Advocate Disha Wadekar, who represents Radhika Vemula and Abeda Tadvi in the Supreme Court, breaks down the new UGC regulations aimed at eradicating caste-based discrimination against SC, ST, OBC, EWS, and other marginalized groups on Indian campuses in a chat with Sukanya Shantha.Following is the full text of the conversation, transcribed by The Wire’s editorial intern Ritvi Jain. This interview was conducted before the Supreme Court stayed the UGC’s 2026 Equity Rules.Sukanya Shantha: Hello and welcome to The Wire. My name is Sukanya Shantha. Following the Supreme Court’s direction in the petitions filed by two mothers, Radhika Vemula and Abeda Tadvi, the university’s grants commission issued guidelines to address discrimination against the students from scheduled caste, scheduled tribes, other backward classes, the economically weaker section and also other forms of discrimination on the basis of gender, disabilities which are rampant on Indian campus. The university’s grant commission promotion of equity in higher education institutions regulation of 2026 were notified on January 13 and now it applies to all higher education institutions in India. Since the notification, protests first online and now gradually moving offline have been building up across the country. As expected, the protesting communities are the savarnas who have curiously positioned themselves as victims and feel that the regulations will indiscriminately target them. Memes, reels, video interviews, all very wild and casteist are flooding social media platforms. As expected, they are steeped in baseless claims and are factually incorrect. A plea has now been filed before the Supreme Court challenging the recently notified rules. The Supreme Court observing that it is aware of what is happening in the country has agreed to hear the plea. To unpack the details of these regulations, the concerns raised and what this means for campuses nationwide, we are now joined by advocate Disha Wadekar who represents both Radhika Vemula and Abeda Tadvi in the court. Thank you for joining us, Disha, today.Disha Wadekar: Thank you, Sukanya. Thanks for having me.Sukanya Shantha: Can you please tell us what exactly do these regulations actually say and more importantly, what they do not say?Disha Wadekar: Yeah. So, Sukanya, these regulations, the UGC equity regulations of 2026 clearly have set out in its objective three things. It says that the objective of these regulations is A, to eradicate discrimination based on various access, caste, gender, disabilities, place of birth and other forms of discrimination. So, it is to A, to eradicate these forms of discrimination from campuses. And secondly, it talks about bringing in equity and inclusion in campus spaces. So, this is mainly the objective of the regulations, to eradicate discrimination and to promote equity and inclusion in higher educational institutions. So, this is what the regulations are about. Now, what do these regulations do? These are firstly, regulations that operate in the civil realm. They are not a criminal law. There is not going to be any punishment or any incarceration based on these regulations. They are only giving civil remedies for cases of discrimination based on caste, gender, disabilities, etc. They actually set out a mechanism to deal with complaints of discrimination based on all these access.Now, what is this committee? It says that an equity committee needs to be set up. It is a multi-member body and that committee has representation from student community, from professors of the college. It even has the head of the institution on the committee, which is something that we have been opposing. But the head of the institution is the chairperson of the committee. It has representatives from the civil society as well. And this is an equity committee, which forms the core of these regulations. This equity committee is supposed to look into complaints of discrimination based on caste, gender, etc. And it is this committee which will make recommendations based on its findings in various complaints about the punishments that need to be given. Now, the punishment section of these regulations is also important because we are not talking about some kind of criminal action. The punishment actually talks about UGC regulations, existing ministry guidelines, as well as university bylaws that prescribe various forms of punishment. What are these punishments? These punishments could be as simple as giving the respondent or the person who has been found to be guilty by the committee a simple warning, right? Or asking the person to even say, write an apology saying that I have done this and I do not wish to further, I will, I take an undertaking that I will not engage in these kinds of discriminatory acts, right? It can be as simple as that. If it is a teacher, a professor, a non-teaching staff member, their promotions can be withheld, right? If they are found to be guilty, or they could be suspended in the interim, or say in an extreme case, in extreme forms of discriminatory acts, that person can, the respondent can be rusticated, the student can be rusticated. So these are all civil remedies that are not new to this