Last year, a friend of mine managed to get his daughter admitted to the University of Delhi—what most of us still proudly call DU—for an undergraduate science course. It was a big moment for the family. Although she secured admission through the applicable reservation, she was a bright student whose marks were on par with those of general category students.

For a girl from a tribal community in the central Indian plains, this was not just an admission; it felt like a doorway opening. What followed inside that doorway, however, was something else altogether.

From the very first few weeks, the humiliation began—quietly at first, then more openly. Classmates mocked her background. One of them sneered, “Why should people meant to stay inside forests study something like chemistry?” As if science itself had caste boundaries. As if curiosity and intelligence were hereditary privileges.

Image: Students protesting against the UGC Rules (left) and against caste-based reservations (right)

Worse still, the cruelty did not stop with students. A chemistry teacher, someone meant to guide and encourage young minds, once taunted her in front of others: “As if you’re going to become another Marie Curie.” It was said casually, almost jokingly, but the message was clear. Know your place. Don’t aim too high!

As painful as these moments were, they remain mild compared to the harsher humiliations and sustained harassment documented across campuses in recent years. What she faced was not the worst of it—it was simply what managed to surface.

These were not isolated incidents but part of a pattern that steadily eroded confidence, dignity and the simple joy of learning. Yet in the university’s official record, none of this exists: no mention of caste, no acknowledgement of discrimination—only silence, carefully sealed within procedure.

On Indian campuses, caste discrimination is rarely denied outright. Instead, it is reworded. It becomes an issue of ‘adjustment,’ ‘merit,’ ‘attitude,’ or ‘mental health.’ Institutions appear to listen, but only within limits they themselves set.

Over the past decade, however, this careful management of reality has begun to crack. Student suicides, personal testimonies, fact-finding reports, and even parliamentary questions have piled up. Dalit, Adivasi, and other marginalised students have spoken repeatedly about experiences that were not one-off incidents or personal misunderstandings, but institutional patterns.

They pointed not to one bad teacher or one rude classmate, but to a system that looked away—supervisors withdrawing support, departments delaying evaluations, grievance cells that existed on paper but failed in practice.

Image: Students protesting against discrimination, driven by caste-based identities

Official data from the University Grants Commission (UGC) reveal that complaints of caste-based discrimination in Indian universities have jumped by around 118 per cent over five years — from 173 in 2019–20 to 378 in 2023–24, with a total of 1,160 complaints logged across more than 2,200 institutions.

Yet even as reported cases rise, the number of unresolved complaints has grown, and many campuses lack effective grievance mechanisms to address them. This pattern underscores that the humiliation experienced by individual students is part of a widespread institutional problem, not random misfortune.

At the heart of this struggle lies a familiar Indian paradox. Groups that are numerical minorities often function as institutional majorities. Their power does not come from numbers, but from presence—dense, continuous presence in decision-making spaces. Committees, governing bodies, faculty rooms and administrative offices quietly convert social advantage into institutional norm. Over time, this dominance becomes invisible.

To understand what is happening on our campuses, we need to look beyond individual incidents and see the pattern. The humiliation faced by my friend’s daughter is not an exception.

It is a symptom. And until institutions are willing to name caste clearly, such stories will continue to be told quietly, over phone calls and kitchen tables, instead of being acknowledged where they truly belong: in the conscience of our universities.

From regulation to retreat: How campus accountability was put on hold

Much of the present controversy has been framed as a clash between equality and autonomy, but this framing obscures a more mundane and revealing reality.

As Yogendra Yadav, political scientist and senior public intellectual, observed in a recent  BBC interview, the substantive difference between the 2012 Equal Opportunity framework and the new regulation is, in his words, remarkably simple: the 2026 regulation adds Other Backwards Classes (OBC) to the list of protected groups.

Beyond that inclusion, the idea that universities must prevent discrimination, provide redress and ensure institutional responsibility was already embedded—at least on paper—in earlier frameworks. The suggestion that the new rules represent a radical or unprecedented assault on academic freedom, he argued, is therefore deeply misleading.

