On September 18, 2026, a second-year B.Tech student at IIT Bombay, Sahil Wakode, was reportedly found with a mobile phone during an examination and was taken out of the hall by the invigilating professor. He died by suicide later that day. The next day, the institute told the public a remarkably specific story: that he had been caught uploading the question paper to ChatGPT, that he had been counselled and reassured, and that no disciplinary action had been started. Two days later, however, the institute had to apologise, conceding that it had been inappropriate to characterise the events before they were established by investigation. Wakode’s father has alleged months of caste-based harassment by the professor concerned. The professor denies it and the faculty forum has defended him. Hundreds of students came out in protest, which still continues albeit with dwindled numbers. An FIR has been registered against the invigilating professor, Suryanarayan Doolla, under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) (Section 108) and the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 (SC/ST Act). The matter is being investigated by the Mumbai Police Crime Branch.What happened in that examination hall is for investigators and courts to establish. But the episode is a useful lens because it brings together, in a single case, three things that Indian elite technical education has long preferred to keep apart: caste, discipline and institutional self-protection. The argument of this article is that these are not separate problems. The agrahara logicThe most durable belief about the IITs, IIMs, and some other lesser-known institutions is that caste does not operate inside them. The reasoning is familiar. Admission is by a competitive examination; the examination measures merit, merit is blind to birth, and therefore the campus is a meritocratic enclave in which caste is a relic that students leave at the gate. Caste, in this view, is imported by “politicisation”, by reservation, or by aggrieved individuals looking for externalising blame.This belief is comforting and institutionally convenient. If caste is invisible then a complaint about it can only be a personal failing of the complainant – the burden shifts silently from the institution to the student, who must now prove not only that something happened but that it belongs to a category the institution insists does not exist. Caste bias is embedded in the history of these institutes against the entry of Dalits. While it became difficult to resist their admission as students or their recruitment into administrative positions, resistance persisted in faculty recruitment which constitutes their intellectual aristocracy. Even today, IIMs and their cohorts, have not instituted reservations into admission to their fellow programme, knowing fully well that programme could help remedy the negligible Dalit representation in their faculty. For years, the IITs resisted or restricted the application of reservation to faculty posts, particularly at senior levels, invoking their status as institutions of “excellence”. The consequences remain stark. At IIT Bombay, of 412 professors, only five belong to SC communities and none ST; among 363 associate and assistant professors, there are just 29 from SCs and eight faculty members from STs. At IIT Kanpur, none of its 257 professors belong to SC or ST communities; among 128 associate professors, there are only eight from SCs and one from ST, while among 193 assistant professors, there are 17 from SCs and four from STs.Such disparities, especially the near absence of SC/ST faculty at the highest levels, cannot readily be explained by individual merit alone. They point to a historically reproduced institutional structure in which upper-caste presence has been normalised as the natural outcome of merit, while Dalit exclusion has been attributed to an alleged lack of it. This reflects a deeper social conception of merit in which the historically privileged become the normative bearers of academic competence, while the structural disadvantages faced by Dalit communities are rendered invisible. Caste shapes access to schooling, cultural capital, language, professional networks and higher education itself. The advantages accumulated through caste are presented as individual merit, and the disadvantages produced by caste as individual deficiencies. The long resistance to reservation in institutions and the persistence of stark disparities at their apex thus suggest the continuing operation of caste in the very definition and reproduction of academic excellence.The IITs’ claim to being centres of “excellence” rests substantially on their ability to select a tiny fraction of applicants from an enormous pool of aspirants. Yet, despite decades of prestige and investment, none has entered the top 100 of major global university rankings. Such rankings have their own biases and cannot be treated as definitive measures of excellence, but they do challenge the unqualified claims made on the IITs’ behalf. More importantly, there is no evidence that implementing reservation has diluted their academic reputation or standards. The argument that Dalit faculty would compromise merit is thus an assertion, not an established fact. Across the world, diversity is increasingly recognised as enriching learning and institutional life. Integrating Dalit students, faculty and employees into the IITs could broaden perspectives, challenge inherited assumptions