Opinion UGC regulations on caste are narrowly framed
If the Indian state is serious about addressing caste, it must confront it as an institution in its entirety. This requires pedagogical reform that teaches caste, including caste privilege, as a lived social reality.
Students protesting against the new UGC regulations. (Express photo by Vishal Srivastav) The widespread protests against the new UGC regulations have led to the Supreme Court staying their implementation, citing concerns that the regulations could “divide society”. While much public debate, including this newspaper’s editorial (UGC regulations force a needed reckoning, IE, January 29) has focused on the merits and flaws of specific provisions, a more fundamental question remains insufficiently examined. Why are measures aimed at correcting historical caste-based inequities consistently met with such severe backlash? Why, even more than 75 years after the adoption of the Constitution, do we still struggle to accept the need for such interventions?
The answer lies in how Indian society, backed by its socio-political institutions, continues to treat caste only as a relic of the past. We keep tripping over caste while insisting that it no longer exists. Caste atrocities are framed as isolated acts by deviant individuals rather than as manifestations of an unchallenged social order. The editorial, too, even as it acknowledges caste privilege, stops short of examining how our institutions, including the proposed UGC regulations, fail to meaningfully challenge it.
The stated objective of the draft regulations was to eradicate discrimination and promote equity and inclusion. Yet even under the section titled “Measures for the Promotion of Equity”, the focus remained almost entirely on discrimination. Students are asked to submit undertakings not to discriminate and to report instances of discrimination, and institutions are directed to implement guidelines aimed at protecting socio-economically disadvantaged groups.
In keeping with longstanding policy approaches, the regulations framed caste as something affecting only disadvantaged students. Engagement expected from advantaged-caste students is limited to a commitment to “not discriminate”, with little emphasis on sensitisation or pedagogical interventions that explain how privilege operates. Neutrality is assumed as the default condition, while discrimination is treated as an unfortunate but contained aberration.
Sociologist Satish Deshpande, in his writings on caste and castelessness, has long highlighted this idea of neutrality. He shows how the privileges of advantaged castes operate invisibly, allowing their ways of being to pass off as “neutral”. This invisibility is central to how caste reproduces itself in modern India.
Yet this insight has barely travelled into policy circles. Indian caste policy remains narrowly legalistic. It punishes atrocities, allocates reservations, and establishes grievance redressal mechanisms. Necessary as these measures are, caste privilege continues to go unnamed and caste pride remains socially acceptable. Even when challenged in progressive spaces, such critiques struggle to gain wider social acceptance in the absence of clear state backing.
Resistance to caste-based protections and to equity measures such as reservation are only a reflection of this continued institutional failure. Unless this is addressed, even symbolic shifts in power, however cautiously framed, will continue to be perceived as attacks on the “general category.”
Useful lessons can be drawn from how gender has been addressed in policy. Alongside laws protecting women, the Indian state has invested extensively in public sensitisation around gender inequality, often in partnership with civil society, helping normalise conversations about male privilege and structural disadvantage. As a result, women’s disadvantage today is broadly acknowledged, with resistance persisting largely at the margins.
No comparable effort has been made with caste. If the Indian state is serious about addressing caste, it must confront it as an institution in its entirety. This requires pedagogical reform that teaches caste, including caste privilege, as a lived social reality, from the level of basic schooling. We also need public campaigns that challenge the idea of dominant-caste norms being simply neutral culture. Unless this happens, resistance to reform will persist. The protests against the UGC regulations are not an aberration; they are the predictable outcome of a long-neglected responsibility. As B R Ambedkar warned in Annihilation of Caste, political reform without social reform can never lead to lasting change.
The writer is research scholar, Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram
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