effigies of Modi and Shah were abused in crude casteist language and publicly burnt, yet the police were conspicuously absent. This tolerance is revealing. Had even five per cent of such violence occurred at Jawaharlal Nehru University or in any space associated with students, Dalits, Muslims or dissent, the response would have been swift and brutal: wall-to-wall media vilification, mass arrests and the full coercive machinery of the State unleashed. The political calculation is transparent. With the Uttar Pradesh elections approaching, the Bharatiya Janata Party needs to consolidate SC, ST and OBC support and can afford to temporarily irritate upper-caste groups, fully aware that they have nowhere else to go electorally. Only a party as cynically entrenched as the BJP can play this double game—provoking symbolic upper-caste rage while retaining their loyalty. The judiciary, too, performed its role predictably. The Supreme Court, unmoved by undertrials languishing for years without bail, displayed astonishing urgency here: agreeing on January 28 to hear petitions against the regulations and staying them the very next day, pushing the next hearing to March 19. What emerges is not a failure of institutions, but their selective efficiency—a system that moves with lightning speed for upper-caste and elite interests, while constitutional rights of the marginalised remain indefinitely deferred. It would be deeply naive to expect anything substantive from this manoeuvre by the BJP, a party that has already installed its ideological agents across institutions. These actors subscribe to an ideology that normalises caste hierarchy and legitimises exclusion; in such a setting, formal safeguards can only be symbolic. It is these very functionaries who will interpret and administer the regulations, ensuring that their intent is diluted or quietly subverted. The likely outcome will mirror the trajectory of the Atrocities Act: victims will be offered a false sense of protection, while perpetrators, cushioned by institutional backing and social impunity, will feel further emboldened to discriminate. Even so, in the present climate, such gains should still be used as levers to strengthen the struggle.