and strengthen their academic culture. Their persistence in treating historically privileged social composition as the natural basis of merit suggests that, beneath their modern technological façade, the IITs still operate by age-old agrahara logic.Caste in nuanced formsCaste in these institutions as elsewhere rarely announces itself as untouchability. It works through small, nuanced, deniable practices. It is the question about surname and the enquiry into a student’s entrance rank that caste is surmised and leads to a permanent presumption of lesser ability. It is the “quota student” label, the informal clustering of friends and study groups, the reluctance to disclose one’s identity for fear of what follows, and the faculty attitudes that shape supervision, evaluation and recommendation in ways no rulebook records.IIT Bombay’s own SC/ST Cell surveyed nearly 400 students in 2022. Roughly a quarter reported being asked their surname to identify their caste, and over a third said people asked about their entrance rank to guess their caste. A meaningful minority reported mental-health effects from caste-based discrimination, and a substantial number said fear of disclosure kept them away from support collectives. About 83%, however, said they had not personally experienced slurs or discrimination. It means that a sizable minority carries a constant, low-level burden of nuanced casteism that the majority does not see.While the institute acknowledges the issue by having its own SC/ST Cell, any caste related episode meets with denial. After Darshan Solanki’s death at IIT Bombay in 2023, an internal committee ruled out caste discrimination, a finding disputed by his family and by student groups. A police investigation produced a different evidentiary picture but denied caste. Also read: The Cost of the ‘Package’ Culture: Inside the Systemic Crisis of IIT SuicidesThe lesson was not dissimilar to what happened in Kilvenmeni or Khairlanji. In Kilvenmeni, 44 Dalit agricultural labourers including children were burnt alive by caste Hindus and in Khairlanji, four members of a Dalit family, were sexually assaulted and brutally murdered by caste Hindus. In both cases, there was a palpable context of caste conflict, yet the judicial investigations failed to note the caste dimension. The upper caste dominated institutions have still not understood that caste is not an object – that it manifests in the form of prejudices that could only be proved circumstantially.In 2025, an episode occurred in which Ramadan was to be observed on the terrace of the HSS block of IIT, Bombay. The right-wing student organisations, which observed Hindu festivals openly in the institute, made an issue of it in the media. Two Ph.D students affiliated to Ambedkar Phule Periyar Study Circle (APPSC), when approached by media, gave statements saying that they saw nothing wrong with the observance since Hindu festivals were openly celebrated on campus. They were subsequently charged, and Professor Suryanarayan Doolla – yes, the same person who is now charged in Sahil Wakode’s suicide – then chair of the Academic Disciplinary Committee, punished them for speaking to the media. One student received eight months’ suspension, while the other received 13 months’ suspension and a ban on hostel admission. Apart from the larger question of whether speaking to the media could legitimately constitute a disciplinary offence when no institutional rule can override students’ constitutional rights, the disparity in punishment is striking: the non-Dalit student received a lesser penalty, whereas the Dalit student faced a harsher one. Given their different circumstances – the former was completing his Ph.D while the latter was only in his second year – the disparity becomes even more pronounced. When the Dalit student approached Doolla, he had reportedly behaved insultingly and issued an immediate email banning him from the campus. This cannot be dismissed as merely the conduct of an intolerant professor enforcing discipline; it bears a disturbing imprint of caste prejudice. There is a case pending in the Bombay high court challenging the punishment.Over the past decade, these institutions have grown less tolerant of dissent, less consultative in their functioning and more punitive under the heads appointed by the ruling regime for their ideological alignment. This ideology reveals itself in discriminative treatment of Dalit communities. The best-known early instance is the 2015 derecognition of the Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle (APSC) at IIT Madras, which was reversed only after national protest, while there existed Hindutva-linked students organisations. At IIT Bombay, students who protested a reserved vegetarian table by eating non-vegetarian food there were fined. Rules are increasingly issued by notice and the space in which students can contest them has narrowed.Discipline as the administrative reflexIIT Bombay’s published academic malpractice procedure separates detection from adjudication: an invigilator who finds indiscipline is to confiscate the material, issue a fresh answer book, let the student continue, and report to the head of the department. A disciplinary committee then decides, the complaining instructor takes no part, the benefit of doubt goes to the student, and the student is given the evidence and two working days to reply.That procedure was obviously not followed in this case. The reported sequence, in which the professor