(Focusing on the protests and debates against the recent University
Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education
Institutions) Regulations, 2026, the article examines how upper-caste
common sense manifests as both assertion and victimhood when
caste-based policies challenge entrenched exclusions and hierarchies.
Recent protests have displayed an unabashed upper-caste assertion
in public space, not merely through claims of victimhood but also
through open sloganeering such as Brahmanvad Zindabad. This
marks a qualitative shift in upper-caste politics, one in which the
earlier “cloaks of civility” appear to have been discarded.)
On 13th February 2026, outside the Maurice Nagar Police Station in Delhi, a crowd gathered in the name of justice. A viral video showed YouTuber Megha Lawariya raising a slogan rarely heard in the discursive space of “prestigious” public universities in India. Brahmanvad Zindabad – long live Brahminism. The occasion was a protest against the University Grants Commission (UGC) (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, notified on 13th January 2026. The slogan was neither an aberration nor a momentary lapse. It was the public articulation of a certain ideological politics long present but rarely declared so brazenly in public space—a politics that this article argues is constitutive of how upper-caste subjects understand, articulate, and defend their privileges in Indian academia.
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The UGC Equity Regulations, 2026 can trace their genealogy to a 2019 public interest litigation filed by Radhika Vemula and Abeda Salim Tadvi—mothers of Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi, whose deaths exposed the institutional machinery of caste violence at Indian universities. Their deaths were not isolated incidents. Between 2018 and mid- 2023, 98 students from Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivast communities died in government-run universities and premier institutions, such as the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), National Institute of Technology (NIT), Indian Institute of Management (IIM), and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER). Caste-based discrimination complaints also doubled in Indian universities between 2019- 20 and 2023-24. Thorat (2026) notes that the denial of equal access and opportunity along with experience of harassment, humiliation and contempt for Scheduled Caste (SC) / Scheduled Tribe (ST), constitutes structural features of higher educational institutions, which necessitate policies such as the UGC regulations.
“Across all the IITs and IIMs, over 80 per cent of faculty belongs to the general category. This data does not indicate a meritocratic system in place; rather, it points to the failure of higher educational institutions to honour constitutional commitments—and, crucially, the UGC’s prolonged abdication of its own regulatory mandate”
The new UGC regulations mandated the establishment of equal opportunity centres in all higher education institutions, with mandatory representation from SCs, STs, and Other Backward Classes (OBCs), women, and persons with disabilities. For the first time, OBCs were explicitly included within the definition of caste-based discrimination—a long-overdue recognition. The regulations also stated that higher educational institutions are now required to maintain 24-hour helplines and strict complaint timelines, and vice-chancellors are made personally accountable for ensuring discrimination-free academic environments.
The response against these regulations was swift, and to those familiar with the history of caste exclusion in Indian academia, entirely predictable. Upper-caste organisations, explicitly identifying as upper caste, took to the streets across the country. In Uttar Pradesh, posters appeared outside homes banning Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders from soliciting votes, emblazoned with “Savarna against BJP.” In Rajasthan, the Karni Sena warned of large-scale agitation, alleging the law was designed to suppress the upper-caste communities (Asnani 2026). In Kaushambi, the district head of the upper-caste army wrote a letter to the Prime Minister in his own blood, calling the regulations a “black law.” Brahmin, Rajput, Vaishya, and Kayastha organisations coalesced into a platform called the Savarna Samaj Samanvay Samiti. Students and parents staged protests, framing the regulations as threats to institutional autonomy and, above all, to merit. That merit is invoked so reflexively and so urgently in these protests is not incidental – it reflects an ideological vocabulary through which upper-caste dominance of Indian academia is justified. For example, across all the IITs and IIMs, over 80 per cent of faculty belongs to the general category. This data does not indicate a meritocratic system in place; rather, it points to the failure of higher educational institutions to honour constitutional commitments—and, crucially, the UGC’s prolonged abdication of its own regulatory mandate.
