Himadri Sekhar Mistri
A Familiar Script, A New Hashtag
In India, after any genuinely popular protest, something predictable happens: its language is borrowed, and its momentum diverted to other causes that have little to do with its original politics.
This is what seems to have happened after the month-long agitation by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). The protest peaked when thousands took to the streets at Jantar Mantar and culminated in the hunger strike by Sonam Wangchuk (for 26 days) and other student activists. That protest forced the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. The agitation was largely concerned with paper leaks and the state’s faulty exam management, and later also addressed the broken education system. Within a day of Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, a campaign against the ethanol policy started, and the E20 Janata Party was created online, following the CJP model. Within a week, an Instagram account for “Reservation Hatao Andolan” (RHA) was created, which had already reached 56 lakh followers.[^1]
A simpler mechanism is at work here, familiar to other precarity movements. In a generation facing real labour market dysfunction and state failure to certify its own examinations, anger must be vented somewhere. Pointing it upward—at the ministries and corporations that did not create jobs—is difficult and requires sustained effort. Judging classmates who benefited from quotas brings instant satisfaction. The reason reservation can serve as a more convenient villain than structural unemployment is that it is visible, countable, and already disreputable in elite and common-sense discourse. None of that makes the anger less genuine—only the target wrong.
RHA built itself as a citizen-led, citizen-driven, and apolitical platform for individuals who have been “deprived by reservation politics” and who are “led by merit.” It has clearly defined four demands: equal merit, no age limit, equal fees, no caste. The line “sari jaati ek samaan, mera bas yeh desh mahaan” (all castes are equal, only my nation is great), in the X bio, quietly assumes that the non-existence of reservation itself produces equality. Another slogan was taken almost verbatim from Dr. Ambedkar himself: “Educate, Agitate and Organise.” Its long-term objective reads without much ambiguity: “One Nation, One Identity, Indian.” The accompanying policy document has an interesting name: Remove Reservation, Remove Casteism.
RHA says it has no party affiliation, and there is no reason to disbelieve this. However, being apolitical is an intention, not an effect. A campaign can exist organizationally outside all parties yet, in its impacts, serve as a form of insurance for a current social contract. Now, no one has to wait for any political party to demand an end to reservation for castes that did not need it in the first place. Even without a party flag, a movement is not structurally neutral; this only makes it more difficult to name its politics.
Remove Reservation, Remove Casteism assumes two things: first, that the two can be separated cleanly; and second, that reservation is somehow manufactured by caste consciousness rather than constrained by it. This is an old assumption—perhaps the oldest in the anti-reservation portfolio—and one that invariably reappears whenever reservation politics is put to the test. To make sense of it, we must go further back than most commentary on RHA has done.
1981 to 2018: A Genre Takes Shape
The anti-reservation mobilisation in India did not begin with Mandal. It began in Gujarat nine years before the Mandal agitation. In 1981, ‘upper caste’ medical students in Ahmedabad raised objections to reservations in post-graduation courses. Within a week, the government backed off, but the agitation’s scope enlarged to months of documented violence against Dalits.[^2] This recurred in 1985 when the state increased OBC reservation from 10 to 28 per cent. An agitation against the job policy by upper castes took a communal turn within weeks, leaving hundreds dead and the army deployed in Ahmedabad for months.[^3] In both instances, a procedural change in quota percentage provoked violence against individuals who had nothing to do with the policy. Anger over redistribution took a casteist turn—almost automatically—into violence against a different minority group.
At the national level, the same pattern followed in 1990. On 7 August, Prime Minister V.P. Singh announced that the decade-old Mandal Commission recommendation of 27 per cent OBC reservation in central government appointments would be implemented. Six weeks later, Delhi University commerce student Rajiv Goswami poured kerosene over himself and set himself on fire outside Deshbandhu College. He survived with serious burns and became an icon for a countrywide agitation. In the following weeks, over 150 young people in northern India attempted self-immolation, killing over sixty.[^4] The Supreme Court later confirmed OBC reservation in the 1992 Indra Sawhney case, imposing the ‘creamy layer’ restriction and a 50 per cent cap on reservations.[^5] This policy has remained largely unchanged, but its antagonist grammar entered the storehouse of political rhetoric rather than disappearing.
