The Dialectics of Dignity and Privilege

**Pranav Saraf

Of late, the Indian higher education landscape has witnessed an interesting legal and sociological phenomena – the notification and subsequent judicial stay of the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026 (“Regulations”). 

The Regulations were brought in as a corrective measure to address the systemic and institutional exclusion and harassment of students from the Scheduled Castes (“SC”), Scheduled Tribes (“ST”), and Other Backward Classes (“OBCs”). These regulations were meant to be the most significant intervention in campus equity since the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations. However, on 29^th January, 2026, the Supreme Court of India, while responding to a batch of petitions alleging “reverse discrimination” and “divisiveness,” put a stay on these regulations. 

This piece attempts to offer an analysis of the situation. Firstly, it dissects the Regulations, contrasting them with the “toothless” University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2012 (“2012 Regulations”) [Part I]. The argument goes on to provide a historical analysis, spanning from the theological practices of the 19^th century to the “meritocratic” gatekeeping of the 21^st, to demonstrate that the current “outrage” by the dominant castes is not a novel phenomenon but historical patterns repeating themselves to the ideals of democratisation [Part II]. Finally, it analyses the prevailing narrative of “reverse discrimination” through empirical data [Part III]. 

This piece’s aim is to show that the “feeling” of reverse discrimination among the dominant / “upper” castes is immensely misplaced, stemming from a psychological inability to distinguish between the loss of exclusive privilege and the onset of oppression. The empirical data reveals that “academic apartheid” remains the dominant reality of Indian higher education, characterised by high dropout rates among marginalised students, abysmal conviction rates for caste atrocities, and a faculty composition in these institutions that remains overwhelmingly homogenous. The Supreme Court’s intervention, therefore, must not be seen in a vacuum, but as a sociological sign regarding the fragility of substantive equality in the face of deep-rooted social hierarchies.

The Regulations

The Regulations were the outcome of a prolonged judicial and civil society struggle, born largely from the institutional murders of scholars like Rohith Vemula in 2016 and Payal Tadvi in 2019. These deaths exposed the inadequacy of the 2012 Regulations, which treated caste discrimination as an administrative grievance rather than a human rights violation.

The Regulations show the shift from “welfare” to “rights.” Instead of being “guidelines” that relied on advisory language, these Regulations are explicitly prescriptive, punitive, and structurally expansive. This expansiveness is evident in its definition of discrimination. Under Rule 1(e) and similar provisions, discrimination has not been limited to overt acts of violence or verbal abuse. It includes implicit bias, which is defined as the “unintentional” or “implicit” behaviours that result in “unfair, differential, or biased treatment.” This can be seen as a breakthrough acknowledging that casteism in modern campuses often manifests through silence, exclusion from informal settings, and non-verbal humiliation rather than just explicit slurs. It also includes the denial of access to resources, benefits, or opportunities that a student might be eligible for, effectively criminalising bureaucratic delays often used to harass scholarship-dependent minority students. The Regulations also expand their protection to Economically Weaker Sections (“EWS”), women, Persons with Disabilities (“PwD”), and minorities, realising equity as an intersectional objective. 

The Regulations mandate a standardised infrastructure for equity across all Higher Education Institutions (“HEIs”). Equal Opportunity Cells (“EOCs”) are to be established by every HEI and it is not to be a token office but a nodal agency with statutory powers. To this effect, it introduces the Equity Committee, chaired by the Head of the Institution (Vice-Chancellor/Principal) which is meant to be representative. It requires student representatives, faculty from the marginalised communities, and external civil society members. Also borrowing from anti-ragging regulations, it provides for “Equity Squads,” functioning as mobile units to monitor campus spaces, and “Equity Ambassadors” within hostels and departments to act as first responders to discrimination.

The most significant aspect of the Regulations, and the likely driver of the administrative backlash, was the punitive provisions. Non-compliance with the Regulations could result in punitive action against the HEI along with de-recognition and debarment from offering degrees.

It is also critical to distinguish between the Regulations and the 2012 Regulations. The 2012 Regulations were widely criticised as “toothless” and “advisory” because they lacked any consequences for non-compliance and relied on a vague “Anti-Discrimination Officer” rather than the comprehensive framework that has been introduced now. However, this power to punish is precisely what subject the Regulations to massive backlash. The 2012 Regulations survived because they were ineffective and easily ignored by the dominant caste administration. It was the introduction of genuine consequences that generated the anxiety of “misuse” among the privileged, leading the Supreme Court to stay in the face of a challenge to these Regulations. 

The Supreme Court decision

On 29^th January, 2026, a Division Bench of Chief Justice of India (“CJI”) Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi issued an interim order staying the Regulations. The Court directed that the 2012 Regulations would continue to operate in the interim. 

