I do not write this as someone who hates IIT Bombay. I owe the institute my education. During my years there I met professors and students who were casteist, and I also met professors and students from ‘upper’ castes who supported me without hesitation and whom I still count as mentors and friends. Both exist. I refuse to generalise about every ‘upper’-caste professor or student on that campus, and I ask readers not to either.But an institution is judged by what it does when one of its most vulnerable students dies. This time, IIT Bombay protected itself and sacrificed Sahil Wakode’s name. The media followed. The police let the evidence leak. And a family that lost its son was left to watch his last hour replayed for clicks.Sahil cannot answer. So those of us who sat where he sat will.What I sawI studied at IIT Bombay. I sat in the same examination halls, on the same benches, under the same system of invigilators and me along with all my batchmates were required to sign an honour code against cheating in exams and assignments by the Chemical Engineering department. So, when I watched the clip that has been circulating for a week, captioned as proof that Sahil Wakode “cheated,” I did not see proof. I saw a first-generation young student from a historically oppressed community being tried and convicted in a court where he can never speak: the internet.Sahil, a second-year B.Tech student from a Scheduled Caste community, lost his life on September 18, hours after he was pulled out of a mid-semester exam. His family says he endured casteist remarks and harassment. An FIR under the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act names a member of the institute’s own faculty. Those allegations are for the Crime Branch to investigate. What happened next did not wait for any investigation.The verdict came firstWithin a day, IIT Bombay posted on X that Sahil had been found using a mobile phone to upload the question paper to ChatGPT. The institute is not a bystander in this case. Its faculty member is named in the FIR. Its campus environment is what the family’s complaint is about. Yet it chose to publish its version of Sahil’s conduct before the police and investigation had established anything.That post did not stay a post. Newsrooms turned it into “caught cheating.” Then a fragment of exam-hall CCTV footage was leaked, which the Crime Branch itself said had not been released to anyone, appeared online and was republished by outlets that admitted they had not verified it. Someone released evidence from a live investigation, either from the police or from the institute that controls the cameras, and nobody has been held to accountable for it.I will not claim to know what was in Sahil’s hands that morning. But I will say what the footage cannot show, because I have sat in exam rooms of IIT Bombay:Nothing in a low-resolution clip establishes, without forensic verification, that the student shown is Sahil, or that the clip is complete and unedited.In a mid-semester exam at IIT Bombay, students on the front bench are within arm’s reach of the invigilators. Every one of us carried a scientific calculator into those halls, and from a distance a calculator and a phone look alike. Photographing a question paper or typing a prompt into an AI tool like ChatGPT under an invigilator’s nose is not something I would accept as proven from a few seconds of silent footage.Even IIT Bombay’s own statement says no disciplinary action was taken against him. If the institute had caught a student red-handed, that is not how it usually responds.Whether any malpractice occurred is a question for the investigation to answer on the full evidence. It is not a question a caption writer, or an institute’s social-media handle, had any right to answer. That is my objection: not that the institute lied, which I cannot prove, but that it spoke when it should have stayed silent, and that the media amplified its words as if they were findings and facts.Who tells the story mattersI do not think what happened to Sahil’s name and reputation was an accident. I think it reflects who holds the microphone in this country.Study after study has found that Indian newsrooms are overwhelmingly led by people from dominant castes, with almost no Dalit or Adivasi editors, anchors or owners. The IITs are not different. Parliament has been told that reserved faculty posts across the IITs lie vacant year after year, and that SC and ST faculty are a small fraction of what the law requires. When the institution that speaks, the newsrooms that report, and the owners who decide what runs all come from the same side of the caste line, a Dalit student’s death is reported through their instincts, not ours. The instinct was to believe the institute, to run the unverified clip, and to write “cheat.” No conspiracy is needed for that. A shared blind spot is enough, and its result was a wave of online abuse against SC and ST students that is still going on.Why Sahil could not simply ‘file a complaint’IIT Bombay has pointed out that Sahil never approached its SC/ST Cell. It said the same after Darshan Solanki in 2023. I want to explain, as an alumnus, why this proves nothing.A professor at an IIT holds a student’s grades, recommendation letters, project placements and, in practice, his future. The IITs are autonomous; there is no outside authority a student can walk to on a Tuesday afternoon. The SC/ST Cell sits inside the same institute, answerable to the same administration, staffed by colleagues of the very faculty a student might need to complain about. For an SC or ST student, going to that cell is not a remedy but a gamble with the rest of your degree, and every student on campus knows it.So, the absence of a complaint is not the absence of discrimination. It is evidence of how much students distrust the mechanism.And so…I am suggesting the institution of an independent SC/ST protection body for higher education, backed by the Union government or the state governments, outside the control of any institute. It should:have at least half of its leadership and decision-making officers drawn from SC and ST communities;receive complaints from students anonymously, and protect complainants against retaliation by faculty or administration;have the authority to examine the conduct of faculty and students on caste discrimination, and to report publicly;monitor every IIT, NIT and central university, not only after a death.The 2026 UGC Equity Regulations at least proposed stronger equity committees. Even that is currently stayed by the Supreme Court. Students are being asked to trust a system that has not been reformed since 2012.Alongside this, I stand with every demand made by leaders, politicians and representatives of the SC/ST community: a public apology from IIT Bombay to the SC/ST community, a Special Investigation Team, action against whoever leaked the unverified footage and against the outlets that circulated it unverified, preservation and disclosure of all CCTV footage to Sahil’s family and the investigation team including the CCTV video outside the examination room, in the corridors and the dean’s office and a time-bound drive to fill vacant SC, ST and OBC faculty posts to make the campuses across India more inclusive and less hostile towards the SC, ST and OBC students whose communities together form the majority population of India.Dr. Amogh Meshram was a part of the 2012-2017 Chemical Engineering dual-degree batch at IIT Bombay.These views are personal and not those of my employer or the United States government.