nation. We have obviously seen this already in the POSH Act, the Sexual Harassment Act, right? And the ICCs that we see. These are the kind of remedies that are available with any kind of inquiry committee within a university space, right? So these are what the regulations say. What they do not say is very important. Like I already pointed out, it is not talking about any kind of criminal action. That is not the power that either the UGC or the college administration has, right? So it is not a criminal law. These are not regulations to target a particular group or community. These are protective laws. They are actually meant to protect vulnerable communities, marginalized communities that do not just enjoy protection in the regulations, but in our constitution itself. If you look at Article 15 of the constitution, if you look at Article 17 of the constitution, you see that these are the same communities that have been given protection under our constitutional scheme. So this is more about protection, and it is not at all about targeting any particular group.Sukanya Shantha: Right, right. Disha, as I understand that this is not a new regulation, like the UGC regulations against discriminations have existed and they have existed since 2012. Could you then walk us through what those earlier regulations were and explain what are the recent ones are, like the differences between the two?Disha Wadekar: Yes.Sukanya Shantha: And also like, I understand like there are like new categories that have been actually included. So if you could actually go through each one of it and just in some time actually explain it to us, the difference between the two regulations.Disha Wadekar: Definitely. Yeah. So firstly, these, like you said, you know, you pointed out rightly that these are not new regulations. They’ve existed since 2012 and they go by the same name. They’re called the Promotion of Equity in Higher Education regulations. These regulations, again, had the same objective of eradicating or preventing caste-based, gender-based discrimination or discrimination against persons with disabilities, etc. And this kind of mechanism that was suggested and that we now have through these equity committee in the new regulations that has also existed in the previous regulations. Of course, it varies in form because there you had a one-member body in the equity committee. There was an anti-discrimination officer who was supposed to be an associate professor. Now you have in the new regulations a multi-member body with representation from all stakeholders, etc. But clearly, these regulations have always existed. The new additions of groups in these regulations, let’s talk about the OBC community, for instance. When the 2012 regulations came, they specifically mentioned only scheduled caste and scheduled tribe communities. But one also needs to understand that it came in the context of Mandal too, when OBC reservation, the question of OBC reservation was under discussion and OBC reservation was not being implemented. Now we see so many years later, 15, 10, 15 years later, we are seeing that OBCs are increasingly entering these spaces by a constitutional amendment, which has been held by the court to be valid, where OBCs are now getting admissions and reservations and higher education institutions as well. So in that light, the new regulations have also included the OBC community. So that is one major difference between the older regulations and who the aggrieved person in the older regulations could be and who the aggrieved person in the new regulations could be. The second inclusion again is the EWS category, the economic weaker section. Again, in the older regulations, you did not have the EWS category because EWS reservation was not a thing at that time, right? And we saw this after the case where the EWS reservation came and the 103rd amendment was held to be valid, that now this country also has EWS reservation, then you will have EWS candidates who are all non-STOBC, this is important to say, because EWS is a category that is exclusively upper caste, right, or general category. So that category also finds mention in the new regulations, the 2026 regulations as a protected category alongside the OBCs.Sukanya Shantha: Right. So according to the new UGC rules, the objective is very clear, like I’ll just quote what it says, eradicate discrimination only on the basis of religion, race, gender, place of birth, caste, or disability, particularly against the members of SC, ST, socially and economically backward classes, the EWS, persons with disability or any of them, and to promote full equity and inclusion amongst the stakeholders in the higher education institution. So like you mentioned in your response to the earlier question, so it is the SC, STs, OBCs, and the other categories very clearly also includes the upper caste, what we understand in the governmental category as the general category. So why is then the right seeing this as a betrayal rather than the equity, like how do you understand this entire, the debate that has actually been, that’s broken out and the way, the kind of pushback that is coming from the right and invariably from the southern