What changed was not the moral principle, but the administrative consequences of acknowledging it. The regulation—formally titled the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026—defines discrimination as any act or omission that results in unequal, unfair or biased treatment on the grounds of caste, including Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST) and OBC, as well as gender, disability and other protected categories.

In doing so, it moves discrimination out of the realm of personal grievance and into that of institutional failure. This shift matters because once discrimination is recognised as a governance issue, universities can no longer absorb it through discretion, delay, or euphemism.

Equally significant is what preceded the regulation. The UGC did not arrive at this framework through ideological enthusiasm or political ambition. It acted in response to a December 2025 stricture by the Supreme Court, which pulled up the regulator for the inadequacy of existing grievance mechanisms and the persistent failure of universities to address caste-based discrimination effectively.

In other words, the regulatory move was not voluntary reform; it was court-prompted compliance. That is, the state did not lead; it followed.

Yet when the regulation triggered backlash from influential academic and social constituencies—many of them aligned with caste-dominant groups—the response shifted again. The same Supreme Court that had earlier pushed the UGC to act now became the site where the regulation was paused, says Yadav.

Even more tellingly, the UGC itself made no serious effort to defend its own regulation before the court. This silence conveyed a powerful message: the regulator was willing to notify accountability, but not to stand by it when challenged.

The impression that emerges is difficult to ignore. A government reluctant to antagonise its core support base implemented a regulatory reform under judicial pressure, only to retreat tactfully once resistance hardened—allowing the court to absorb political fallout while executive intent remained formally intact.

In this choreography, accountability is neither rejected nor realised; it is suspended, deferred and redistributed across institutions until its force dissipates.

Against this backdrop, claims that the regulation unfairly targets upper-caste students or faculty collapse under scrutiny. What unsettles universities is not the presence of caste in the regulation, but the loss of discretion it entails: the shrinking space to decide when to listen, how long to delay and when to quietly close a complaint without consequence.

Seen this way, campuses appear not merely as sites where caste prejudice persists, but as spaces where accountability itself is carefully managed. Discrimination is tolerated as routine dysfunction, while scrutiny is treated as an emergency.

When regulatory obligation threatens to convert informal power into reviewable action, resistance is articulated not in the language of caste, but of autonomy, freedom and overreach.

The struggle, then, is not between equality and merit, but between discretion and obligation. The 2012 framework allowed institutions to profess ethical intent without measurable responsibility.

The 2026 regulation insists—however imperfectly—on traceability, timelines and consequence. That insistence, more than any expansion of protected categories, is what has made caste suddenly visible, controversial, and legally contestable on Indian campuses.

Resistance, judicial pause and caste-dominant anxiety

Resistance to the UGC’s regulatory turn did not present itself as open opposition to equality. Instead, it took a familiar and institutionally respectable form: concerns about autonomy, fears of overreach, anxieties about misuse, and warnings of a chilling effect on academic freedom.

Critics argue that vaguely worded provisions could invite frivolous complaints, expose faculty to reputational harm without due process, and politicise everyday academic interactions. These apprehensions, at least on their face, are not illegitimate.

Any grievance mechanism, to be credible, must be procedurally clear, balanced and equipped with safeguards against arbitrariness.

Yet the force of these objections lies less in their content than in their timing and intensity. For decades, universities have functioned with weak or ineffective mechanisms to address caste discrimination. Persistent complaints, documented harassment, and even student suicides rarely provoked comparable urgency.

Regulatory accountability, by contrast, triggered immediate mobilisation—petitions, protests, and swift judicial intervention. This asymmetry is difficult to ignore.

Image: Protests against the Mandal Commission Report in 1990 (left), and the Indian Express news report (right)

Such moments are not unprecedented. From the agitation against the Mandal Commission’s recommendations to the backlash against policies like the deprivation points (Points for Admission Policy – PAP) system at Jawaharlal Nehru University, some decades back, efforts to correct structural inequality have repeatedly been met with intense resistance framed as a defence of merit, fairness and institutional integrity.

Thus, the stay granted by the Supreme Court was widely read as a legal pause to examine scope and proportionality. Narrowly understood, such intervention is routine. Sociologically, however, it reveals how quickly institutional discomfort—particularly among caste-dominant groups—translates into suspension of reform. Accountability is experienced as a crisis, while discrimination is absorbed as routine dysfunction.