The narrative was resurrected in 2018 when the Supreme Court diluted procedural safeguards of the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act.[^6] Upper-caste youths in the Gwalior-Chambal belt, under various names such as SAPAKS, blocked convoys and threatened political leaders. Seven Dalits were killed when police fired on a counter-mobilisation.[^7] These agitations repeatedly suggested either that caste-blindness had already been achieved or that it should be achieved through legislation, alongside demands to end reservation. Although organisers kept reiterating that they had nothing to do with caste, RHA is no different from this pattern—just running over a faster network.
Merit’s Old Alibi
Dr Ambedkar penned the definitive answer to this genre even before it was fully formed. In Annihilation of Caste—the talk he wrote for the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal but was never allowed to deliver—he made a distinction that anti-reservation discourse has failed to internalise. Caste, he argued, was not a mere division of labour but a division of labourers, arranged in an unvarying scale of ascending privileges and descending contempt, and allotted by birth.[^8] In all complex societies, labour is differentiated; caste society is the only one that splits the people who perform it into permanent ranks.
This makes a significant difference to the true meaning of merit within such a system. Over centuries, when access to occupational and educational rights has been restricted by birth, what a caste has built up—whether in terms of property or professional networks—is not an indication of individual superiority. It is interest compounded on an inexplicable early start. A student raised within an academic ecosystem never encounters the same obstacles based solely on the entrance exam.
Sociologists have named this phenomenon “casteless merit.” Upper-caste familiarity with markets, English, and modern institutions is read as the absence of caste, as if caste could only be brought into a classroom by students in the reserved category. The Constitution’s own drafting reinforces this illusion. Article 15 presents affirmative action as an exception to the general rule of equality, suggesting that the general rule was neutral in the first place. This baseline is itself a caste position—the privileged never need to name it.
This was directly tested in a 2007 field experiment. Researchers sent identical CVs to over 500 private companies in four Indian cities, changing only the applicant’s last name. Dalit candidates received callbacks at about two-thirds the rate of upper-caste candidates with identical qualifications, while Muslim candidates fared even worse.[^9] These forms did not include any state-recorded caste category. The discrimination came entirely from the last name—something to bear in mind when some suggest caste would be eradicated by banning its recording on government records. Employers don’t need state records to discriminate; a name is enough.
That is why RHA’s move to delete caste details from government forms warrants not sympathy but examination. Refusing to record caste means that the surnames, addresses, networks, and inherited assets that continue to sort people remain intact. What it takes away is the state’s ability to recognise and address it. A movement that simultaneously advocates for abolition of caste data collection and abolition of caste correction is not a remedy that solves two problems with one instrument. It is hiding one of them forever.
What the Numbers Really Mean
No institution would suggest that castelessness is a reality in India if it were not an aspiration. They do not.
The Union Ministry of Law recently informed Parliament in February 2026 that 73.5 per cent of the 593 High Court judges appointed from January 2021 to January 2026 were from upper castes.[^10] The combined population percentage of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes is about 25 per cent, yet their appointees in this period were 4.38 per cent and 2.36 per cent respectively. In a separate reply to the Rajya Sabha the same month, the ratio remained similar for the longer period of 2018-2026: 3.89 per cent SC, 2 per cent ST, and 12.25 per cent OBC among High Court appointees. The Supreme Court, which selects High Court judges through its own collegium, does not even maintain caste-wise data on sitting judges.
