The controversy surrounding the University Grants Commission’s equity regulations has once again revealed how quickly India’s commitment to social justice begins to fray when institutions are asked to examine their own structures of power. What could have been a serious engagement with caste discrimination in universities has instead turned into a cycle of protests, outrage, and defensive rhetoric that speaks far more about discomfort than about policy.

Across these reactions, familiar arguments are repeated with remarkable confidence, invoking merit, autonomy, and misuse of the provision as if these ideas have ever existed outside caste, even though Indian universities have always been shaped by the social order that produced them, carrying forward its hierarchies through admission processes, faculty cultures, evaluation systems, and informal networks unless deliberate effort is made to disrupt them.

I write this from a position of deep caste and class privilege, and any attempt to deny that reality would be dishonest. Even though I actively reject caste hierarchies and refuse to attach pride to my identity, that identity continues to cushion my movement through academic and professional spaces, influencing how easily I am accepted, how readily my competence is assumed, and how generously my failures are interpreted. Publicly denouncing caste does not dismantle these advantages; it only acknowledges that they continue to operate.

Caste does not disappear because one claims to be progressive, nor does it lose its force because one believes in equality. It continues to structure everyday life in universities regardless of intent, allowing some to move through academic spaces without suspicion while subjecting others to constant scrutiny, justification, and surveillance, a contradiction that many prefer not to confront because of the discomfort it produces.

In 2022, while working on a project that examined the everyday lives of PhD students across several Indian universities, this reality became impossible to ignore. What initially began as an inquiry into academic pressure, funding issues, workload, and mental health revealed a deeper pattern in how supervisory power was exercised, with caste emerging as a determining factor in how students were treated, supported, or exploited.

Students from dominant caste backgrounds often described relationships with supervisors that were marked by encouragement, intellectual engagement, and flexibility, where delays were negotiated, feedback was substantive, and mentorship extended beyond formal requirements, while students from marginalised castes repeatedly spoke of being asked to perform tasks that had little to do with research, including administrative labour, personal errands, and routine work that others were never expected to take on.

Several students described being spoken to in ways that stripped them of dignity, with their work dismissed without engagement and their struggles framed as evidence of personal inadequacy rather than structural barriers. In many cases the power imbalance between supervisor and scholar made resistance nearly impossible, because complaining risked retaliation, changing supervisors risked years of academic labour, and leaving the programme meant absorbing the consequences alone.

These experiences rarely appear in institutional reports or official narratives of academic excellence, yet they decisively shape who completes a PhD, who drops out, and who exits academia entirely, and when scholars from marginalised castes are pushed to exhaustion and isolation the system does not treat this as institutional failure but as individual attrition.

We have already seen where such conditions lead, with names like Rohith Vemula entering public memory only after irreversible harm has occurred, followed by institutional expressions of concern that rarely translate into structural change, allowing the same conditions to persist across campuses and generations.

The UGC’s equity regulations represent a limited attempt to respond to this entrenched reality, not by dismantling caste hierarchies in higher education, but by acknowledging that discrimination exists and that institutions bear responsibility for addressing it, an acknowledgement that alone has been sufficient to provoke intense backlash. This backlash reveals less about the technical limitations of the regulations and more about caste anxiety, because for many, even a modest redistribution of institutional power feels threatening, unsettling the belief that academic success is entirely the result of individual effort, untouched by social location or historical advantage.

Caste pride thrives in this moment, often framed as cultural defence, but functioning primarily as a refusal to interrogate inherited dominance, while caste atrocities are simultaneously minimised or reframed as aberrations rather than structural violence, allowing hierarchy to persist without accountability.

Privilege does not operate as a single event; it is reproduced continuously through academic life, reinforced through moments that appear ordinary but accumulate into advantage, such as a supervisor’s patience, a committee’s trust, a peer network’s openness, or an opportunity that arises because one’s background feels familiar and legitimate. Many of us have benefited from these moments without recognising them as such. Acknowledging this is not an exercise in guilt but a matter of political honesty. If we claim to value equality, we must confront how inequality actually functions, and if we believe in merit, we must be willing to examine why it aligns so consistently with caste privilege, particularly within institutions that claim to foster critical inquiry.

The Supreme Court has recently stayed the implementation of these regulations. The decision is procedural and signals that the Court will examine their legal and administrative dimensions before they come into effect. Yet it is difficult to ignore the symbolic weight of this pause. While intended as judicial caution, the stay also delays a response to persistent, documented inequities. It leaves students and institutions in a liminal state, where recognition of structural disadvantage is acknowledged in principle but postponed in practice. The effect is not intentional harm by the Court, but it underscores how fragile reform can be when it intersects with entrenched social hierarchies.

Till then, for those of us who are privileged, allyship cannot remain symbolic or occasional; it must become habitual, requiring us to recognise when systems work in our favour and to resist the comfort of treating that advantage as natural or deserved, even when fairness produces unease. Rejecting caste in theory is easy, but confronting the everyday benefits it continues to grant is far more difficult. That confrontation must begin within our institutions and extend inward, because until we are willing to do that honestly, our protests will continue to defend comfort rather than justice.

As Dr. B. R. Ambedkar warned,

Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy.

About the Author

Saptarshi is a public policy professional with an academic background in psychology and public policy. He is the co-founder of Citizens for Reform - India and formerly worked with Health Parliament, where he collaborated closely with the former Advisor to the Union Health Minister. Saptarshi has contributed to India’s Viksit Bharat Abhiyan Vision Document and the UN IGF’s Dynamic Coalition on Environment, focusing on governance, sustainability, and civic engagement.

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