This article argues that such exclusion is not accidental. Drawing on the foundational critique by B.R. Ambedkar (1936), who identified caste not merely as social stratification but as graded inequality—a hierarchical structure in which upper-echelon privilege is always sustained by the degradation of those below—it situates the contemporary protests within a longer history of caste reproduction in Indian intellectual life. For Ambedkar, education was central to the project of Dalit emancipation; yet as debates about who produces academic knowledge, who counts as learned, and which bodies can legitimately inhabit intellectual space continue to reveal, the university space remains one of the most durable sites of caste persistence. Deshpande and Zacharias (2013) documented systematic discrimination in hiring, promotion, access to resources, and evaluative practices at premier universities and IITs, demonstrating that Dalit and OBC faculties and students routinely face disadvantages dressed in the language of academic standards and institutional norms. According to them, merit functions not as a description of individual capacity but as a legitimising discourse that naturalises upper-caste ascendancy.
Subramanian (2019) describes this process as the laundering of caste privilege into the language of talent and hard work. Upper-caste dominance in institutions such as IITs and NITs is thus not simply demographic – it is epistemological. The university space itself becomes an upper-caste-dominated space, where pedagogical norms, knowledge production, and the architecture of collegiality are calibrated to upper-caste sensibilities, and where those from marginalised communities who do enter are required to assimilate or face professional marginalisation.
It is against this backdrop that the upper-caste assertion, triggered by the UGC regulations of 2026, must be read—not as a defence of merit, but as a defence of the structures through which upper-caste dominance has been naturalised as institutional common sense. By analysing the publicly mobilised protests and debates around the UGC regulations, this article argues how upper-caste notions of merit operate as both an ideological and material tool—one that systematically undermines policy frameworks designed to address caste exclusion and to suppress the voices of Dalit and Bahujan communities in Indian higher education. We argue that this notion of merit is influenced by seemingly contradictory tendencies, that of upper-caste assertion and victimhood. However, as Kang (2024:313) notes,
‘The article proceeds as follows. We begin by situating the ideological frame-work of Brahminism as the lens through which upper caste groups navigate in postcolonial India, arguing that their mindset oscillates between victimhood and caste pride/aggression. Together, these contradictory but complementary tendencies—operating behind a ”cloak of civility”—function to reproduce upper-caste common sense while obscuring its structural and historical foundations.”
To be wounded and to simultaneously wield the power to would others, both entrenches and regenerates upper-castes long continuing power to oppress.
Our intervention draws from this categorisation, which points to a structural unity between upper-caste victimhood and assertion. We contend that the UGC protests exemplified a microcosmic instance of such tendencies.
The article proceeds as follows. We begin by situating the ideological frame-work of Brahminism as the lens through which upper caste groups navigate in postcolonial India, arguing that their mindset oscillates between victimhood and caste pride/ aggression. Together, these contradictory but complementary tendencies—operating behind a ”cloak of civility”—function to reproduce upper-caste common sense while obscuring its structural and historical foundations. Further, we examine how upper-caste common sense manifested in the UGC protests through twin expressions of victimhood and assertive Brahminical aggression. Finally, we argue that the protests mark a qualitative shift in upper-caste politics—moving from the earlier defensive language of meritocracy and individual victimhood towards open, collective caste assertion—as the older ideological frameworks of castelessness and merit lose coherence under sustained Dalit- Bahujan pressure.
The Upper-caste Common Sense
We cannot adequately understand the upper-caste mindset towards social change unless we situate it within the broader ideological framework that structures and guides it. Following Ambedkar and other scholars/ thinkers of the non-Brahmin stratum, we call this ideological framework Brahminism. In elucidating this concept, V.Geetha notes that it “provides an epistemological—and social— bind, if you will, within which alone matters of authority may be effectively negotiated.” This ideological tool does not operate in abstraction. It is linked to materiality and influences the caste mandate for each historical epoch. Therefore, it operates in a distinct manner in the postcolonial epoch. By examining the Constituent Assembly debates related to caste, which fell woefully short of taking steps towards a casteless society, Geetha points out that,
and in this compromise, Brahminism came into its own—not as an orthodoxy that resisted change, not as conservation which was cautious about the nature of change, but as an odd democratic option which was happy enough to enable political democracy into existence, but extremely reluctant to usher in a social and civic revolution.
