Ending a remedy is not the same as ending the condition it was meant to address.In late July, an anonymous Instagram account calling itself the Reservation Hatao Andolan appeared. Within days the account had close to six million followers. Before arguing with the campaign, it helps to be clear about what it is.It is not an organisation in the ordinary sense. No named leadership, no membership, no office. It calls itself a citizen-led platform with no party affiliation, and its work has been almost entirely digital; its administrators told followers to flood comment sections rather than gather anywhere. Anti-quota protests have since appeared on the streets — a march in Nagpur on July 30 that local reports described as the movement’s own, gatherings in Lucknow and Visakhapatnam, a Karni Sena rally in Jaipur that ended in a lathi charge. But these are separate outfits with separate demands. There is no single command.Compare what came just before it. Weeks earlier, thousands of students stood at Jantar Mantar under the banner of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), demanding answers about leaked papers and rigged examinations. They came from every region, religion and caste. They were people in a square, asking something of the state, and when the education minister resigned on July 25 they went home.Then, online, the grievance changed shape. A protest about paper leaks developed into a fight about quotas, in Instagram stories, in WhatsApp forwards from cousins and classmates, in comment threads under news clips. Some suggested standards would improve the day reservation ended. Others replied that no quota ever leaked a question paper.Whatever one thinks of reservation, that turn is important. It redirected the rage. The collapse of an institution became a fight over who gets what, and the questions that started it all, about examination integrity, recruitment and the money the state does not spend on schools, faded.The size of the response is not nothing. Six million people is not a fringe. Behind that figure sit young Indians outside coaching centres, on a second or third attempt at an exam, watching stable jobs shrink, feeling expected to pay for a history they did not write. That is worth listening to. Calling every reservation critic a bigot does no one any good.The campaign’s demands are harder to pin down than its following. They have been differently expressed at different moments and the images shift. A late July post specified four: merit over caste, equal fees, equal age limit, equal cut-off. Other versions added economic support irrespective of caste and periodic evaluation of policy. Elsewhere it has urged the state to stop recording caste on its forms and to make public display of caste unlawful.The wording moves, but the target does not. Every version is aimed at reservation. In none of them does caste itself, as something people practise, appear as a thing to be given up.Look at what that demand reaches. Caste on a form. Caste in a certificate. A box to tick, which an executive order can erase overnight.Now look at what it leaves untouched. Who marries whom. The surname pasted across a car windscreen. The caste named proudly in a wedding invitation. The uncle who makes a call, the senior who forwards a CV, the neighbour who mentions a vacancy before it is ever advertised. Delete the column on the application form and every one of these survives the afternoon.This is the asymmetry running through the debate. Caste is to disappear from the admission list but stay in the matrimonial advertisement, struck off the government form and kept in the community WhatsApp group. As one critic observed, a great many posts demand an end to reservation, and almost none an end to casteism.Ambedkar saw this coming, which is an irony worth sitting with, because the campaign has taken his words for its motto: educate, agitate, organise. In Annihilation of Caste, he argued that caste cannot be reformed in parts. It has to be dismantled as an institution, through inter-caste marriage, the refusal of caste pride and the surrender of inherited advantage. By that measure, the test of any movement claiming to want a caste-free India is not whether it opposes reservation. It is whether it will give up the things caste quietly gives it.Another claim needs correcting. Reservation, people say, was meant to last ten years. That is half right. The ten-year limit in Article 334 covered reserved seats in legislatures, and parliament has renewed it seven times since 1960, most recently to January 2030. Reservation in education and public employment, under Articles 15(4) and 16(4), never had an expiry date.What the framers did assume was that these measures would fade as society changed. They expected untouchability to end, marriage to loosen, caste to stop deciding a life. Judged against that, the survival of reservation is not a policy that overstayed its welcome. It is a social change that stalled.The evidence is easy to find. Indians still marry within caste, decade after decade, in cities as much as villages. In the survey that measured it directly, three in ten rural households and two in ten urban ones said they practised untouchability. Neighbourhoods still sort by community in metros that think themselves modern. In a correspondence study by Sukhadeo Thorat, Paul Attewell and Firdaus Fatima Rizvi, identical applications differing only in the applicant’s name were sent to private employers; the odds of a Dalit applicant being called for interview were about two-thirds those of an upper-caste Hindu applicant with the same qualifications. Universities still face students who say they were treated differently.Also read: Uttar Pradesh: ‘Gen Z’ Cycle Yatra Takes Off from Gorakhpur, Demands Annual Recruitment CalendarNone of this means every Indian follows caste the same way. Much has changed. Protections have expanded, classrooms have opened, plenty of old cruelties have thinned. Saying so does not oblige anyone to pretend the rest has gone.Two questions need pulling apart, because the discussion keeps welding them together. Reservation is a constitutional policy. Caste is a societal system older than the constitution by centuries. Criticising reservation is not the same as denying caste, and defending reservation does not mean treating it as beyond revision.Democracies revise their policies, and reservation is not exempt. But revision needs a diagnosis. Blame paper leaks and administrative rot on quotas, and the real causes go unexamined. Point to caste and brush aside all concerns about institutional quality, and that discourse also fails.What these weeks have shown is how fast caste returns to the surface. Students gathered over governance. Days later the country was debating who gets a seat. Caste seldom comes as spectacle. It lives in assumptions. In marriages. In neighbourhoods. In who-knows-who. In what a family expects of itself. To most Indians this feels unremarkable, which is exactly the point. It has become ordinary.That ordinariness is what makes caste visible and invisible at once.So the tougher question is not whether reservation should end. The question is whether a society will give up caste itself, and not merely the policy that admits caste exists. A campaign that wants reservation gone while caste pride stays is not asking for equality. It wants the bandage taken off and the wound left alone.Until this is addressed, every public debate in India will come back to the same unfinished business. Not because caste is of our past, but because it still organises our present.Ankit Prakash is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Aryabhatta College, University of Delhi.