Play and Ploy of Caste: Where Does It End?

— Harshul Singh & Aishwarya AVRaj

“Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice…Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me.”

-Gloria Anzaldua

We think deeply of Sahil Ravindra Wakode when we write this: a human being, somebody’s child, somebody’s loved one who recently lost his life under institutional pressure at IIT Bombay; we extend all the care and attention to his loved ones, whose loss is irreparable, while also understanding that these will remain just words into an abyss of injustice amidst the insidious realities of our time.

We also think and call upon - Chuni Kotal, Rejani S Anand, M Shrikant, Ajay Shree Chandra, Jaspreet Singh, Senthil Kumar, Prashant Kureel, G Suman, Balmukund Bharti, Mahrui Sali, Anil Kumar Meena, Aniket Ambhore, Rohith Vemula, J Muthukrishnan, Bheem Singh, Payal Tadvi, Fathima Lateef, Darshan Solanki, Ayush Ashna, Anil Kumar, Nithin Raj and many others (that this 'list’ has more names, those we may put here and those we may not or cannot is what constitutes our tragic positionality as writers of essays like this one) extraordinary scholars who were victims of institutional murders, the insidious circumstances they had to bear and had to pay the toll of discrimination they faced by their life.

Every few months, another student’s death on a university campus pushes us back into a helpless, sad and angry limbo. We can only wonder what the parents and loved ones will continue to experience, while institutions celebrated as national achievements and excellence fail to make their inner worlds inhabitable for those entering them.

Sahil was a second-year BTech student in the Department of Energy Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay. He died by suicide on 18 September 2026. His parents, Ravindra and Sonali Wakode, spoke of caste discrimination and harassment that their son had shared with them. Their complaint led to an FIR (Smart, Sah and Agashe 2026). Behind the administrative language of inquiry is a family demanding answers about the loss of their child.

On 18 September, Sahil had two mid-semester examinations scheduled during the day. He completed the first. During the second examination, CCTV footage from approximately 12.30 to 12.45 pm shows Professor Suryanarayana Doolla approaching Sahil after apparently noticing him looking towards his pocket (suspecting he was using ChatGPT). Sahil handed over his mobile phone, following which Doolla spoke to him separately, and he left the examination hall. IIT Bombay subsequently alleged that the phone had been used during the examination. CCTV footage then records Sahil returning to Hostel 4 and entering his room at around 1.25 pm; investigators say he did not leave the room afterwards. At approximately 5.30 pm, Ravindra Wakode called his son, expecting his son to have finished his examinations, but received no answer. Later that evening, Sahil was found dead in his hostel room. At around 8 pm, his family received a call from the institute informing them of his death (writers hold and express their emotional as well as intellectual discomfort with the circulating CCTV footage; CCTV footage is an important piece of evidence for official, formal, judicial proceedings; however, such a piece of media thrown out in the public domain then is getting picked up by the new platforms to put Wakode's parents exposed to a process of humiliating questioning).

Among the discourse that hounds and haunts the internet about Sahil’s death, there is a stark difference in how everyone perceived Sahil’s death; a majority of people, mostly upper-caste Hindus, had taken it into their hands to define how Sahil was at fault already in this instance, and some even justified his death. On the other hand, the wider anti-caste and DBA community and those who empathise with the sensitivity of the issue speak of immoral casteism and lack of institutional attentive response as a determining factor that led to this situation that day. We see the latter, but here we speak to the former and to the grammar of its psyche.

His father described casteist remarks over three months; his parents recalled discussing his distress during a campus visit. They had encouraged him to focus on his studies. His father expressed anguish at having left him there instead of bringing him home (Smart, Sah and Agashe 2026). These are parents recounting what their son told them, and the questions that remain. What had the institution made available when he needed care? There is a sensitivity to vocabulary, and to what gets omitted when we read Sahil’s case. A human life has been removed from the world: a body carrying relationships, labour, potential and an uncompleted future. His absence is dearly felt by his parents and loved ones. How shallow can our principles become when the defence of an institution occupies more space than the human being it was meant to support?