identities?Disha Wadekar: So like we already talked about, Sukanya, it’s not that these regulations are new, they’ve always been there, why is this selective outrage happening now? I believe one major answer to this could be that now the new regulations have an enforcement clause. So let me tell you, so when we had filed this petition for Abeda Tadvi and Radhika Vemula in the Supreme Court, we did it, we filed multiple RTIs, we filed two RTIs in 2018 and 2019 because we filed the petition in 2019. And the RTIs, from the RTI responses, we saw that around 10,000 universities, colleges, there was complete institutional, there was no awareness, institutional awareness about these regulations. So these equal opportunity cells or equity committees mandated under the regulations did not exist in any of these colleges and universities. Rohit’s death and Payal’s death happened much after, right, like in 2016, 2019. There were already 2012 regulations that were in place, but they were just formally there on paper. They were not being implemented by the institutions. There was a complete institutional apathy, is what I would like to call it, from the institutions end. Now the new regulations have an interesting clause and this was the reason why we had filed the petition.We said, we told the court that these regulations, even though they formally exist, they are not being implemented. So there is a need to have an inbuilt enforcement mechanism, enforcement clause, where the UGC, which is a statutory body that has certain powers under the UGC Act to ensure enforcement of its regulations. And how do they do that? So in the UGC Act, UGC has the power to withdraw the grants. It’s a grants commission. So it gives grants to institutions, especially government institutions. So it can withdraw the grants if a certain university is not implementing its rules and regulations.It also has the power to de-recognize affiliations. UGC also gives affiliations to certain colleges. A college is affiliated to A university, B university, etc. So those affiliations can be withdrawn if a college or university does not implement its rules. Thirdly, UGC also has the power to de-recognize courses. UGC gives recognition to so many courses. So it has those powers. So the new regulations, after our intervention, and this was our major demand, our foremost demand, I would say, that you need to have an enforcement mechanism and they have now included that enforcement mechanism in the form of a non-compliance clause, which means that any non-compliant university will have to face the consequences from UGC. So going back to your question, so this is the reason why I believe that there is this outrage, because now there is a real threat, a so-called threat, of the regulations being implemented and enforced, because till now they have only existed on paper. Neither Payal Tadvi’s college nor Rohit Vemula’s college or university had these regulations or these equal opportunity cells when they were facing these forms of discrimination. Right?Sukanya Shantha: Right, right. Very interesting. Yeah. So the anger that has been pouring out is very clear. It’s actually targeting the BJP as if the BJP is the one which has betrayed them. They are actually doing reverse casteism, discrimination against the upper caste. The entire discourse at this moment is framed in such a way that it’s the government which came up with this rule on its own. But a lot actually went into this petition, right? The petition, like you said, was filed many years ago and the fight has actually taken so many years before the regulations were finally actually notified. So could you just walk us through the journey of this petition? How did you convince both mothers, Rohit Vemula’s mother, Radhika Vemula, and also Payal’s mother, Abeda Tadvi, to fight this case in the Supreme Court?Disha Wadekar: So rather than me convincing them, I was already representing Abeda ji in the Payal Tadvi case, the suicide case that has happened. And I think it was the mothers who were very much convinced that this is not merely about suicides, but this is about discrimination. I think they were very clear about what their kids had gone through, right? And both of them felt that both Payal, especially in Payal’s case, because the mother and the husband, Payal’s husband, had been consistently approaching the authorities, the college authorities, about these instances of harassment and discrimination that Payal was facing. And they did not find anySukanya Shantha: I would say, recourse in the college, because they were…Disha Wadekar: Right? So Payal’s mother had, in fact, in one of the conversations that we had, and it was like an online meeting like this, where she spoke about this, that we did not have any recourse. And that is when we started looking at the equity regulation, started looking at the UGC regulations, whether there are any legal safeguards that already exist, because there is no point in going to court with some new regulations or new guidelines or directions, if there already exists a mechanism. And we found that these equity regulations of 2012 had existed all along. And in fact, I, myself, being a lawyer, having worked in all