Much of the opposition rests on the fear of misuse. This argument echoes long-standing critiques of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, which has repeatedly been portrayed as vulnerable to abuse. Yet empirical reality complicates this narrative. Despite decades of such claims, conviction rates under the Act remain low, and complainants routinely face procedural delays, social pressure and institutional resistance.

Thus, fears that university regulations will unleash widespread victimisation of privileged caste faculty or students appear overstated.

What is at stake, then, is not simply the risk of false complaints, but the prospect of routine authority becoming reviewable. The regulation threatens discretion—the informal power to delay, reframe, or quietly close complaints without structural consequence.

When that discretion is questioned by students from below, it is defended as autonomy; when exercised against marginalised students, it is rarely named as abuse. As a result, what is essentially a social conflict is pushed into legal procedure and treated as a technical dispute rather than a question of power and accountability.

Image: Rohith Vemula, the University of Hyderabad student who allegedly committed suicide in January 2016, is widely seen as a victim and symbol of caste discrimination in higher education institutions in the country

This need not imply bad faith on the part of courts or individual petitioners. It does, however, illuminate how institutional pathways are calibrated to respond more attentively when the interests of caste-dominant groups are implicated. The speed of judicial pause, contrasted with the slow absorption of discrimination, points less to legal necessity than to the political economy of accountability itself.

Additionally, in more ways than one and more often than not, contemporary governance in the country has perfected a careful division of labour—policy ambition is publicly announced, legal vulnerability is privately acknowledged, and judicial intervention arrives at precisely the moment of political inconvenience.

In this arrangement, the court appears as an active constitutional actor, even as its intervention stabilises executive interests by absorbing public backlash, allowing power to claim both intent and innocence while the promise of social justice remains unresolved.

Numerical minority, institutional majority

In demographic terms, upper-caste Hindus form a minority in India—roughly one-sixth to one-fifth of the population—while the majority belong to OBC, SC, ST or religious minority communities. Yet this numerical reality has never translated into a similar sharing of power.

Instead, a clear imbalance persists in who controls institutions. This is not accidental. Institutions tend to reproduce existing privilege, especially where access to education, language, networks and cultural capital has long been concentrated. As a result, privilege survives not as a matter of numbers, but as an institutional habit.

Universities show this most clearly. While affirmative action has widened access for marginalised students, it has barely changed who holds authority. Senior faculty roles, administrative posts and key committees remain dominated by upper castes.

The effect is rarely open exclusion, but something quieter: upper-caste experience becomes the default standard for merit, professionalism and reason. Being a numerical minority does not weaken this power—it often sharpens it. And when regulation questions this long-held control, it is framed not as accountability, but as an attack on autonomy.

Discretion as the last refuge of power

The controversy ultimately reveals less about regulation than about power—how it consolidates, defends itself and adapts. What is protected in the name of autonomy is not freedom in the abstract, but discretion: the authority to decide when to listen, when to delay and when to declare matters resolved without structural change.

In universities, discretion has long shielded those embedded within hierarchies while exposing marginalised students to procedural exhaustion. Regulation threatens this arrangement by converting discretion into obligation and narrowing the space in which power operates invisibly.

When accountability approaches entrenched authority, it is rarely met with open resistance. Instead, it is slowed, reframed and pushed into the legal domain. Neutrality is mobilised not to correct the imbalance but to preserve it. Caste does not disappear; it is relocated from lived experience to legal abstraction.

Image: Caste remains an enduring factor in India's higher education system, with varied dimensions; photo credit - Madhyamam

The question, then, is not whether regulation is excessive, but whether institutions that have repeatedly failed their most vulnerable members can continue to claim moral authority over their governance. Until caste discrimination is recognised not merely as a social pathology but also as an institutional condition, reform will remain vulnerable to dilution and delay.

Thus, the story unfolding in Indian higher education is not one of regulatory excess, but of accumulated neglect meeting belated accountability. Whether that accountability is allowed to endure will determine not only the future of campuses, but the credibility of institutions that claim to stand for equality while quietly managing its limits.

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