Fifteen years later, Aarakshan feels less like cinema and more like contemporary India

The barricades at Jantar Mantar may have come down, and the Cockroach Janta Party's agitation over the NEET paper leak may have culminated in the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, but the politics it unleashed has refused to recede. Within days, another student-led campaign began dominating headlines. Under the banner of the Reservation Hatao Andolan, organisers called for the abolition of caste-based reservations, rapidly amassing millions of followers online and reigniting one of the Republic's oldest constitutional debates.

The transition was as swift as it was revealing. If the CJP movement challenged the credibility of India's examination system and demanded institutional accountability, the new campaign shifted the conversation towards a more contested question: who gets to access education, and on what terms? The language of protest remained rooted in students and the promise of opportunity, but its politics had fundamentally changed.

That shift also drew immediate criticism. Anti-caste activists, constitutional scholars and social commentators argued that the momentum generated by a movement demanding fairness in public examinations was now being channelled into a campaign that reduced educational inequality to the language of merit, while overlooking the structural caste hierarchies that reservation was designed to address. The debate had moved beyond paper leaks. It had returned to the unresolved line between merit and social justice.

Fifteen years ago, filmmaker Prakash Jha placed that very contradiction at the heart of Aarakshan. Today, as India once again argues over reservation, merit and the meaning of equality, the 2011 film feels more like a political document waiting to be read again. As Jha himself said ‘that the caste question itself did not begin to appear in the 1980s, nor did it end there’.

As the Reservation Hatao Andolan gathers momentum across Instagram, X and Reddit, one of the most widely circulated clips we find is not from Parliament, a university campus or a television debate. It comes from a fifteen-year-old film. In the resurfaced scene, Saif Ali Khan's character, Deepak Kumar, rejects the suggestion that reservation is an act of charity for the less hardworking

(You're here to lecture us about hard work? Us? What have we done all our lives except work? If you've forgotten, then read history again……For centuries, you filled your coffers by collecting tribute and dues, and now you dare speak to us about charity? We ploughed your fields. We harvested your crops. We grazed your cattle. We carried the palanquins of your wives and daughters. We cremated your dead. We stitched your shoes, drove your bullocks, rowed your boats. We cleaned the filthy drains of your homes... We even carried your human excreta on our heads)

he declares—a monologue that has unexpectedly found a second life as India once again argues over merit, caste and access to education.

Yet before India rediscovered Aarakshan, it had first attempted to stop it.

Released in August 2011 against the backdrop of renewed debates on caste-based reservation, Prakash Jha's political drama triggered a storm well before audiences entered cinema halls. Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Andhra Pradesh suspended its screening, citing fears of public disorder, while political organisations and caste groups staged protests over its portrayal of reservation. The National Commission for Scheduled Castes objected to portions of the film, arguing that certain dialogues could be interpreted as derogatory towards Dalits. Even the casting of Saif Ali Khan—a member of the Pataudi royal family—as Deepak Kumar, a Dalit lecturer, drew criticism, turning questions of cinematic representation into political vocabulary.

Jha consistently rejected the suggestion that the film sought to campaign for either. What disturbed him, he argued, was that many of its fiercest critics had condemned the film without watching it. Reservation, he repeatedly maintained, had become ‘India versus India’—a debate so deeply polarised that even the attempt to portray its complexities was viewed as taking sides. His intention, he said, was not to deliver a verdict but to hold a mirror to an education system where caste, merit, privilege and commercialisation collide.

That is perhaps why Aarakshan feels strikingly contemporary today. It has returned because the questions it asked—whether merit can ever be separated from social inequality, who gets to define fairness, and whether education can truly level an unequal society—have once again moved from the cinema screen to the centre of the national conversation.

For all the controversy surrounding Aarakshan, Prakash Jha's film was never fundamentally interested in deciding whether reservation was right or wrong. Its deeper concern lay elsewhere. It questioned whether merit—perhaps the most frequently invoked word in India's education debate—could ever be separated from the unequal society that produces it.

Inside the fictional STM College, the conflict unfolds through admissions, faculty appointments and the growing commercialisation of education. Yet beneath these institutional disputes lies a more enduring constitutional question: can two students, shaped by vastly different histories of privilege and exclusion, be judged as though they began the race from the same starting line?

It is here that the film quietly shifts from political drama to constitutional argument. The Indian Constitution did not envision reservation as an act of charity or concession. Through provisions such as Articles 15(4) and 16(4), affirmative action was conceived as a mechanism of substantive equality—recognising that formal equality alone cannot dismantle centuries of caste-based exclusion. Reservation, in that imagination, was never designed to replace merit. It was intended to make access to merit possible.