The rationale of the Court can be said to rest on four pillars of scepticism – (i) “Vagueness” and Due Process in the context of the definition of discrimination, particularly the inclusion of “implicit” bias, expressing concern that subjective feelings of being discriminated against can be weaponised to file false complaints against faculty and students, thereby vitiating the academic atmosphere; (ii) “Divisive” Nature of Equity insofar that the Regulations were “capable of dividing the society” and regressive that impairs the goal of a casteless society; (iii) Misreading of “Separate Hostels” provision, interpreting it as sanctioning “segregation” (separate hostels for separate castes); (iv) Asymmetry in terms of recourse for “General Category” students who might face “reverse discrimination,” potentially violating Article 14 of the Constitution. 

The stay, therefore, prioritised the anxiety of the dominant castes regarding potential misuse over the safety of marginalised students who face actual abuse. 

By interpreting the recognition of caste as its perpetuation, the Court commits a grave error. Its observations about the ideal of a “casteless society” reveals a fundamental disconnect between the constitutional ideal and the social reality. For the upper castes, caste is something that only others have. Their lives are only governed by “merit” and “individual choice,” while viewing the lives of Dalits as governed by “caste” and “quotas.” This caste-blindness is a form a of privilege that allows them to ignore the capital that sustains their success. The Regulations were an issue because they forced the unmarked citizen in the General Category to be marked as a potential oppressor.

Historical Analysis

The resistance and backlash to the Regulations cannot be understood in vacuum. It is the latest effort in a two-century-long conflict over the democratisation of knowledge in India. This section attempts to trace the treatment of lower castes by the upper-caste elite historically. 

In the pre-colonial and early colonial period, education was not a public right but a theological privilege restricted to the Dwija (twice-born) castes. The Manusmriti and other Dharmashastras prescribed severe corporal punishment, including the pouring of molten lead into ears, for Shudras and Atishudras who attempted to access Vedic knowledge. This theological ban led to a monopoly on “cultural capital” that persisted for centuries.

When the British, driven by the need for a broader workforce and the “civilising” mission, opened schools to all castes in the mid-19^th century, the upper-caste response was not grounded in “merit” but in “pollution.” A landmark case from 1856 in the Bombay Presidency is a fitting precedent. A boy from a “Depressed Class” (Mahar) petitioned for admission to a government school in Dharwar. The educational department, despite having a policy of open admission, rejected him. The rationale behind the rejection was that his admission would lead to mass withdrawal of Brahmin students who feared “pollution.” The colonial state, prioritising social order over equity, acquiesced, creating a policy stating “educational institutions should not be forced upon the people” if it violated their social customs. 

Even in cases where admission was technically granted, physical exclusion persisted. Dalit students were often forced to sit on the veranda outside the classroom, listening through windows, prohibited from drinking from the school water pot. This practice of presence without integration ensured that the upper-caste educational space remained “pure.”

This era also saw the rise of the first-generation of anti-caste educators. Jyotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule opened the first schools for “untouchables” and women in Pune in 1848, directly challenging the Brahminical monopoly. Subsequently, Chhatrapati Sahu Maharaj of Kolhapur introduced the first reservation policy in 1902 of 50%, arguing that an assessment of “meritocracy” between a horse and a donkey was inherently unjust and illogical. These interventions form the bedrock of the modern policies of affirmative action. 

After independence, the Constitution of India legally abolished untouchability and institutionalised reservations. However, the upper-caste elite, who dominated bureaucracy and academia, came up with novel ways to maintain their hegemony. 

Satish Deshpande describes this period as a “passive revolution.” The upper-castes having secured their position through centuries of exclusive access to education, declared themselves “casteless.” They converted their caste capital into modern class capital, in the form of degrees, English fluency, professional networks, etc. Consequently, the idea of “merit” was constructed as an objective, secular metric, defined purely by examination scores, conveniently ignoring that these scores were highly correlated with the historical privileges they possessed.

Universities systematically keep reserved faculty positions vacant. The standard administrative note is “None found suitable” (“NFS”) or “Non-availability of suitable candidates” (“NASC”). This allowed thousands of academic positions to be de-reserved or kept vacant, preserving the university as a social club for the upper castes. The “merit” argument here was used to mask a refusal to share spaces and/or deny access.

The implementation of the recommendations of the Mandal Commission in 1990, extending reservations to OBCs, triggered the most violent upper-caste backlash in independent India. These protests marked a shift in the narrative of exclusionary politics. The argument was no longer about “pollution,” since it was now illegal and socially unacceptable but about “national efficiency.” Upper-caste protestors argued that the entry of OBCs would dilute the quality of administration and science. The instances of youth immolating themselves was framed as a sacrifice for the nation, positioning the upper castes not as oppressors, but as victims of a populist state. 

The Supreme Court upheld these reservations in Indra Sawhney v. Union of India in 1992. It imposed two checks to mitigate the anxiety of the upper castes – the 50% cap, ensuring students of merit (almost all from upper castes) retained half the seats regardless of their population share, and the Creamy Layer exclusion, ensuring that the OBCs who had a chance to compete are excluded [¶ 860]. These were judicial innovations framed as policy compromises to balance social justice with the preservation of elite spaces, assuming a correlation between reservations and efficiency.

The Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act, 2006 introduced reservations in elite institutes like IITs and IIMs, leading to the current phase of “academic apartheid.” 

