EVEN AS 2026 draws to a close, casteism persists as a relic of the past whose diktats deepen the cracks within society. The lived reality of caste continues to paint an unsettling picture across higher educational institutions. Between 2018 and 2023, 98 students died by suicide in these institutions, the majority belonging to the Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi communities, with the highest numbers recorded at premier government institutions like IITs, NITs, central universities and IIMs. Data submitted to a parliamentary panel shows complaints of caste-based discrimination in universities and colleges rose by 118.4 percent over five years, from 173 in 2019-20 to 378 in 2023-24.
On September 4, IIT Mandi found itself at the centre of controversy over its Janmashtami celebrations. A poster titled “Bhagavad Gita - The Timeless Wisdom” was reportedly displayed outside the institution’s auditorium. The poster emphasised karma and categorised the four varnas according to their assigned roles. It described the Brahmin's role as spreading God’s message, the Kshatriya’s role as protecting society and spirituality, and the Vaishya’s role as sustaining the economy. The row erupted over the poster's description of the Shudra’s role as “serving higher classes.” The institute has ordered an inquiry, and its director, Prof. Laxmidhar Behera, has said the poster carried no institutional endorsement.
Lok Sabha member Chandra Shekhar Azad condemned the poster on X, calling its language a violation of “social equality and constitutional values” and urging the Supreme Court to lift its stay on the UGC (Promotion of Equity in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2026.
The Stayed Regulation and its Roots
The IIT Mandi controversy has resurfaced the UGC’s 2026 regulation on equity in higher educational institutions, a measure that has been contentious since publication. The UGC issued the regulation on January 13, 2026. Sixteen days later, on January 29, a division bench of CJI Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi stayed it. The petition was filed by Mritunjay Tiwari, a post-doctoral scholar at Banaras Hindu University, along with advocates Vineet Jindal and Rahul Dewan. Their central contention was that the regulation's definition of “caste-based discrimination” covered only members of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes, excluding the general category, and that it built in no safeguard against false complaints.
The stay of the aforementioned UGC’s 2026 regulation drew resistance from student groups at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi University and marginalised-community student groups at Banaras Hindu University. The Kshatriya Karni Sena meanwhile recently proposed a peaceful protest at Jantar Mantar demanding withdrawal of the same 2026 regulation, a demand that sits in stark contrast to student groups calling instead for the stay to be lifted and for a central anti-discrimination law covering all Indian higher educational institutions.
Gautam Bhatia, writing on the Supreme Court’s stay of the 2026 equity regulation, has challenged the claim that such regulations function asymmetrically in favour of one group. He argues that after N.M. Thomas (1975), reservations are not exceptions to the rule of equality but integral to it, since their purpose is to correct a structural barrier that itself operates asymmetrically against SC/ST/OBC students. Caste atrocity, on this view, is already asymmetrical in its functioning, and discrimination works through the same pre-existing imbalance of power.
Hearings resumed on August 20, when Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the Court that the Union government was reconsidering the 2026 regulation and asked that the framing of issues be deferred until that exercise concluded. Senior Advocate Indira Jaising, who has appeared in Abeda Salim Tadvi v. Union of India, a case ongoing since 2019 and instrumental in prompting the UGC to draft the regulation, asked the Court to set a definite timeline for the Union’s reconsideration.
The Abeda Salim Tadvi case dates to 2019, when Abeda Salim Tadvi and Radhika Vemula, mothers of Payal Tadvi and Rohith Vemula respectively, petitioned against the weak on-ground enforcement of the UGC’s 2012 equity regulation and sought stronger mechanisms to address growing caste based discriminations in university campuses.
Rohith Vemula, a 26-year-old Dalit PhD student at the University of Hyderabad, died by suicide on January 17, 2016, after being barred from hostels, common areas and student union elections over an alleged assault on an ABVP leader. The university had cleared him and four others of the charge, then reversed its own decision. Rohith and the other students had been protesting the university’s social boycott of them and had camped outside the campus after being denied hostel accommodation. Payal Tadvi, a second-year postgraduate student of gynaecology from the Tadvi Muslim Bhil Scheduled Tribe community, died by suicide in 2019 after facing caste-based harassment from three senior colleagues. Those colleagues were arrested, granted bail three months later, and had their medical licences restored. The trial remains unresolved more than six years on. Tadvi was set to become one of the first women doctors from her community.
