There is a specific kind of body that moves through the Indian university with ease. It does not think about the utensils it uses, because separate utensils for the maid have been filed under “hygiene” since childhood. It does not flinch when teachers mispronounce certain surnames, because its own surname opens doors. This body has been told, through a thousand small rituals, from family lores about ancestors to school anthems and prayers singing paeans of freedom fighters mostly from specific caste groups to pop culture where every Raj and Rahul of Karan Johar is also from the same denomination, that its identity is special. And by extension that India is special. That the gap in life expectancy between itself and a Scheduled Tribe person is not violence but simply how things are.This body learns about caste discrimination, the way a fish learns about water, which is to say, it doesn’t. Not until class 12, when suddenly the entrance exam results arrive and with them, the bitter pill of reservation. Perhaps the first time when caste becomes visible. Caste to them is an unfair impediment to their unlimited ambition and not socially structured violence on the have-nots. The propaganda machine has done its work well. From WhatsApp forwards to television media, this body is made to believe it should be competing with the US, China and at the very least be sitting on the UN Security Council, even as it lives in a country where the infant mortality rate in a state like MP competes with war torn nations like Congo. Even as 98 students from Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi communities died by suicide in elite institutions between 2019 and 2021. The numbers don’t lie, but the body has learned not to see them or perhaps know them. Instead, it sees the HDI numbers, Hunger Index and instead of shame feels rage. But whose rage is this? And why does it never turn inward?The root of the rageWhen Rohith Vemula left behind his final words, “my birth is my fatal accident”, he was holding up a mirror to the entire edifice of upper-caste Hinduism, forcing it to confront the violence that lives in its bones, the violence it has dressed up as tradition, merit, and the natural order of things.The UGC regulations of 2026, born from the petitions of two mothers who buried their children, Radhika Vemula and Abeda Salim Tadvi, are about what happens when the mirror is held too close. And the rage that has greeted these regulations, the cries of harassment from the “general category,” the claims that this will “deepen caste divisions”, is instructive. It tells us everything we need to know about how power sees itself, and how it never wants to interrogate itself.The masculinity that cannot grieveThe Hindutva project has always understood something fundamental: that the upper-caste Hindu man’s sense of himself as powerful requires an Other to dominate. Mostly it is the Muslim, lustful, cunning, forever abducting Hindu women. But here is what the UGC regulations expose, what makes them so threatening, the Other has always been internal too. The Dalit student. The Adivasi scholar. The OBC doctor. These are the people whose very presence in the university, in the spaces that were built by and for the upper castes, represents an intolerable challenge. Not to the nation, but to the carefully constructed identity of the upper-caste Hindu. When Payal Tadvi was tortured by her three upper-caste seniors until she could no longer bear and when Vemula was suspended and his fellowship stopped for raising certain issues, they were not aberrations. This was the system working exactly as designed. The university was doing what it has always done, enforcing hierarchy, teaching certain people their place, ensuring that any move toward equality is experienced by the powerful as an attack on their liberties.The impasseThe UGC regulations are almost comically mild. Equal Opportunity Centers. Equity Committees. A helpline. It even has the removal of punishment for false complaints, because of course the assumption is always that the marginalised are lying, that their pain is performative, that 1,160 complaints and a 118.4% increase in reported discrimination was all somehow exaggerated.Even these modest measures are met with fury because they force a reckoning. They make visible what was meant to stay invisible. They say, caste discrimination is not hygiene, it is not tradition, it is not the natural order. It is violence. And the university has been complicit in this violence.But here is the deeper problem, that brings us back to Modi and the Shakhas and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the entire architecture of Hindutva, this movement cannot survive without an enemy. It needs the Muslim. It needs Partition. It needs the humiliation of invasion and the fantasy of reclaiming lost glory. It needs the angry Hanuman and the 56-inch chest because without them, there is only the terrible truth, that the imagined greatness comes with caveats, that the power was always built on the backs of those designated as lesser, that the identity in which we take pride was always hollow.The university is where this lie becomes hardest to maintain. Because here, merit is supposed to matter. Here, the Dalit student with a brilliant mind, the Adivasi scholar with a PhD, the OBC doctor saving lives expose that fiction. They reveal that the separation of utensils was never about hygiene, that the entrance exam outrage was never about fairness, that the whole system was always about maintaining dominance.What the mirror showsThe UGC regulations hold up a mirror. They say: look at what you have done. Look at Rohith Vemula’s note. Look at Payal Tadvi’s death. Look at the 122 students who died, this endless litany of institutional murders dressed up as suicides. Look at the fact that caste-based discrimination complaints doubled in four years.And the response is somehow not grief but rage. Because grief would require acknowledging loss, and acknowledging loss would require acknowledging what was lost, and acknowledging what was lost would require seeing the humanity of those who were lost, and seeing their humanity would shatter the entire edifice.So instead, this will harass general category students. This will deepen divisions. This is reverse discrimination. The same script, over and over, in every country where the powerful are asked to share even the smallest fraction of their power. The same inability to see that equity is not oppression, that justice is not revenge, that making room for others does not mean there is no room for you.The crusade continuesHindutva wants to completely win over any and all diversity that exists. It wants them to disappear or if they must exist, then they should be properly subjugated, grateful, and remain in their place.The university was supposed to be a safe ground for this dominance. After all, the so-called lower castes could be kept out through poverty, and if they made it in through reservation then they could be hazed and harassed until they left, and if they persisted, then they could be suspended, expelled or driven to suicide. The system was working.Until two mothers said, no more. And the mask slipped. Because the rage at these regulations is not about protecting anyone. It is about the terror of being seen. It is about what happens when the body that has always moved through the world with ease suddenly has to think about how it moves, what it says, what it assumes. It is about the unbearable prospect of actual equity, which would mean the end of the world as the upper castes have known it.Where we areThe UGC regulations aren’t doing much, they are at best saying the university belongs to everyone. The Dalit student has as much right to be here, unmolested and alive, as the Brahmin professor. The tribal doctor should not have to endure humiliation from upper-caste seniors. The OBC scholar should not have to file their ambitions under “merit” while upper-caste mediocrity sails through on inherited networks and “hygiene.”Will this change the course the nation has undertaken? Perhaps not, perhaps it is not enough. But here is what the mothers of Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi understood, you fight anyway. You petition the courts anyway. You demand regulations anyway. You create committees and helplines anyway. Not because you believe the powerful will suddenly see the light, but because the struggle itself is the point. Because every institutional murder that is named is one the system cannot quietly bury. Because every complaint documented is one that cannot be erased. Because every regulation, however modest, is a small weight on the scales of justice.The impasse was coming because Hindutva was always heading here, to the place where its contradictions become unsustainable, where the mythology collides with reality, where the demand for real equity reveals how much of the power was always built on sand. The university is where this collision happens most clearly, because the university is where merit and caste are supposed to be reconciled, and they cannot be. One or the other must give.The upper-caste Hindutva project chose caste. It chose to preserve dominance over everything else – development, education and life itself. The UGC regulations are a small attempt to choose differently. That they inspire such fury tells us how much is at stake. That they exist at all tells us the fight is not over.In the end, any act towards equality by the oppressed will always seem like oppression to the powerful. But it is also true that the oppressed keep acting anyway. And one day, perhaps, the body that has never had to think about how it moves through the world will finally be forced to look at itself.That day has not come yet. But the mothers who lost their children are making sure it will.Raj Shekhar is based out of San Francisco and works in the area of data privacy regulations. He also occasionally contributes as a freelancer writing on politics and runs a podcast on politics called the Bharatiya Junta Podcast.