It took the Supreme Court just two days to stay the University Grants Commission’s (UGC) Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions Regulations, 2026. Compare this with the grueling seven-year legal struggle waged by Radhika Vemula and Abeda Tadvi—four years just to secure a hearing, and three more before the long-pending guidelines were finally notified. This stark contrast lays bare a systemic injustice: when marginalized communities—Dalits, Bahujans, Adivasis (DBA)—fight for their dignity, constitutional rights, and institutional accountability, they are met with delay, indifference, and bureaucratic inertia. Yet, the moment savarna interests perceive a threat, the machinery of power springs into action with lightning speed. The savarna media amplifies their concerns instantly; the savarna bureaucracy responds with urgency; savarna politicians rally in defense; and the justice system—always sluggish for the oppressed—delivers swift intervention. Meanwhile, opposition parties remain silent, unwilling to challenge the status quo even symbolically. The barriers DBA communities face in accessing justice are not just procedural; they are deeply entrenched in caste power. And that power ensures that even bare-minimum guarantees, however miniscule, even granted, can be revoked faster than it was ever earned.
The 2026 regulations were not a radical departure but an attempt to strengthen and enforce what had already been promised 14 years earlier. The UGC (Promotion of Equity in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2012 were meant to combat discrimination on campuses by mandating equity committees, grievance redressal mechanisms, and preventive measures. Yet, for over a decade, these regulations were never implemented. They were ignored from the outset, then quietly forgotten, as if they had never existed.
This systemic neglect was precisely what drove Radhika Vemula and Abeda Tadvi to file their landmark public interest litigation in 2019. Having lost their children—Rohith and Payal—to caste atrocities in educational institutions, they sought legally binding and enforceable safeguards to protect the students. Their core demand was clear: transform the non-binding, toothless 2012 guidelines into mandatory regulations with accountability mechanisms and penalty for violations. Had the 2012 regulations been implemented properly, countless lives might have been saved. The pervasive casteism in our universities thrives due to institutional apathy and regulatory impunity. The 2026 rules were born from that grief and struggle, aiming to close the enforcement gap. The fact that they were stayed within a week, while the original guidelines gathered dust for 14 years, underscores not just bureaucratic inertia, but active resistance to equity from those who benefit from the status quo.
Even if the 2026 guidelines were to take effect, their implementation across our savarna-dominated campuses remains a distant hope. These institutions have long flouted even mandatory reservation norms in faculty hiring and student admissions with systemic impunity. They are shielded by a savarna bureaucracy that turns a blind eye, a savarna judiciary that provides a legal free pass, and a savarna media apparatus that sanitizes their image—all while our DBA children face daily hostility and violence within these very spaces. There is a profound confidence among these savarnas that no political will exists to enforce equity, and that even if exposed, their institutions will be protected by judiciary.
The contrast is telling. Regulations like POSH and anti-ragging policies, however imperfect, were adopted in many campuses without major backlash. But the moment caste equity is on the agenda, the entrenched resistance is immediate and visceral. This reveals not a problem of feasibility, but one of fundamental opposition to dismantling caste privilege. The guidelines, therefore, are not merely a policy challenge—they are a litmus test of the willingness to cease being a site of exclusion and violence.
Though these regulations faced improbable implementation, savarnas instantly mobilized narratives of unfairness and “reverse discrimination.” This reaction exposes the fragility underlying their power: it is the panic of a fortress at the first sign of a single blade of grass upon its walls. Despite all their control over the machinery of state, capital, and media, their dominance is so brittle that they perceive the slightest reform as an existential threat. Their panic is the ultimate confession; it screams to the world that they want to continue harassing and killing DBA students with impunity.
Documented through countless surveys and research, the reality of harassment faced by DBA students is both systematic and routine. A survey in 2022 shed light into this harassment which begins at admission, where the entrance rank of the student itself becomes a public marker used to question their merit, label them quota students, and justify exclusion. Daily life is punctuated by casteist slurs, derogatory anti-reservation jokes and memes shared openly on social media and in group chats, and the constant probing for surnames to out their identity. Some face untouchability in hostels, harassment due to the way they speak, for eating non-veg food, or the way they dress. Academically, they face discrimination from faculty who deny courses or project opportunities, offer insensitive mentorship, and fail to curb open anti-reservation rants in classrooms. They are socially ostracized—excluded from study groups, friendships, and casual conversations—and their opinions are routinely sidelined. Even institutional support structures fail them: counselling services lack caste sensitivity and breach confidentiality, scholarship staff deliberately complicate processes, and book bank usage is met with harassment. This environment enforces a constant message of being “undeserving,” inflicts profound guilt for availing rightful benefits, and associates any academic struggle not as an individual issue but with their caste identity. The casteist logic emphasises the failure of one savarna as an individual flaw, while the failure of one DBA student becomes proof of lack of merit of an entire community. The cumulative effect is a relentless assault on their dignity, mental health, and academic trajectory, all while the institution and its savarna majority normalize and embolden this violence.
The evidence of violence towards DBA students is overwhelming: with systemic non-implementation of past guidelines and reservation, the countless lives that has been taken from us, the invisible dropouts, life-long severe mental health crises, and survey after survey documenting these caste-based hostility. Yet, all it takes is for the savarnas to invoke the spectre of fraudulent complaints—a ghost they themselves have conjured—for the entire discourse to shift and the long-suppressed cry for justice is, once again, buried beneath their feigned victimhood.
In a nation where a savarna lawyer can hurl footwear at a Dalit Chief Justice with impunity—where even the highest offices offer no refuge from casteist humiliation—what genuine safety or dignity can students from socially marginalized communities possibly expect within the savarna bastions of academia? If the pinnacle of judicial authority is not shielded from such brazen contempt, what hope remains for a DBA student in a hostel, a classroom, or a library? These institutions are not merely indifferent; they are active enablers of a hierarchy that views our presence as an affront, our success as a threat, and our justice as a disruption to be dismissed. Our campuses do not fail by accident; they perform exactly as designed—as fortresses of caste, gatekeepers of exclusion, and open halls of violence.
These guidelines represented a crucial first step. At the very least, they offered a thin hope for students to hold onto by establishing a formal mechanism for grievance redressal, even if their full implementation always seemed unlikely. Without reservation being implemented properly in faculty recruitment, which can increase the representation of DBA in faculty and administration, these campuses will always remain graveyards for students. These grievance redressal mechanisms and structural inclusion must be complemented by compulsory caste-sensitization courses for all students and faculty, modelled on existing POSH sensitization programs. Before teaching engineering or science; we must teach humanity. We have had too many institutes of eminence; we now need institutes of empathy. Furthermore, accountability cannot be confined to campus gates. For these policies to have teeth, representation must extend beyond academia into the very bureaucracies and judiciaries that oversee these institutions. Only when the systems meant to audit and enforce are themselves reflective of the diversity, can we ensure that campuses are truly held accountable for their violations.
Related:
Higher Education: How Centre is Undermining State Autonomy & Politicising UGC