took the paper and answer sheet and escorted the student out, makes it clear violation of the rule. There is a further question about the rules themselves. A revised punishment schedule, proposed by a committee convened by Prof Pratibha Sharma in July 2026, were approved by the Senate on August 8, 2026, but the order to implement them was issued only on September 18, 2026, the day Sahil commits suicide. The new punishment regime prescribed a failing grade and a one-semester suspension for mere possession of an unauthorised device, even at a first offence. Obviously, students were not told of this before their mid-semester examinations. A semester’s suspension is not a routine sanction: it removes a student from his cohort, campus and academic sequence, and sends him home with a stigma of cheating.One cannot quarrel about the rules of academic discipline. But one expects them to be communicated to all beforehand and then applied evenly. Unfortunately, they are not applied evenly, and this unevenness is where caste enters. A rule, in itself, is caste-neutral. But rules are enforced through discretion: who is reported, who is warned, who is counselled, who is given the benefit of the doubt, whose explanation is believed, whose infraction is treated as a lapse and whose as a character flaw. Discretion is exercised by people, and people carry the assumptions of the society they come from, including assumptions about who is deserving and who is “really” here on merit.A seemingly harsh and discretionary system is not harsh in the same way to everyone. It is harsh in proportion to a student’s lack of social protection, and it reads the same act differently depending on who commits it. Extra humiliation, extra punishmentIt helps to separate two claims. The first is differential treatment: Dalit students are punished more often or more severely for the same conduct. This is plausible, but there are no disaggregated disciplinary data in public either to prove or disprove.The second is differential impact. The same suspension, the same fine, the same public accusation lands unequally. For a first-generation student dependent on a scholarship, whose family has staked its savings and its social standing on his admission, a semester’s suspension can mean lost funding, loss of a precarious foothold and a return home that the community reads as failure. A student from a well-networked family has cushions to absorb which Dalit students do not. Also read: Over 13,600 Students From Marginalised Communities Dropped Out of Premier Institutions in Five Years: ReportBetween 2020-21 and 2024-25, the 23 IITs across India recorded a total of 45 student suicides. Of these, nine belonged to SCs and seven STs – 16 in all, or 35.6%. Another 12 were from Other Backward Classes (OBCs). This took the combined share of SC, ST and OBC student suicides to 62.2%. By comparison, SC students constitute roughly 14-15% and ST students 5-6% of the total IIT student population – about 20% taken together. On this crude comparison, SC and ST students accounted for suicides at roughly 1.7 times their share of enrolment. The disparity is therefore more suggestive than the earlier national figures, although the numbers are too small to establish a statistically robust difference or its causes.What accountability should look likeThis is not to say that every disciplinary encounter involving a Dalit student is caste-motivated, and a student’s identity establishes the motive of a particular teacher’s actions. The professor, in Wakode’s case, has denied the allegations but that does not explain why he violated the rules, which ultimately led to the loss of a life of a Dalit student. Could he be so callous if Sahil was an upper caste student? If the presence of an explanation other than caste does not rule out the caste angle, then the presence of caste as a factor does not need to be the whole explanation either. The procedural questions about the phone, the report, the committee and the timing of the rule stand independently of the caste question. And they should be answered whether or not the caste angle is ever established.If this death is to change anything, it should produce more than an apology. First, it should give a disclosure: the invigilator’s report, the seizure record and the disciplinary trail, the Senate resolution and the date and manner of communication of the revised punishment rules, and disciplinary data disaggregated by social category, obtainable through RTI if not volunteered. Second, it needs an independent inquiry that does not rely on the institution investigating itself. Third, grievance mechanisms with real powers and real independence, not advisory cells. Fourth, student and faculty representation in framing disciplinary rules before they are adopted. Lastly, a change in how these institutions approach student mental health: from counselling-centred responses to attention to the institutional conditions, punitive rules, opacity and social isolation, in which distress deepens.The IITs and IIMs describe themselves as the country’s institutions of merit. An institution confident in that description should then welcome the scrutiny. They cannot claim that caste has been left at the campus gate, that discipline is neutral, or that a student’s death can be explained by a story told before the facts were known.Anand Teltumbde is a former CEO of Petronet and professor at IIT Kharagpur and GIM, Goa. He is also a writer and civil rights activist.