That constitutional imagination finds its sharpest articulation through Deepak Kumar, whose rebuttal to the popular assumptions surrounding caste exposes the historical inversion at the heart of the debate.

(This is not a dialogue, this is society itself.

​'Intelligence and performance are not dependent on one's background. Given the opportunity, someone like us went on to write the Constitution of this nation)

Rather than presenting reservation as a demand for privilege, the film reframes it as a response to generations of labour, exclusion and social humiliation that remain invisible within popular conversations on merit.

Fifteen years after Aarakshan was released, the constitutional dilemma it dramatised remains unresolved. A Parliamentary Standing Committee has pointed to the continued underrepresentation of students from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes in several private higher educational institutions, underscoring that access to higher education continues to mirror India's entrenched social inequalities rather than transcend them. The distance between constitutional promise and institutional reality remains significant. The idea of 'two Indias' declared by Dr.Prabhakar (played by Amitabh Bachchan) re -establishes itself.

Perhaps that is why it continues to resonate beyond its own time. The film refuses to reduce reservation to a contest of numbers or quotas. Instead, it interrogates the assumption—that merit exists in isolation, untouched by caste, class, language, schooling or inherited privilege. Before asking who deserves a seat, Aarakshan asks a more difficult question: who gets the opportunity to become meritorious in the first place?

That question has returned to the centre of India's education debate. And it is the idea of merit—not reservation alone—that now demands closer scrutiny.

The argument was never about reservation. It was always about merit.

The film refuses to treat merit as a neutral measure of intelligence.

That argument has resurfaced with renewed urgency. The Reservation Hatao Andolan frames its campaign around the principles of ‘Equality. Merit. Equal Opportunity’, arguing that admissions and public employment should move away from caste-based quotas. Its supporters see reservation as an obstacle to fairness. Its critics respond that such a definition of merit begins at the finish line rather than the starting point, measuring examination scores while overlooking the social conditions that produce them.

It is precisely this contradiction that it anticipated. Deepak Kumar's defence of reservation is not merely a defence of policy; it is a rejection of the assumption that hard work has ever been distributed equally across caste. His monologue, recalling generations condemned to carry society's physical labour while being denied its educational institutions, dismantles the comforting fiction that merit grows in isolation from history. The film's most enduring argument, therefore, is not that reservation creates equality, but that inequality begins long before merit is ever measured.

Sociologists have long challenged the popular imagination of merit as an individual achievement detached from social conditions. Drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu's work, recent scholarship on Indian education argues that schools frequently reproduce existing hierarchies instead of dismantling them. Language, coaching, inherited educational capital and family networks quietly become forms of advantage that masquerade as individual talent. Merit, in that sense, is often recognised only after privilege has already done much of its work.

The illusion is not new. Writing during the 2006 debate on OBC reservations, Kancha Ilaiah argued that India's dominant understanding of merit had become inseparable from unequal access to English-medium education, expensive coaching and inherited social capital rather than creative ability or social contribution. Reservation, he contended, was conceived as a democratic instrument to widen access to knowledge and produce intellectual leadership from historically excluded communities—not as an act of benevolence but as a means of deepening democracy.

That is why this film continues to unsettle contemporary India. It asks viewers to interrogate not only who receives reservation, but who has always enjoyed invisible reservations of birth, language, schooling and inherited opportunity. In doing so, the film transforms the debate from one about quotas into one about the social production of merit itself.

The films changed. The question did not.

If Aarakshan asked whether equality could ever be measured without confronting caste, the films that followed suggest that Indian cinema has never really stopped asking the same question. Vaathi(2023) shifted the conversation towards the commercialisation of education, exposing how access to learning is increasingly determined by class and caste. Bheed (2023), set against the migrant crisis of 2020 revealed how caste and social hierarchies continue to surface even in moments and places that appear universally shared. ‘Humko bhi hero banna hai sir, Kab tak unki gaadi saaf karenge aur joote utheeyenge’

(I want to be a hero too, sir. How long am I supposed to clean their cars and pick up their shoes?)

by the character of a police officer itself narrated the story.

That is why Aarakshan has returned to public conversation in the wake of the Reservation Hatao debate. Not because a fifteen-year-old film suddenly became relevant again, but because India rediscovered a constitutional argument it never truly settled. What we shall rather settle with is that we actually have 'two Indias' existing together, as the film argues and Vir Dass echoes later.

Every generation inherits this debate through a different crisis—reservation, paper leaks, privatised education or student protests. Yet the question remains remarkably unchanged: Can a society built upon unequal histories ever measure opportunity through a single idea of merit?

The films changed. The question did not. And until that question finds an answer, Aarakshan will remain less a film about 2011 than a mirror held up to the India of today.