……continuing from the previous issue
Assertion and Victimhood in UGC Protests
Related articles
The protests recycled the master narrative: that merit was under siege, and the academically deserving upper-caste students were the true victims. The apogee moment of upper-caste victimhood in this context was a poem written by Kumar Vishwas, in which he descried himself as an “unfortunate upper caste.” Here, he (re)defines the lived experience of upper castes through the lens of being “unfortunate.” Therefore, to be upper caste is to be “unfortunate.” A recent example of a comparable outburst was the analogy drawn by Congress member of Parliament Manish Tewari, who linked contemporary Brahmin existence in India to Jewish experience under Hitler.”
Alongside this exhibition of victimhood, the pro-regulation public sphere also drew on savarna assertion. It manifested in the upper-caste backlash against protests and media narratives that supported the UGC regulations. Student organisations at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and the University of Delhi staged rallies demanding immediate enforcement of regulations. Many independent internet portals, such as Round Table India and Dalit Voice, offered sustained critiques of upper-caste outrage, locating it within the longer history of Brahminical resistance to constitutional equity provisions. An “Adhikar Rally” in support of the regulations on 13th February was attacked by right-wing groups. A woman research scholar and student activist was physically assaulted and verbally abused at the Maurice Nagar Police Station where she had gone to file a complaint. It was outside the same police station that slogans of Brahmanvad Zindabad rang out. It further translated into physical intimidation and violence, revealing how Brahminism operates not just as an ideology but as an active force capable of suppressing dissent and silencing marginalised voices.
The assertion of Brahmanvad Zindabad outside the police station where a woman student sought protection is not incidental; it is the spatial enactment of a broader discursive strategy in which caste-supremacist feelings are mobilised to drown out and silence the claims of Dalit, Bahujan, and women’s voices. Menon’s (2012) work on gendered spatial order similarly reminds us that when a woman enters a public institutional space to claim rights, she confronts not one, but several axes of exclusion condensed into a single threshold. The upper-caste subjects do not merely occupy space; it saturates it with an affective charge that renders the subordinated body illegible as a rights-bearing presence. What makes this moment particularly diagnostic is the way upper-caste hurt—the performative grievance of upper-caste groups against constitutional provisions functions not as a genuine claim of injury but as a political technology of delegitimation. Such spatial domination is not confined to the streets and police stations. It mitigates inward, into the architecture of the university itself–into its seminar rooms, its hiring committees, its syllabi, and its informal cultures of belonging. Upper-caste assertion in Indian higher education operates through precisely what Taiwo (2022), writing in a different but resonant context, calls “elite capture”—the process by which those already privileged come to dominate the institutions, discourses, and resources ostensibly meant to redress structural inequality.
In the Indian academic context, this capture is systemic; Dalit, Adivasi, and OBC faculties remain catastrophically under-represented among the professors and academic decision-makers, even in centrally funded institutions legally bound by the reservation policy (Kumar 2023). The upper-caste academics do not merely populate these spaces—they set the terms of what counts as legitimate knowledge, academic rigour, and scholarship, thereby producing/reproducing a Brahminical epistemological order beneath the neutral language of academic merit (Guru 2002). The mechanism through which this hegemony reproduces itself is worth examining carefully, because it operates through feelings as much as through formal exclusion. Upper-caste hurt—the wounded sensibility of upper-caste facilities and students when reservation and anti-caste pedagogies are centred—often leads to such interventions being marked as disruptive, politically motivated, or academically unserious.
When Dalit, Bahujan research scholars and faculties raise questions of caste discrimination in their institutions, they are routinely met not with institutional inquiry but with the hurt and indignation of upper-caste peers and colleagues who experience the naming of caste as a personal attack. This is accentuated by a process which explains as “distorted” upper-caste “photochromic gaze” where any struggle apart from their own appears frivolous.” Or as Khang notes, “The upper-caste’s tendency to dominate narratives of victimhood tries to disallow others from what it means to be hurt.” This inversion—where the articulation of structural harm becomes recast as an act of aggression against the dominant—is precisely the discursive move that Taiwo (2022) identifies as central to elite capture: the grievance vocabulary developed by and for the marginalised is appreciated and redirected to protect the interests of the already powerful. Occupying the academia, the streets and many public domains emerge not as separate spaces but as continuous sites of a single structure; the savarna project of monopolising not only physical space but the very conditions under which knowledge, justice, and legitimate voice are defined and distributed. In sum, we contend that the contradictory common sense animating upper castes, constitutive of victimhood and assertion, as evidenced in the recent protests, represents a continuum of upper-caste mentality within educational institutions, and reflects their broader ideological world view, having real material implications.
“In earlier phases of anti-reservation politics—from the 1990 Mandal agitation to subsequent upper-caste mobilisations—the argument was that reservation violated the constitutional promise of non-discrimination. The upper-caste subject was positioned as a victim of state policy, denied opportunity on the basis of birth. Such categories of the victimhood of the upper-caste subjects are an agglomeration of aggrieved individuals rather than as a caste collective”
A New Normal?
