Chaityabhoomi is the final resting place of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. Every year, lakhs of Dalits and his followers assemble in this corner of Dadar on Mahaparinirwan Diwas. The site is sacred and has over decades evolved into a counter-public space where Dalits can assert claim on public belonging and civic memory. It is the site of remembrance and resistance. On 25 October, it is from this very space that Mumbai Police detained Dalits and anti-caste allies gathered there for a peaceful candlelight vigil.
The All India Independent Schedule Caste Association (AIISCA) had given a call for this gathering to demand justice in the case of Sahil Wakode, a second year B Tech student, who was found dead on the campus of IIT-Bombay exactly a month earlier.
Their protest was ruthlessly shut down by the police as the rest of the city watched Ambedkarites being violently picked up from Chaityabhoomi itself. This was the second act of ruthlessly employing detention to prevent peaceful protest on the matter.
Not a Singular Case
On 18 October, Mumbai Police had entered the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay campus and forcefully detained students from the ‘Justice corner’ they had set up. Sahil’s parents, who wanted to pay homage to him on campus, were also briefly detained. Also violently picked up and removed were activists from the AIISCA, as well as Left groups who have been campaigning for justice.
The IIT Bombay based students’ group, the Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle (APPSC) stated that the portraits of Babasaheb Ambedkar, Jotiba and Savitri Phule, Birsa Munda, Bhagat Singh, etc., present at the protest site were mishandled and broken during the detention. Subsequently, a group atleast 20 IIT Bombay faculty have questioned the institution’s role in allowing police on campus to deal with a peaceful student protest.
At a time when massive, multi-city protests over ‘vote-chori’ are playing out across India, this seemingly small battlefield over a campus suicide may become a much larger flashpoint that hits close to the very idea of India’s democracy. At the surface, it would not appear to be so. In fact for some, such a protest could splinter the ongoing revolutionary mobilising against the state.
But democracy in India, is built upon a social contract between castes. The constitution provides a framework to this through certain guarantees of equality and inclusion, but the fundamental contradiction of inequality rests in the cultural domain. The social fabric of caste denies equality, conceptually and materially.
Nowhere is this more evident than on the campuses of elite institutions, like the IITs, where casteist structures against all constitutional morality routinely cut down the possibility of upward mobility and aspirations of caste-marginalised youth.
Sahil is not the first student to die on an IIT campus. There have been 10 confirmed suicides on campus in 2026, three at IIT-Bombay itself. In the past five years, there have been over 50 student deaths on campus. That is a terrifying average of a student dying in an IIT roughly once every five weeks.
Sahil Wakode’s parents’ protest hence, is not just about a tragic student suicide. It is a moral reckoning for the state itself. The assault on a peaceful gathering at Chaityabhoomi is an invasive and shameful stain in this reckoning, that has exposed the state as uncaring, arrogant and bereft of any sensitivity towards the social contract of caste that hangs on, increasingly fragile in the face of consistent casteist provocations.
Behind this flashpoint is the fact that higher education, especially in STEM, is one of the only pathways available to large sections of India’s caste-marginalised to gain upward mobility and corporate employment (in an era of retreating public sector).
The IITs represent a very small percentage of the large ecosystem of engineering and science institutions, and an even larger network of coaching centres preparing students for admission into these spaces. A sum total of deaths across this landscape is not fully accounted for. Even so, a suicide represents the most extreme step a student can take, many more just end up dropping out of programs or develop deep psychic trauma. A young person can carry such psychological damage for years, stunting their future possibilities and aspirations.
Taken together, as a complete picture, it becomes difficult to understand how people in a democratic society are okay with such high levels of student mortality and trauma resulting from this ecosystem.
It fundamentally boils down to how caste irrationality shapes the politics of higher education.
Entrenched Caste Ideology
A very simplistic framing of casteism on campus would be to reduce it to simple identity binaries i.e., a SC/ST student being isolated and dramatically being attacked with casteist slurs by a savarna professor and/or students. While this is certainly a feature of campus life, it would not explain the entire pressure chamber of toxicity or why it is tolerated, even defended, in public life. Indeed, there are also many savarna students among the tragic campus deaths, and among the course dropouts.
Casteism on campus instead must be reframed on the axis of its administrators. For it is the faculty and administrative cohort upon whom the ultimate moral and pedagogical responsibility of providing a safe, dignified and stimulating campus life to its students. It is also precisely this cohort which is overwhelmingly savarna, and the protest for Sahil Wakode seeks accountability from this group.
They have routinely ruled campuses with an iron fist, created a deeply problematic environment, leaned on tokenisms in the name of redressal and frequently sandbagged any internal investigations which could expose the same. This pool of senior faculty and administrators at IIT Bombay and the larger network of institutions needs to be held accountable.