of these cases, was not aware of these regulations. Many people that I talked to, many academics, many sociologists, educationists, were not aware. Colleges and universities were completely apathetic. They were not at all worried or concerned about these regulations, even if they knew about them. So we thought that there is a need to file this case. And the two mothers, in fact, based on their experience, decided that we actually need to focus on the root cause, that is discrimination, which is why the suicides of their kids happened. And then we went to the court and we took the UGC regulations, that was the crux of our petition, the UGC 2012 regulations. And we had two prayers before the court. One prayer, like I said, was to bring in an inbuilt mechanism of enforcement of these regulations through a non-compliance clause. So that was the implementation part.But we also felt that there was some lacunae in the regulation, in the 2012 regulations. What were these lacunae? One of the lacunae that we found was that the equity committee or the inquiry committee was a one-member body. We thought that that is not fair because it does not include all stakeholders. And that inquiry is to be conducted by an associate professor. So we thought that that is an extremely problematic provision. No person will get any justice before a committee which only has a professor in it. Secondly, the regulation said that the appeals mechanism, so if once the complaint is decided by the anti-discrimination officer, if someone wants to appeal, there was an appeal mechanism. But the appeal was in the older regulations supposed to go to the head of the institution. Now that again we thought is extremely problematic because that creates a conflict of interest, right, situation. Yeah, where the head of the institution will actually be interested in protecting the institution’s image, as we have seen in so many cases. So that was another problematic provision. We also felt that the punishments clause in these regulations was not well defined. There was another issue with regards to monitoring mechanisms. So there was no monitoring mechanism for any of these equity committees. So equity committees only operate at college or university level, right. Now the college can do whatever it wants. They can make them non-functional also. They can make them extremely ineffective if they want to. They can just have paper committees if they want. So there needs to be an oversight on these committees and there needs to be an oversight monitoring mechanism, right.So we thought that that mechanism also did not exist in these regulations. We also felt that OBCs now were excluded, right, and we have come this far and OBCs are now slowly entering college spaces, university spaces through the reservation policy and they themselves are facing some forms of systemic discrimination. One major form of discrimination OBCs are consistently facing and OBC category has been facing is that in the admissions the OBC reservation is not even being implemented in most colleges and universities. As far back as, you know, four years, two years back national law schools, big national law schools had, did not have a policy reservation policy for OBCs. OBCs also get scholarships from the government. There is a delay in disbursal of these scholarships and universities and administration harass the students because they do not, because these scholarships do not come in time. So either they will say that we will suspend you because we’ve not received your fees or you both take a loan and, you know, you pay the fees of the college. So all of this kind of harassment or systemic harassment is also now happening with the OBC community, right? On top of that, OBCs are also victims of stereotyping, right? Even if there is no violence of that form or an atrocity of that form that is being committed against OBC and there may not be that kind of evidence or even if there is, we are not aware of it as yet. But these forms of stereotyping and stigmatization of OBC communities based on their caste identity continues to happen, right? And campuses and university spaces are not an exception. It happens there as well. So it was, we also thought that it is important to have OBC communities included in the regulations. So some of these aspects we brought before the court in our petition and we thought that the court should look into this and the court should give guidelines or directions to UGC to strengthen the regulations.Sukanya Shantha: Right. So now that we are actually trying to debunk all these misinterpretations and misrepresentation of what the petitions are.Disha Wadekar: Sorry, I’ll just interject. So this was the petition. How the regulations came about is also important because again, like you said, you know, the credit is going somewhere else or the discredit for that matter is going somewhere else and mostly the target is UGC. But UGC on its own has not done this. The regulations have existed since 2012. 