Ambedkar, Vivekananda, Dyerism and the Sore of Caste Hierarchy
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in ‘Annihilation of Caste’ wrote that “caste is a notion, it is a state of the mind.” Even earlier on November 20, 1930 while speaking at the fifth sitting of the plenary session of the Round Table Conferences held in London he brilliantly defined, in one single sentence, the caste system and the graded social inequality embedded in it. He said, “It must be recognised that Indian Society is a gradation of Castes forming an ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt—a system which gives no scope for the growth of that sentiment of equality and fraternity so essential for a democratic form of Government.” The IIT Mandi poster depicting Shudras in terms of their ascribed role for “serving higher classes” represents the stubborn persistence of the scourge of the caste system rooted in “…an ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt.” It is, therefore, violative of the Constitution and the constitutionally enshrined ideals of dignity and fraternity.
It is instructive to recall that Ambedkar in his last speech in the Constituent Assembly asserted that “The castes are anti-national.” Persuasively arguing that “they bring about separation in social life,” he forcefully remarked that, “They are antinational also because they generate jealousy and antipathy between caste and caste.” He then emphatically stated, “But we must overcome all these difficulties if we wish to become a nation in reality. For fraternity can be a fact only when there is a nation. Without fraternity equality and liberty will be no deeper than coats of paint.” Employing the logic of Dr. Ambedkar it could be said that the IIT Mandi poster condemning Shudras on account of their ascribed social attributes sadly points at an anti-national activity.
It is also painfully revealing that Swami Vivekananda, who emerged in the USA and many parts of the western world as a mesmerising Hindu monk in the late nineteenth century for his numerous illuminating lectures on Vedant and spirituality, was hurled abuses by some caste Hindus on the ground that he had no right to be Sanyasi because he was a shudra. He confronted those caste slurs after his triumphant return to India after he delivered several lectures including the famous Chicago address in the World Parliament of Religions in 1893. Vivekananda gave an account of that abuse in his book ‘Lectures From Colombo to Almora’ which contains the speeches he delivered in response to the rousing welcome accorded to him in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and different cities of India on his return from the US. In his address under the caption “My Campaign Plan” delivered in the erstwhile Madras, he said, “I read in the organ of the social reformers that I am called a Shudra and am challenged as to what right a Shudra has to become a Sannyasin”. Responding to such contemptuous casteist remarks he gave several explanations, one of which is worth quoting. He said, “….I am not at all hurt if they call me a Shudra” and then courageously confessed, “It will be a little reparation for the tyranny of my ancestors over the poor.” “If I am a Pariah,”(an outcaste), he proceeded to add, “I will be all the more glad, for I am the disciple of a man, who–the Brahmin of Brahmins–wanted to cleanse the house of a Pariah”.
It clearly shows that the festering sore of caste hierarchy rooted in inequality and contempt for those placed in the lower order of its scale has spared none including Swami Vivekananda. Its gory manifestation in the IIT Mandi poster underlines the arduous tasks ahead to ensure equality and equal opportunity to all regardless of identities defined, among others, by caste, faith, gender or ethnicity.
That was why Mahatma Gandhi drew a parallel between the heinous practice of untouchability and caste discrimination within Hindu fold with Dyerism attributed to the firing, ordered by Colonel Reginald Dyer, which massacred hundreds of unarmed people of diverse faiths at Jallianawala Bagh in 1917. He said that Dyerism caused frightfulness in the minds of its victims. In an article, “Untouchability and Nationalism,” published in the Navajivan on August 14, 1921, he wrote, “I have described untouchability as the greatest blot on Hindu society as the latter has been guilty of Dyerism in its treatment of the communities regarded as untouchable.”The IIT Mandi poster pouring scorn on Shudras tragically played out Dyerism a few weeks after India celebrated its 80th independence day.
Scholars have long argued that what sustains caste hierarchy is the belief in karmic principle, the idea that privilege in this life flows from conduct in a past one. Karma explains why a person is born into a particular caste; essentialism explains what caste inherently is. Together they render caste hierarchy not just persistent but, to those who hold the belief, justified and immutable. It is nothing but a continuation of social Dyerism rooted in the doctrine of frightfulness.
In 2023, the Times of India reported that the then Union Minister of State for Education, Subhas Sarkar, told the Lok Sabha that 13,600 students from reserved categories had dropped out of premier central universities, including IITs and IIMs, over the preceding five years. Rising dropout rates among marginalised students, set against rising suicide numbers, demand structural introspection into how these institutions actually function. Students from marginalised communities win the battle to enter premier institutions only to be defeated once inside by the caste discrimination embedded in them. The IIT Mandi poster is a glimpse of how deeply that hierarchical thinking persists, even among students at premier government institutions. It raises a direct question about whether the existing safeguards for marginalised students in these institutions work at all.