This compromise benefited the upper caste groups and reshaped the manifestation of caste in the postcolonial conjuncture in multiple ways. First, unlike several countries in the global South, whose emergence from colonialism was coterminous with a social revolution, India witnessed a “passive revolution” that prevented significant reforms against the traditional feudal structure, thereby preventing a full-fledged onslaught on the material foundations of caste. However, as Satish Deshpande (2013) discusses, despite these limited attempts to democratise the broader social structure, the discourse around caste was largely confined to questions of reservation. Deshpande points out that the historical process through which upper-caste groups converted their economic capital into credential capital in the post-independence period was effectively obscured, producing a situation in which a sense of “castelessness” prevailed among the upper castes. While Deshpande’s arguments on the internalisation of “castelessness” among upper castes can be debated and critiqued, it is clear that the source of “upper-caste victimhood” that is witnessed episodically, primarily against attempts at reservation, lies in this extremely limited discourse surrounding upper-caste privileges in postcolonial India. In this context, even interventions such as Mandal Commission recommendations, which Geetha (2002) notes as largely symbolic; which Omvedt notes as “a broad democratic demand, a matter of simple justice” and not particularly substantive in attacking caste, ferment and create space for this “upper-caste victimhood” to be expressed. As Omvedt notes in the context of Mandal Commission recommendations, the figure of a poor “Brahmin boy,” whose opportunities for mobility are allegedly displaced by reservations, became a central discursive point in upper-caste rhetoric against the Mandal Commission—a quintessential example of upper-caste victimhood.
However, the sense of victimhood encapsulates only one side of the upper caste mentality towards case. Alongside like brazen forms of aggression and caste-pride. As a recent EPW editorial (2026) notes (“Fangs Bared against Equality”), this brazen display of caste pride has to coexist with a “cloak of civility,” which the constitutional moment has brought about. Otherwise, the political hegemony of upper castes would be questioned, creating spaces for backlashes from the subaltern groups, purely because of the numerical equation. Nevertheless, as the EPW editorial succinctly points out,
from behind this cloak, subtle expressions of caste supremacism, not the explicit jativachak (caste-naming), but the subtle jatiya (caste-denoting) emerge, which occasionally become brazen.
Several sociological studies note this phenomenon. One of the most important scholarly contributions on this question is The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India written by Ajantha Subramanian. Drawing on her extensive field-work in IIT Madras, she maps how merit and pride for Tamil-Brahmins are intrinsically imbricated in their caste identity. In a casteless space, as Deshpande (2013) denotes, merit is only incidentally linked to caste, even when the disproportionate presence of upper castes in positions of power and authority is evident. Here, merit is individualised, delinked from social history and structural factors. However, it is not the caste in IIT Madras, where caste and merit exist in a symbiotic relationship. While this phenomenon does not result in unabashed forms of violence, it leads to systematic exclusion and constant humiliation for students from marginalised communities, causing institutionalised misrecognition. Studies in other educational institutions, such as the Indian Institute of Science-Bangalore (IISC), have also arrived at similar conclusions. The more barefaced displays of pride and attacks manifest in village “publics,” the national public sphere is largely kept away from such expressions. By and large, the “cloak of civility” is upheld. In the educational sphere, the “cloak of civility” protects the institution’s reputation while the harm continues underneath. It also makes resistance harder, because there is no single dramatic event to point to—only an accumulation of misrecognition, exclusion, and erasure.
The observations help us to give a broad picture of upper-caste common sense, which we believe was evidently illustrated in the recent protests against UGC regulation. By common sense, we invoke the Gramscian notion of common sense. For Gramsci, common sense, through which different social groups make sense of their world, is often “fragmentary, inconsistent, and incoherent”. For subaltern classes, this often produces the simultaneous presence of submissive and rebellious tendencies within their consciousness. The agenda of progressive political activists, Gramsci notes, is to engage with this fragmentary common sense and cultivate “good sense.” This framework can be broadly extended to analyse upper-caste sensibilities. The dominant upper-caste common sense is also fragmentary and inchoate. The rhetoric around victimhood and aggression indicates these contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, upper castes assert dominance and caste pride. On the other, they claim to be victims—of reservation policies, of being called “casteist,” of losing privileges. Nevertheless, as Kang (2024) indicates, while rhetorically distinct and different, they are symbolically united and help in the reproduction of upper-caste privileges. Since these tendencies operate together to reproduce upper-caste hegemony, the cultivation of “good sense,” especially among upper-caste social collectives, is nearly impossible.
Returning to Brahminism, with which this section began, the contradictory tendencies of assertion and victimhood, by providing an “epistemological and social bind” through which upper castes interpret caste and their position within it, are central to understanding how Brahminism adapts in the present historical conjuncture.
(to be continued…)
Courtesy: ‘Economic & Political Weekly’