The upper-caste protesters who chanted Brahmanvad Zindabad with unusual clarity are a significant transformation in the public articulation of upper-caste identity. In earlier phases of anti-reservation politics—from the 1990 Mandal agitation to subsequent upper-caste mobilisations—the argument was that reservation violated the constitutional promise of non-discrimination. The upper-caste subject was positioned as a victim of state policy, denied opportunity on the basis of birth. Such categories of the victimhood of the upper-caste subjects are an agglomeration of aggrieved individuals rather than as a caste collective. The 2026 moment represents something qualitatively different—the open chanting of Brahmanvad Zindabad marks a rhetorical shift from victimhood to explicit case assertion. In that sense, it represents a discursive mutation. Upper-caste groups are no longer only claiming to speak as aggrieved individuals; they are mobilising as a caste collective and asserting that identity in public. This is significant. This assertive caste politics by upper castes signals a new willingness to make Brahminical privilege visible and to defend it unapologetically. The upper-caste assertion and domination are not simply about who occupies positions of power but about how the infrastructure of collective action—the agendas and frameworks—is articulated. Here, we see the continuum between assertion and victimhood operating slightly differently from what Kang (2024) has proposed. At least rhetorically, this continuum previously had to deploy universal categories, most prominently equality. That moral universe has been discarded, and instead, invoking hierarchy has become rhetorically crucial. Even before UGC protests, several posts on social media, valorising biological essentialism and genetic superiority of upper castes, had indicated such tendencies.
The slogan Brahmanvad Zindabad and the increasingly visible assertion of upper-caste identity are symptoms of a deeper structural transformation in how upper-caste groups are repositioning themselves politically in an era when the older, quieter languages of their hegemony are no longer useful. The languages of meritocracy and castelessness are losing their ideological coherence under sustained pressure from Dalit-Bahujan intellectual and socio-political movements. What we have witnessed from the protest against the UGC regulation of 2026 is better understood as a mutation in the grammar of Brahminical hegemony, as a shift from the disavowal of caste to its open, even celebratory, re-inception—but one that does not abandon the other languages so much as selectively recombine them under new conditions. The upper-caste investment in meritocracy and castelessness was related to positional defence: a way of protecting monopoly access to state employment and educational opportunity that reservation threatened to democratise. The language of merit was the political form the upper-caste interest took in a constitutional democracy that formally prohibited caste discrimination. What is new about the current moment—the moment of Brahmanvad Zindabad and over upper-caste identity assertion—is that this captured language of meritocratic castelessness is no longer sufficient on its own. In other words, while the fragmentary nature of upper-caste common sense remains, the element of assertion has become more significant and pronounced.
Upper castes who once did not need to be named as “savarna” because the institution named everyone else as particular, now increasingly confront a situation in which those same institutions are being asked to name them as well. The protest and most importantly slogans against the regulation can be seen as an existential threat, not merely to ideological and material position but to the very self-understanding through which the upper-caste identity has been organised. And it is out of this threat that the new savarna identity politics emerges. Taiwo (2022) precisely draws our attention to how racially privileged elites do not simply react to challenge but strategically reposition themselves to manage and redirect it. The public assertion of Brahmin and upper-caste identity is not an abandonment of the earlier meritocratic narrative but its intensification through a different register. The Brahmanvad Zindabad moment performs a kind of caste-based assertion is reverse: by claiming the vocabulary of identity assertion for the dominant group, it works to delegitimise identity politics as such, or at least to render it symmetrical, to suggest that if Dalit assertion is permissible, then Brahmin assertion must be equally so.
In Conclusion
This article has argued that the protests surrounding the UGC Regulations, 2026 represent not merely an opposition to the policy framework, but a qualitatively new moment in the public articulation of upper-caste assertion. Our analytical entry point has been the slogan Brahmanvad Zindabad chanted openly outside a police station; a moment whose significance lies precisely in its brazenness. It indicates a disconcerting phenomenon; an unapologetic, self-naming claim to caste privilege in the public domain. Therefore, the relationship between victimhood and aggression has shifted from a subterranean yet symbiotic alignment to a discursive mutation in which victimhood and assertion now operate simultaneously and openly reinforce one another. This new grammar of upper-caste identity no longer requires the alibi of euphemism or self-concealment. The UGC protests of 2026 offer a diagnostic moment to understand the evolving grammar of Brahminical hegemony in contemporary India. What began as a postcolonial ideological framework oscillating between victim-hood and assertion—operating behind a carefully maintained cloak of civility—has now mutated into open, collective caste assertion, as the older languages of meritocracy and castelessness lose their ideological grip. The Brahmanvad Zindabad moment does not mark the origin of a new upper-caste identity politics. It marks the exhaustion of the older strategy of concealment of standards, autonomy, and institutional norms—and its replacement by a more openly contestatory, self-avowing stance.
It is possible that compulsions of electoral democracy would subdue the rhetorical intensity of this moment. However, it is clear from the scale of UGC protests that such strategic manoeuvres are likely to be temporary, and similar episodes could manifest intermittently. In that sense, this moment captures a durable habitus of upper-caste attitude towards social changes, one that can be countered only via counter-mobilisations.
Courtesy: ‘Economic & Political Weekly’