2019, we filed the petition with these prayers, like I said, and the court issued directions to UGC to respond to our petition. UGC in response said that we want to work on this. We want to strengthen the regulations. They set up a committee, their internal committee to draft revised regulations with strengthened mechanisms and the draft regulations were brought by the UGC before court. Those draft regulations came in February of 2025. We were not happy with those draft regulations. We submitted to the court, we made submissions to the court saying that many changes need to be made in the draft regulations. They are quite problematic. Those suggestions of ours were recorded by the court in September 2025. These were 10 point suggestions on the draft regulations that we had made. And interestingly, the court also asked UGC to consider those suggestions and notify the regulations as soon as possible. Four months later, UGC works on those suggestions, works on those recommendations, considers them. Some of the it accepts, some of course it has not accepted. And then in January of 2026, 13 January 2026, to be specific, these regulations are notified by the UGC by a court order, pursuant to a court order.Sukanya Shantha: Right, right. Thanks. Thanks for adding this bit. So what I was trying to ask is, so there is, we’re trying like, this whole attempt here now we’re making is to debunk all the misinformation that has been very intentionally been spread and like how the new regulation is looked at as a threat by a certain section of the society and clearly the upper caste, the so-called general categories. So just to make like, just to understand a few things, if I were to actually cite an example, if a woman who happens to be from a sovereign actually faces gender-based discrimination, or if a person with disability faces discrimination on the basis of the disability that he is, he has, he or she has, and in the hands of somebody who comes from a Bahujan caste, from a SC or ST caste. So what happens then? Like, does this rule then apply and can it be used against even the ones who are actually from SC, ST, in that case?Disha Wadekar: 100%.These are not regulations only based on caste, right. They, like we said, you know, there is gender, there is disability, there are other forms of discrimination that have been included. And if an upper caste woman has a complaint of gender-based discrimination against, the basis of discrimination is important, gender-based discrimination against a schedule caste man, let’s say, right. She can definitely file a complaint of gender-based discrimination, right. The regulations do not prevent an upper caste woman to file a complaint, a gender-based discrimination complaint against a lower caste or Dalit or Adivasi man, right. In fact, the regulations are actually protecting such a woman, right, such an upper caste woman against gender-based discrimination by schedule caste, schedule tribe men. So let’s be very clear, this is not, you know, these are not regulations that are only meant to target upper castes. These are regulations,Sukanya Shantha: Right, right, yeah.Disha Wadekar: So for instance, there can be an upper caste person with disability and they may have a complaint against the schedule caste, schedule tribe able-bodied person that they are discriminating against me based on my disability. That complaint is also enunciated, explicitly mentioned and has space in these regulations and that protection very much there in the regulations. It’s very explicit there, there’s no question, one really has to read the regulations properly and not go around this sort of rumour-mongering that is happening around the regulations. That is not what the regulations say.Sukanya Shantha: Right, right. So the government’s own data that was provided in the Rajya Sabha in 2023, it states that between 2019 and 2021, 98 students from Dalit, Adivasi and from the OBC communities died by suicide in central universities and other top institutions like the IITs, the IIMs, the NITs, the IICRs. Also, the caste-based discrimination complaints in universities and colleges, according to the data that the UGC has submitted to the parliamentary panel and the Supreme Court, has jumped 118.4% from 2019-2020 to 2020-24. So these are government data. These are the data that the government bodies have actually collated, they have actually presented it before the committees, the parliamentary committees, the Supreme Court. And yet you have BJP leaders who are very clearly speaking against the UGC rules. Some have even actually gone about resigning from whatever the party positions that they were holding. So how to understand these contradictions, these contradictory responses that are actually coming out? How do you see it as a lawyer, a lawyer who is actually taking care of these cases in the Supreme Court?Disha Wadekar: I mean, in our country, it’s not like this is happening for the first time. It’s happened every time there has been any attempt by the government to bring in a protective legislation for marginalised communities, whether it’s women, whether it’s SEST people, whether it’s with disabilities, the narrative around misuse has always existed. And it will exist as long, and I’m not saying that it’s just a narrative, laws are misused. They are prone to being misused. Any lawyer, any legal academic will tell you every law you go with