Years ago, in late spring, under the brooding canopies of banyan trees lining the campus of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, a letter circulated quietly, but its resonance was anything but soft. The resignation came from a professor whose departure was less a career shift than an indictment.
His letter described a climate not of academic friction or administrative disillusionment, but of something more entrenched—an invisible yet unrelenting caste system that gnawed at the very heart of an institution celebrated for meritocracy.
In his words, caste was not incidental; it was foundational, a ghost in the walls. And as those words travelled through inboxes and whispers, they laid bare what India’s Constitution had promised to end seventy-five years ago, but never truly buried.
The professor did not name names, but he did not need to.
Earlier that year, an associate professor had stood in a classroom meant to prepare students from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes—those historically branded as ‘untouchables’—for the rigours of elite technical education. Instead of guidance, she offered condescension, her words sharp, her tone unrelenting.
She mocked the very students the state had sworn to uplift. She told them, implicitly and explicitly, that their place was provisional, conditional, precarious. Her disdain was wrapped not in academic critique but in casteist contempt, the sort that required no overt slurs because the structure beneath the silence said enough.
To many outside the institution, it seemed a singular incident—cruel, yes, but isolated. To those within, it was merely the most visible fracture in a wall long splintering. What had been revealed was not the failure of a professor but the endurance of a system that cloaked itself in the rhetoric of excellence while continuing to exclude.
The idea that IITs—temples of learning, bastions of “pure merit”—could be infected by caste seemed almost sacrilegious to the privileged. But for the students who entered through reservation quotas, it was merely confirmation of what they already knew: the playing field was not just uneven; it was mined.
Caste, in India’s elite spaces, is most comfortable when unseen. It thrives in plausible deniability, in the myth of merit that insists achievement can be measured in test scores alone. But merit, like caste itself, is a social construct—one shaped by who can afford coaching, who speaks fluent English, who is not asked to mop the floor before studying on it.
For a Scheduled Caste student, gaining admission to an IIT is not merely the result of hard work but a feat of resistance against history, geography, language, and ridicule. The irony is cruel: those who most loudly trumpet their own merit rarely examine the scaffold of privilege that made it possible.
This illusion—that caste is obsolete in India’s modern institutions—extends beyond academia. It haunts the corridors of bureaucracy, where officers are expected to be faceless instruments of the state, loyal to law rather than lineage. But caste, like water, seeps through every crack.
Puran Kumar knew this well. A 2001-batch Indian Police Service officer in the Haryana cadre, Kumar was found dead in his official quarters in the early summer of 2025, barely a week after receiving a new posting. At fifty-two, he had seen what the inside of power looked like—and what it could do to a man who would not bow.
He had always been a difficult fit in the machinery, not because he lacked ability but because he would not keep quiet. Years earlier, Kumar had filed a formal complaint with the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, accusing a senior officer of harassment rooted in caste.
The matter was eventually “settled,” as such matters often are, in closed rooms with polite phrases and suppressed truths. But Kumar continued to speak. He challenged transfers, questioned bias in election appointments, and protested the symbolic indignity of being denied an official vehicle.
These grievances may seem mundane, but they accumulate meaning over time. In his final note, Kumar named names—senior officers, some retired, others in service—whom he accused of orchestrating a campaign to degrade him. His body was found alone.
There were murmurs, statements, the sterile rituals of investigation. But no one really asked what it meant that an officer entrusted with the nation’s law felt the system had turned so fully against him. His death was not declared a murder. Yet it echoed with the violence of institutional neglect, the kind that kills without ever lifting a hand.
Even the judiciary, the supposed temple of reason, is not immune. In a moment that felt surreal even by India’s increasingly chaotic standards, a lawyer flung a shoe at the Chief Justice of India inside the sanctum of the Supreme Court. The man shouted slogans in defence of Sanatan Dharma—a term now wielded with political venom, invoking a vision of Hindu orthodoxy—and railed against the Chief Justice’s earlier comments in a case concerning a centuries-old idol. What was not said in court, but murmured outside it, was this: Justice B.R. Gavai is a Scheduled Caste judge. Only the third in India’s history to ascend to the position of Chief Justice.
Though he remained calm, even unfazed, the symbolism could not be missed. This was not just a protest; it was an assertion. The man who hurled the shoe was not merely angry over a legal opinion. He was enraged by the presence of someone like Gavai in that chair. The idea that a Dalit man could preside over the highest court in the land was, for many, an affront to the established order. And so, in the language of caste, the shoe became a message: know your place.
That place, for centuries, was at the bottom—or outside—the hierarchy altogether. India’s Constitution outlawed untouchability in 1950. It established quotas (akin to affirmative action) in education, jobs, and political representation to correct for millennia of oppression. And yet, seven decades later, the very people meant to benefit from these guarantees remain, more often than not, suspects in their own success stories.
Every Dalit professor is accused of mediocrity, every Dalit officer of insubordination, every Dalit judge of overstepping. The presumption is not of competence, but of fraud.
The indignity is both structural and intimate. It occurs in faculty meetings where voices are ignored, in offices where files are delayed, in courtrooms where decorum is a shield for contempt. It is in whispers, eye-rolls, and deliberate exclusions. It is in what is not said in official obituaries and what is shouted in comment sections online.
Caste in modern India has not vanished; it has adapted. No longer policed by dharmic codes or colonial laws, it now thrives in algorithms, policy loopholes, and silent complicity.
The tragedy of Rohith Vemula, the University of Hyderabad scholar whose suicide in 2016 sparked protests across India, was supposed to be a watershed moment. But even his death, which laid bare the deep rot of institutional casteism, led to no convictions, no reform of substance. His final words—“My birth is my fatal accident”—still echo in campus debates and protests, but they have yet to reshape the conditions that produced them.
Perhaps the deepest cruelty is that these incidents—academic humiliation, bureaucratic breakdown, symbolic assault—are no longer shocking. They have become part of a continuum, a slow grind that wears down resistance through exhaustion. Every resignation, every funeral, every thrown shoe is a flare in the night sky, momentarily visible before the darkness returns.
And yet, there is defiance. In the professor who refused to be silent. In the officer who named his oppressors. In the judge who did not flinch. Their stories are not merely tragic—they are evidence. Of a society still divided, of a promise still unkept, of a fight that continues in courtrooms, classrooms, and government halls. The idea of India as an equitable republic endures not because it has been fulfilled, but because people keep insisting it should be.
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