Whenever a person from a marginalized caste asserts their identity, they are immediately met with liberal outrage from dominant castes preaching the virtues of a ‘casteless’ society. Yet this sudden urge to erase identities lines up neatly with aggressive anti‑reservation rhetoric. The hypocrisy is plain to see: dominant castes push to dismantle affirmative action, while holding on to every advantage that caste has given them. This piece lays bare the privilege hidden in claims of ‘castelessness’ and shows why calling for an end to reservation makes no sense as long as casteist thinking continues to condition everyday life.

There is a predictable script that plays out in Indian public life whenever someone from a marginalized Dalit, Bahujan, or Adivasi community publicly claims their identity. The moment a subaltern voice asserts their caste as a marker of political visibility, survival, and historical resistance, self-proclaimed liberals and urban upper-caste elites swoop in to play the moral peacemakers. Suddenly, they become the loudest advocates for a utopian society where caste allegedly does not exist. “Why are you dividing us by bringing up caste?” they ask, insisting that we must view everyone as “human first.” It sounds progressive on paper, borrowing the vocabulary of egalitarianism to sound intellectually superior. This sudden, desperate urge to preach castelessness is hardly ever about actual equality. It works as a silencing tactic to shut down subaltern assertion. The hypocrisy of this stance is exposed every day in how dominant castes navigate the socio-political world. Upper-caste pride does not need to be violently or loudly asserted in the streets because it is already the default setting of our social architecture. It is woven into our institutions, normalized in the boardrooms, and sitting in the upper echelons of academia and media. For the oppressor, casting off a caste identity is easy because they have already reaped, and continue to reap, all its generational and material benefits. Their social capital, economic safety nets, and cultural confidence are built entirely on the very order they now claim to ignore whenever a marginalized person speaks up.

This selective blindness becomes even more glaring when we look at the everyday reality of caste pride and the ongoing anti-reservation discourse. We live in a country where flaunting dominant caste markers is normalized as ‘heritage’ or ‘culture.’ Look at the rear windshields of cars and motorcycles across Indian highways, boldly displaying dominant surnames and caste identities. Look at the matrimonial columns in any leading newspaper, which are shamelessly segregated by caste and sub-caste, demanding “status matching.” This blatant, everyday display of caste pride rarely triggers the “casteless” liberal outrage. When a Dalit groom simply dares to ride a horse to his own wedding, a routine cultural practice for the privileged, it is perceived as an existential threat to the social order, met with brutal, real-world violence. This same duality drives the anti-reservation movements. We are constantly subjected to debates and street protests demanding the rollback of affirmative action, with rhetoric aggressively wrapped in the language of ‘merit’ and ‘fairness.’ What these anti-reservation crusaders conveniently ignore is the fundamental, structural logic of why reservation exists in the first place. Reservation was never designed as a poverty alleviation scheme. It is a mechanism for representation in a society fundamentally rigged by birth. The dominant castes are perfectly content rallying against reservation, yet their outrage mysteriously vanishes when it comes to dismantling the caste order itself, because the latter guarantees their supremacy.

The demand to end reservation while the institution of caste is still breathing, mutating, and thriving is mathematically, logically, and morally absurd. You cannot demand that we scrap the medicine while you actively feed and nurture the disease. Affirmative action can only become obsolete when the caste order and the deep-seated, insidious casteist mentality that governs everyday Indian life are completely eradicated from our collective psyche. Nobody in the anti-reservation camp is protesting to abolish the caste order. They are only protesting the perceived loss of their historical monopoly over resources, education, and institutional spaces. Caste as an institution is not going anywhere anytime soon. It has simply shape-shifted to fit modern urban spaces, turning explicit untouchability into new forms of exclusion. For the oppressed, caste is not a badge of privilege they can just take off at will. It is a brutal reality imposed upon them by exclusion and discrimination. When they claim their caste, they are demanding space and acknowledging that they have survived an order deliberately designed to crush them. Asking marginalized groups to drop their caste pride just to make upper-caste liberals feel at ease is demanding that they erase their own political and historical struggle. If dominant castes genuinely want a society without reservation and without caste assertion, they must direct their outrage at the root cause. Destroy the casteist mentality, dismantle monopolies over resources and positions, and end social hierarchies. Until then, tone-policing subaltern voices under the guise of progressive liberalism is nothing but casteism wearing a modern mask.

The Privilege of ‘Castelessness’: Why Anti-Reservation Outrage and Caste Pride Cannot Coexist?