The worldviews of caste groups, marked by the worldmaking of gradedness positioned vis-à-vis caste positionality, are therefore indeed different —though these worlds overlap through class, gender, sexuality, generational privilege, and educational trajectories. The difference lies in the modus operandi, inherently stemming from caste-graded inequality and a plight of oversight that misses and misplaces the caste critique here (we bear caution that our casted DalitBahujan selves bear no higher stance to police any speech here; in fact we often ask ourselves: what constitutes and maintains our DalitBahujan selves, what renders us as DalitBahujan subjects). Perhaps some may argue that writers (ourselves) empathise with recent IIT Bombay student Sahil’s case “too much” because we see it relationally and personally. While we don't favour the negation of human tendency and capacity of feeling pain, extending sympathy, extending solidarity that exists by the virtue of humanity sharing one common world, as thinking and reasoning beings and as writers, we are also placed by the subjectivity of the Savarna-ness constituted and expressed through acts like ridiculing Sahil's parents and devaluing the epistemic reliability of Sahil's testimonials about caste-based discrimination faced at the institute. Secondly, we partially agree that the origination of such questions about our empathising, which is intertwined with the process and logics of our reading and writing (in fact, living), is indeed difficult to elucidate to those for whom the institutions remain ordinary places of comfort and belonging; such a comfort of and in the present does have a history of epistemic belongingness.

Dignity even after death

In the court of official institutional narrativising, Sahil was already at fault. IIT Bombay publicised its account of alleged ChatGPT use during an examination, then apologised for characterising events before they had been investigated and established (Smart 2026a). The examination footage circulating online does not, by itself, clarify ChatGPT usage, according to police reporting (Pillai, 2026). Yet a person’s death became an occasion to put his conduct on trial while his parents contemplated what happened to their child — the media and the majority already had a verdict and had held the unalive student in contempt, against a backdrop to context where any investigation remains under process. The contempt continues. An OpIndia article presented the footage as puncturing the “caste atrocity” account and dismissed claims of discrimination as an “apocryphal narrative” (Pandey 2026). This is the public court of dominant common sense: an examination allegation is made to answer a different question about caste. Sahil’s life is reduced to an accusation, and even after his death, the grain of dignity owed to a human being becomes conditional. It is also relevant to notice how the morality of certain individuals is made into official accounts and textuality, while that of others, people harmed, is subjected to a series of scrutinies and humiliation.

No moral yardstick, no ethical standpoint, no theory can justify making a student’s dignity disposable. We call Sahil’s death institutional murder and ask, in the same breath as our disagreers, “what is institutional murder?” we ask, “Whether institutions do not distribute humiliation, protection and the possibility of being heard so unequally? Do they not shape whether a student can appeal, rest, return after illness, survive an academic error, report humiliation and be believed?”

Equality cannot end at admission

Education must be equal in access, operation and function. Reservation is no institutional grace, concession, or push; it was the constitutional struggles, with Ambedkar at the centre, that secured rights and opened institutions historically structured against Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi students. Students have arrived through rights, rather than institutional generosity. What have these institutions done for them? We are asking for equality and harmony, for a space in which everyone can feel human enough. Here lies the play and ploy. Caste remains at play through supervision, assessment, discipline, hostel life, scholarships and grievances, while admission statistics ‘may’ become an institutional alibi for equality. Entry is secured; habitability, dignity and protection remain unequally distributed. Affirmative action does not end the institution’s responsibility there — what have these institutions done to make their classrooms, hostels and functioning inhabitable for the students whose presence counts as evidence of inclusion? This ‘violence of being’ gathers around caste, class, religion, gender, sexuality, regional location, accent, educational trajectory, family affluence and access to resources. These determinants shape how institutional life is navigated and how support becomes available or remote.

Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, Muslim and queer students encounter segregation, differentiation and ostracism. The question concerns the unequal functioning of these institutions, and the conditions under which marginalised students must repeatedly negotiate their existence.
Early in 2026, the University Grants Commission’s figures should have raised alarms. Reported caste discrimination complaints rose by 118.5 per cent, from 173 in 2019–20 to 378 in 2023–24 (Harigovind 2026).

These are recorded complaints, rather than a complete measure of casteism. The numbers quantify something already present in institutional life. They should have compelled institutions to pause and ask whether they could uphold equality and humanity within their campuses. Nor does an administratively marked “resolution” establish justice. Across the five years, 1,052 of 1,160 complaints were recorded as resolved (Harigovind 2026). A closed file tells us little about whether the student was heard, protected or able to remain. When internal equity cells answer to the institutions being complained against, the question is who controls the terms of redress; accountability cannot mean disposing of complaints while leaving discriminatory relations untouched.