While Scheduled Caste (SC)/Scheduled Tribe (ST)/Other Backward Classes (OBC) students are admitted to IITs as per quota (despite the constant, rabid toxicity of anti-reservation propaganda), in faculty hiring and administrative responsibility, the SC/ST/OBC faculty are virtually erased. It means that purely from a democratic lens, these communities have virtually no say in the running and administration of the IITs.
None of their lived experiences, social diversity, cultural perspectives and styles of man-management and conflict resolution, etc., benefit the IIT system since practically no one from these communities is elevated to the administrative seniority within the system (few SC/ST/OBC academics in IITs are heavily concentrated at the ‘assistant professor’ levels who do not have much say on institutional matters).
Echoes of Oppression
The result is a Brahminical echo-chamber within the IIT system, which has been proven to be dramatically incapable of understanding (forget arresting) the horrifying trend of student deaths within these institutions. Bereft of any sociological diversity, it seems this cohort keeps trying to lean on its ideological and cultural training and reproduce on campus a ‘gurukul’ of sorts. The mythical ‘gurukul’, however, has poor pedagogy compared to alternatives that modernity has to offer.
While most contemporary research into education praxis and pedagogy recommends inclusivity, empathy, and the necessity of creating an enabling, agentic environment—the ‘gurukul’ remains a site of endless ‘pariksha.’
A continuous gauntlet of trials and tests is meant to toughen up students. This almost military-style language used by many to justify the IIT pipeline from entrance exam to graduation, does not have empathy for those who couldn't ‘toughen’ up. There is almost collective consensus among savarna social groups that any relaxation would dilute ‘quality.’
This is most bizarre. A college campus is not a military boot-camp. Its fundamental purpose is not to ‘toughen’ the student but to give them the best chance to prosper and grow. Those committed to the ‘bootcamp’ model cannot even process that excellence and innovation are not synonymous with toxic professors. That academic rigour is not compromised if academic outcomes are not threat-based.
Hence, campus dropouts, even deaths, are accepted as ‘weak students who could not cut the mustard,’ not mourned as possible national assets whose potential was lost by a system that could not nurture them. Each dropout, each death should be seen as a failure of the IIT, not the student. For it is the literal job of the professors and administrators of an institute to develop the students, and not the other way around.
Unlike the legislature, the administration of IIT is not voted in. It is supposed to be formed through transparent processes and follow constitutional norms of caste-based affirmative inclusion. Every single IIT (as well as most other premium institutions such as IIITs, IISERs, IIMs, AIIMs, NLUs, Central Universities, etc.) fail this test conclusively.
These premium institutions are the sites of undemocratic capture and citadels of casteist pedagogical values.
A Fight for All
When Ravindra and Sonali Wakode sat on a fast in a small corner of the cordoned off Azad Maidan in Mumbai, they were not just asking for justice for Sahil but have taken on this entire undemocratic apparatus of premium higher education in India.
Theirs is also a protest against an IIT system which leaked its CCTV footage to create a public witchhunt of its own dead student. Theirs is also a protest against an unethical savarna media which against all editorial norms ghoulishly played the footage on national TV and framed his suicide (and its ongoing investigation) as a moral question by raising the issue of ‘cheating’ in exams.
If this was a case of a student caught using unfair means, what are the institutional norms of dealing with that? Were they followed? Or did the personnel involved go off-script and try to shame Sahil? Did they threaten him with consequences? Or are these questions not necessary because the precious IIT system cannot be challenged even if its foundation gets built on dead students, even if those dead have to be shamed and slurred upon?
It is against this irrational incivility that the protest rages on.
At the time of writing, many savarna thinkers and media personnel are still avoiding the IIT Bombay story. It was the SC thinkers, anti-caste voices and Ambedkarite activists who dragged this issue into the national consciousness.
It was the visuals of activists and students putting their bodies on the line against the police that stirred the consciousness. As many times before, once again Ambedkarites have in their defiance of savarna consensus, forced a moral reckoning of the social democratic contract.
This protest is for Sahil Wakode, but it is not only that. It is for accountability from the IITs for every death, every dropout—SC, ST, OBC and Savarna, students who were deemed expendable for not being ‘tough enough.’
It is a protest against the undemocratic, casteist echo chamber of savarna administrators whose only vision of academic excellence is creating a campus full of toxic pressures and fears which consumes students.
SC, ST, OBC students, especially from first-generation learner backgrounds, are particularly vulnerable to such environments but even savarna students frequently fall to it.
This protest is for all of them. It is for students whose loss was unmourned and cynically justified to keep a rotting system in place. At the time of writing, Sahil Wakode’s parents' hunger strike is still ongoing. Their resolve remains strong.
This reckoning will go long yet. And as it does, Chaityabhoomi will stand tall and keep the vigil.
(Ravikant Kisana is a professor of Cultural Studies and author of the book 'Meet the Savarnas.' He can be contacted on X/Instagram as 'Buffalo Intellectual.' The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect or represent his institution. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)