The Cockroach Janta Party protest concluded along a path familiar to political agitations across the country, trading an individual resignation for institutional change. When Dharmendra Pradhan stepped down from the Union Education Ministry after seven weeks of student mobilization at Jantar Mantar, the leadership framed the development as an unmitigated victory. The celebration surrounding this supposed triumph of student power over the central government deserves a far more critical assessment than the praise it received on social media. Beneath the satire, the viral broadcasts, and the insect costumes, the movement relied heavily on unacknowledged grassroots labour and packed up its tents before addressing the core defects of the examination system. The most glaring compromise lay in the management of the protest’s public image. While presented nationally as an inclusive youth agitation, its visible leadership and media strategy remained carefully detached from Muslim identity, even as Muslim volunteers sustained the physical occupation day after day. From the opening week, community kitchens organized largely by Muslim residents from adjoining neighbourhoods supplied the food and clean drinking water that kept the gathering viable. The state's response to this logistical support was both swift and harsh. A volunteer from Ghaziabad running one such community kitchen was detained by the police, and his family in western Uttar Pradesh was subjected to questioning. This severe repercussion went largely unnoticed in mainstream commentary, eclipsed by breathless coverage of Sonam Wangchuk’s hunger strike and daily press appearances by the core spokespersons.

This institutional detachment was not merely the defensive caution that minority organizations have learned through years of state scrutiny and selective policing. It served as a tactical convenience for an organizational leadership acutely aware of how quickly a visibly Muslim gathering is delegitimized and dispersed by state forces. Commentators observing the daily assembly frequently registered an implicit relief that the gathering did not present a minority character. A student platform that willingly consumes meals, water, and logistical support from Muslim citizens, while maintaining a sanitized public profile to preserve its political respectability, falls short of representing the broader youth. It represents only those demographics deemed politically safe to display, leaving vulnerable workers to shoulder legal risks beyond the camera frame. The organizational fractures inside the platform ran equally deep and cannot be excused as youthful spontaneity. Having originated as a satirical response to an insensitive judicial remark, the platform failed to build the institutional discipline required to sustain a complex seven-week sit-in. Inviting a senior activist like Sonam Wangchuk to undertake an indefinite fast carried an ethical obligation to maintain transparent medical oversight and an accountable leadership structure. Instead, Wangchuk’s eventual removal to a hospital turned into an uncoordinated public controversy. Organizers publicly claimed the evacuation occurred against his wishes, yet they could produce no coherent medical records or name the specific personnel responsible for monitoring his health on site.

This absence of structure undermined the political focus of the campaign. A minor ink attack on the founder rapidly hijacked the entire media cycle, pushing fundamental examination reforms out of public debate and demonstrating a fragile grip on political messaging. The movement operated as an unregistered entity without clear decision-making protocols, despite presiding over circumstances involving serious personal risk. When controversy flared over medical negligence, no specific organizer stepped forward to take responsibility. When volunteers were detained in outlying police stations, the leadership offered total silence. Spokespersons remained eager to occupy television prime time, while ground-level participants absorbed legal and physical consequences without acknowledgement. A decentralized, leaderless format is easily praised as participatory democracy when momentum is high, but here it serves as an alibi to evade responsibility whenever decisions put ordinary lives in jeopardy.

The ultimate outcome of the protest presents the most troubling compromise. While forcing a cabinet minister’s departure represents a clear political embarrassment for the ruling establishment, it remains an almost entirely symbolic concession when measured against the platform's initial promises. The core demand was kept deliberately narrow, focused on the removal of a single minister, which made an apparent breakthrough achievable within seven weeks. Yet the commercial and bureaucratic networks enabling paper leaks across national entrance tests remain intact. The opacity surrounding evaluation systems inside major testing bodies and central boards continues unresolved, and the structural loopholes that caused widespread disruptions across the 2026 examination cycle have been left unaddressed. By personalizing institutional decay into one administrative figure who has simply been rotated out of office, the movement bypassed the hard work of administrative reform. Even as the organizers conceded publicly that the broader fight for transparent examinations was far from over, they announced that no further marches or mobilizations would take place in the capital. Standing down at this juncture was an abandonment of the cause just as the real institutional struggle was set to begin. Trading a minister’s exit for an immediate retreat from the streets delivers the optics of public accountability without securing any structural remedies. It signals to the state that a symbolic resignation is sufficient to disperse public outrage, dismantle sustained momentum, and restore the status quo.

None of this critique diminishes the personal dedication of thousands of students who spent seven weeks under challenging conditions and constant police surveillance in the heart of Delhi. However, student publications and independent commentators committed to holding authority accountable cannot treat this campaign with uncritical reverence. The central question is not whether an executive resignation matters; it holds immediate political significance within its narrow boundaries. The actual inquiry is why a movement centred on public sacrifice chose to keep its most exposed contributors invisible, why it managed high-stakes medical emergencies without basic procedural rigour, and why it dissolved its own mobilization the moment deep structural demands were required. These constructional compromises must be documented frankly, because the path toward genuine institutional reform cannot be built on symbolic retreats disguised as victories.

 is a student pursuing their Bachelor of Arts from Jamia Millia Islamia.


Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this Publication are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of The Jamia Review or its members.


Articles by Abhigya Singh

The Privilege of ‘Castelessness’: Why Anti-Reservation Outrage and Caste Pride Cannot Coexist?

Beyond the Spectacle at Jantar Mantar

The Privilege of ‘Castelessness’: Why Anti-Reservation Outrage and Caste Pride Cannot Coexist?

Beyond the Spectacle at Jantar Mantar