The same theme is evident in the senior bureaucracy. In 2019, Parliament was informed that out of 89 Secretaries then in service in the Union government, only one belonged to the SC, three to the ST, and none to the OBC—which, according to the Mandal Commission’s own definition, covers about 52 per cent of the population.[^11]
The pattern extends to the institutions RHA wants to champion in the name of merit. According to RTI data from January 2024, 92 per cent of IIT Kharagpur’s 742 faculty were from the general category. The number of Scheduled Tribe faculty was exactly two—more than a quarter of one per cent of the total.[^12] In IIT Delhi, the percentage of SC and ST faculty was around 2.7 per cent and 1.1 per cent respectively, with 460 posts vacant. At IIT Bombay, 523 SC candidates applied for faculty posts in one year; four were hired.
The cost of this exclusion falls heavily on the students who do make it through. Over the five years from 2018 to 2023, more than 13,000 students from SC, ST, and OBC categories in central universities, IITs, and IIMs dropped out.[^13] Government data tabled in Parliament indicated that reserved category and minority students form 58 per cent of all student deaths in IITs and other central institutions between 2014 and 2021—far higher than their representation in enrolment.[^14] These figures describe the exact opposite of a level field with quotas, rather than a level field that quotas are realising.
From Policy Critique to Stigma
There is an honest version of the merit argument that could be put forth: the need to revise the creamy-layer threshold; sub-quota politics among OBCs and SCs; whether examinations can quantify merit. RHA never discussed these.
It became important to understand their framing: “citizens who have been discarded by reservation politics.” That sentence makes a victimhood claim, does not consider arguments of administrative efficiency, and is pushed to an audience already charged with legitimate anger over a corrupt exam system. It is clearly an effort to quietly redirect that anger towards a target that had nothing to do with paper leaks. There is also a section that sees any talk of caste inequality as propaganda, shifting any conversation about policy design into suspicion of anyone who raises caste at all.
Sociologically, this is how a stigma operates. It doesn’t have to announce that a caste group is inferior; it merely implies repeatedly that a classmate’s or fellow’s place in an institution is undeserved and therefore at risk as a result of political grants. Do this repeatedly and on a larger scale, and the point becomes common sense. It enters people’s minds without their recalling where it came from. Even some who profited from reservations themselves now feel compelled to apologise for it publicly.
History suggests this course should be taken seriously. The Gujarat riots of 1985 and the self-immolation wave of 1990 started as protests over policies and culminated in loss of life and safety for those who had no say in those policies. There is no evidence that RHA is on a path towards physical violence, and it would be irresponsible to suggest it is. But the core narrative of RHA is equally dangerous: it frames resource redistribution as an attack on an undefined “merit class.” In the past, this exact language has provoked violence.
Annihilation, Not Erasure
None of this is unassailable. Intense debate already exists around sub-categorisation, and the failure to conduct an updated caste census since 1931 (when the Mandal Commission estimated the OBC population at 52 per cent).[^15] An empirical question has been promised to be addressed in the caste census of 2027, with few details yet available in Parliament. It will then be more or less resolved. Reservation was unfinished work for Dr. Ambedkar; he addressed it as part of a larger demand involving the crumbling of religious and social sanction for caste, in addition to its administrative enclosure.
That is where RHA’s agenda collapses. It advocates deleting caste from government forms, not annihilating it—which will only prevent the state from noticing it. The student groups who made RTI requests on faculty lists, and the reporters and researchers who publish data on judges that the government refuses to compile, are doing just the opposite. They are revealing a hidden hierarchy, one data set at a time.
That work is slower and less viral than an Instagram account gaining five million followers in a week. A campaign that appropriates Dr. Ambedkar’s slogan but strives against his conclusion has not modernised his argument; it has simply learned to say its opposite in his voice.
Reclaiming that slogan requires something specific: releasing the data institutions don’t want to release, teaching the core argument of Annihilation of Caste rather than picking a single line, and not confusing five million followers with five million proofs. It also means saying plainly to those genuinely angry about a broken exam system that the classmate who got in through a quota was not the one who leaked the paper.
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Himadri Sekhar Mistri is a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, working on questions of violence, democratic erosion, and social movements.