With physical exclusion impossible, discrimination became covert. It manifested in the form of humiliating viva voces, isolation of Dalit students in hostels, unfair behaviour with SC/ST PhD scholars, and the segregation of dining halls.

The deaths of Rohith Vemula, Payal Tadvi, and Darshan Solanki are some stories that were the direct result of such a hostile environment. The Regulations should be seen as an attempt to legislate against such specific, modern forms of exclusion. 

This trajectory reveals a consistent pattern that the upper castes have never voluntarily ceded space. Every attempt to democratise the educational spaces has been met with resistance by ways that adapt to the times. The argument evolves from “Shastric prohibitions” to “pollution” to “efficiency” and latest to “reverse discrimination.” The Regulations were the state’s recognition that “merit” in India is not a neutral standard but a repository of generational privilege. The stay on these regulations, therefore, is not just legal; it is a stay on the rights of those marginalised people who have been told again that the comfort of the privileged must precede their right to be part of society and their right to feel safe and included. 

The Outrage and the Narrative of “Reverse Discrimination”

The gazette notification of the Regulations triggered an immediate backlash, primarily from upper-caste student groups, faculty associations, and political figures. This outrage was not merely a reaction to a new law but a overt manifestation of a deeper psychological crisis within the dominant castes.

The paramount reason for the outrage is the psychological phenomenon of dominant group fragility, which is basically when a group has been accustomed to exclusive privilege, equality begins to feel like oppression. 

A primary argument against the regulations was the inclusion of “implicit bias” and the subjective experience of the victim. Such anxieties reveal their inability to reflect on how deep-seated or normalised their behaviours are that jokes about reservation or stereotypes about “quota candidates” is abusive and not “innocent.” The Regulations forced them to see themselves not as “neutral citizens” but as potential perpetrators, a psychological mirror they refused to look at. 

The outrage was also exacerbated by another controversy. In 2024, the UGC had released draft guidelines proposing the “de-reservation” of unfilled faculty posts, i.e., opening them to general candidates. The massive backlash from the Dalit-Bahujan communities forced the Government to withdraw the proposal. The upper castes, feeling “robbed” of these potential seats, seem to have directed their accrued anger at the Regulations.

A major “empirical” argument in the backlash against the Regulations was a study titled “Caste-based enrolment in Indian Higher Education” by IIM Udaipur in December, 2025. The study claimed that the share of the General Category in higher education had shrunk to roughly 39%, while SC/ST/OBCs were in the majority (almost 60%). It was widely cited to argue that “reverse discrimination” is a statistical reality. However, nothing further could be from the reality.

This is so because even if SC/ST/OBCs constitute 60% of enrolment, they constitute roughly 76% of the national population. Looking at this, one could argue that they remain under-represented relative to their share in the population. The General Category is approximately 24% of the national population and holds 39% of seats, indicating they are still over-represented. The “decline” in their share between 2011 and 2023 therefore is a labelling tactic, rather than the reality.

Another convenient argument against the Regulations, and the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, is that these laws are rampant with “false cases” and are used to blackmail innocent upper-caste people. This narrative of “misuse” forms the bedrock of the feeling of “reverse discrimination.” Some credit for it can also go to the Supreme Court of India’s ruling in S. K. Mahajan v. State of Maharashtra. However, empirical data from the National Crime Records Bureau (“NCRB”) shows a very different picture and this argument’s fallacy has already been written about.

Thus, this feelings of “reverse discrimination” is entirely misplaced because it equates the loss of monopoly with discrimination. When a group that had historically filled 100% of the spaces and positions is told to adjust in 50% due to reservations, which is still more than their population share, they perceive the reduction as a loss of their property or space. However, they fail to realise that the 100% was a grossly unjust monopoly. The Regulations do not discriminate against the upper castes. They merely remove the invisible affirmative action, such as caste networks, social and cultural capitals that the upper castes have enjoyed for centuries. 

Conclusion

The issue around the Regulations acts as a mirror into the sociological condition of contemporary India. It reveals that beneath the veneer of “New India” and “Digital India,” the hierarchies of caste remain deep-rooted. 

The outrage signifies the breakdown of “fraternity,” one of the four pillars of the Preamble to the Constitution. The dominant castes are not outraged at the suicide of a Dalit student due to discrimination but are threatened by the laws attempting to prevent such suicides. The lack of empathy, even from the Judiciary, for the marginalised student who is just trying to change his fate and along with him, numerous others, is a profound moral crisis of modern India. “Merit” continues to be the camouflage for caste privilege, and the narrative of “reverse discrimination” is not outed as statistically baseless because it is politically potent. 

The Supreme Court’s observation of these equity measures as “divisive” has inadvertently validated the status quo. True integration does not come from ignoring differences but from addressing the power imbalances that create those differences. Until this distinction between the “divisiveness” of justice and the “harmony” of oppression is not clear to this country and its highest institutions, the ghosts of Rohith Vemula and many others who had to face similar realities will continue to haunt us. 

**Pranav Saraf is a fourth-year B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) student at NALSAR, Hyderabad.

**Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog do not necessarily align with the views of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.