What have institutions of ‘reason’ learned

Aniket Ambhore, a final-year electrical engineering student at IIT Bombay, died by suicide in September 2014 after falling from the sixth floor of a campus hostel. His parents, Sanjay and Sunita Ambhore, filed a complaint alleging that he had faced caste discrimination on campus, and for the first few days the administration was reluctant to concede that the fall was anything other than an accident. Sunita Ambhore told Frontline that a suicide is never sudden but builds from many experiences piling up over time. Aniket, she said, would tell his parents how people treated him: some teachers and classmates mocked him for having entered through the reserved category. Sahil's case, then, is not the first of its kind at the institute.

There is something urgent to rethink about IITs. Their mythology presents education as an enclave of merit, pure science and pure reason, as though caste belongs outside. “Caste privilege operates like infrastructure” (AVRaj and Singh 2026): its beneficiaries experience institutional comfort as ordinary, while others encounter obstruction and friction. Training in subjects of science does not dissolve this order. How have institutions of reason failed to confront the irrationality of graded human worth?

At IIT Mandi, a poster displayed during a Janmashtami event assigned Shudras the duty to “serve higher classes”. An internal inquiry found no intention to hurt any community and recommended counselling rather than disciplinary proceedings (Parashar 2026). The hierarchy was explicit — what kind of generations are these institutions creating, and what have they failed to teach about equality? The question extends beyond who displayed a poster to its institutional world. This is a question of epistemicide: the denial of belonging, recognition, voice and writing. Brahmanical power sustains itself when Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi presence is acknowledged, but its accounts of life remain unacceptable. Why does the demand for dignity produce defensiveness? Why is accountability experienced as a threat by those whose privilege has been secured through graded inequality?

Accountability before another death

An inquiry can be independent in name and still inherit the institution’s account of what matters. Students at IIT Bombay have demanded representation, grievance redressal and accessible care (Smart 2026b). Those demands reach beyond another committee — they ask whether a student can speak about humiliation while alive and remain within the university without becoming answerable for naming it.

Sahil’s parents recount months of casteist remarks that he shared with them (Smart, Sah and Agashe 2026). Much commentary turns to an allegation from his final examination (Pandey 2026). Notice what has moved: a question about how a university treated a student becomes a question about the student’s conduct. The latter is made to explain his death, while the parents are asked to explain why caste belongs in the conversation. That is the misplacement of caste critique. The caste is attached to the grieving Dalit family as its particular preoccupation; the university, its teachers and its procedures keep the privilege of seeming casteless. Yet humiliation is a relation, involving people who enact, overlook or normalise it. Why must the (family) account for its caste while those who govern the shared space need give no account of their own caste (Bargi 2017)?
This crisis has been on our hands for so long. To ask these questions is to underline the contempt against certain lives, (is our supposed wrong is asking the right questions of those who reserve questioning for themselves?) What did you hear while Sahil was alive? What, in your ordinary functioning, made his words difficult to be perceived as a plea for help? Why does an official allegation travel as an explanation while a parent’s account is made to wait? The offence lies in making those who judge account for their own authority. There is shame in this process, but it belongs to caste culture and its custodians that live and thrive on graded inequality, hold the privilege of refusing that shame and passing it to the humiliated. It does not reside in Dalit, Bahujan or Adivasi bodies. No inquiry brings Sahil back. The tragedy of humanity brought upon by casted cruelties in the academic institutions cannot be punctuated with a full stop with a committee report or a TV debate; for us to remain alive in the face of these deaths, the questions must haunt us every day: What have institutions done for those who remain? Why must the demand to be treated as human appear so daring in a university?

About the Authors

Aishwarya AVRaj (Delhi) is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at IIT Delhi and an independent media practitioner. Her public facing work bridges critical philosophy with contemporary discourse on the intersections of the persisting inequalities in the subcontinent.

Harshul Singh (Delhi) is an early-career researcher and graduate of SOAS University of London. His research engages with decolonial praxis, critical caste studies, and ethnographic inquiry, with a regional focus on South Asia. He is passionate about cultivating inclusive academic dialogue and encouraging epistemic and ethical reflexivity in research practices