the consideration when you are working with the law, that laws will be misused. So for instance, it is not just protective legislatures that are misused, right?Sukanya Shantha: Right, yeah, yeahDisha Wadekar: We have something as elementary the IPC which can be used. So, the theft provision is misused against so many times, against people from poor backgrounds, people from nomadic communities and denotified communities. Where they are targeted in the theft cases, right? There are even so many cases of custodial torture and custodial violence and murders, with respect to theft offenses. So something as basic and elementary as a theft offence in an IPC can also be misused. Does that mean that you refrain from having any kind of law? We still have laws, right?Sukanya Shantha: Yes, yes, yeah.Disha Wadekar: We still need to have laws. So, misuse cann0t be the logic of, you know, not having a protective legislation, let alone an IPC sort of legislation, right? So, so, the way I understand this is that there is somewhere in some sections this sort of narrative that you know upper castes will be targeted by the legislations. Let me tell you one thing, law when it is made, and we are living in a democratic country which has the rule of law, right, which means there is due process of law, which means that law in itself has safeguards for respondents. What do these safeguards- or accused parties, right- what are these safeguards? It is not like you are going to file a complaint and a person is going to be sent behind the bars in the equity, as far as the equity regulations are concerned. Firstly, like I said these are civil regulations, so nobody, let me clear this once and for all, nobody’s going behind the bars. Secondly, let me tell you, the equity regulations, once you file a complaint, there is an entire procedure that has been laid out in the regulations itself on how that inquiry is to be conducted. Now, how does an inquiry happen? A complaint is files, a committee is set up, the committee looks at the complaint. They prima facie, the committee finds the complaint has no merit, it is a frivolous complaint. They can just dismiss the complaint, then and there, right? But if the committee thinks that there is some validity to that complaint, the committee will then initiate its procedure. Now what is that procedure- the committee will call upon the respondent, or the person against whom the complaint is made, issue notice to that person, asking to that person to put forth their say on that complaint. So, that person, the respondent, will actually have to submit their response on the complaint, so they will be heard. Secondly, the committee will look at all the evidence, both from complainant’s side and the respondent’s, both are allowed to bring their evidence, right? One will defend, the respondent will defend himself, herself, and the complainant will of course make allegations and then produce evidence supporting their allegations. So this evidence will be looked at. One will also be allowed to get their own witnesses if they want to. So all this due process, all the principles of natural justice, have to be followed. We are living in a country that has rule of law, at least as far as I know, right, uh, I’d like to believe we do – so, let’s say that you know, you know, this is not something, some situation where suddenly the complaint is filed and the person is going to be vanished.After all of this evidence is looked at and appreciated by the committee, they will reach a finding or a conclusion and that finding or conclusion can be in the favour of the complainant or can be in favour the respondent – in favour of the respondent as in, the respondent will be let, you know, be go scot-free. Now, once that finding is reached, the committee e is supposed to send its findings and its suggestions on the punishment- so they will also award punishment that has to be again proportionate to the act, the discriminatory act, right, it has to be proportionate. Like, if it is, it is a complaint that is not of such grave nature, then the punishment also has to be proportionate. Like in so many cases we see that people are just writing undertakings and saying I will not repeat this behaviour. Now, these recommendations are then sent to the head of the institutions, and the head of institution now acts on these punishments that have been prescribed by the committee. So this entire process, this entire due process is followed, right? This whole idea of you complaint will be filed, hundreds and thousands and lakhs of complaints will be filed and we will all be punished and we will removed from university spaces, I think that does, this is not true. And we have seen this happen before in the ICCs (Internal Complaint Committees for Sexual Harassment). This has been, this is not new.Sukanya Shantha: Yeah, yeah. Thank you, thank you so much Disha, for walking us through the case, the petition you filed, and also helping us understand this is not a charity based approach by the government but a very clear justice-driven effort that has been painstakingly built over years of hard legal fights. Thank you so much.Disha Wadekar: Thank you so much Sukanya, thank you.