Reservation hatao andolan: The word 'caste' outside the application forms.

Instagram to Jantar Mantar

For a campaign that had built much of its following online, 21st August was the day the Reservation Hatao Andolan moved from the phone screen to Jantar Mantar. More than 300 people gathered at the Delhi protest site under the campaign's banner, responding to a call circulated through an Instagram page that has around 5.6 million followers. Protesters had travelled from states including Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and Rajasthan.

Their demand was framed less as a single call to end all state support and more as a challenge to the basis on which that support is distributed. At the protest, participants argued that economic disadvantage should carry greater weight than caste in determining access to scholarships, fee assistance, coaching and other government benefits. They sought a review of the reservation system, a creamy-layer provision, quota within quota, a white paper assessing the system over the past eight decades and stronger benefits for Economically Weaker Sections. Minimum marks for admission to higher educational institutions and changes relating to UGC policies and the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act also figured among the demands reported from the protest.

The mobilisation, however, soon became as much about the protest site as the policy being protested. Delhi Police had permitted a gathering of up to 500 people at Ramlila Maidan until 4 pm, but protesters assembled at Jantar Mantar instead. Police maintained that no permission had been granted for a demonstration there. As the crowd remained at the site, security personnel were deployed and more than 50 protesters were detained, according to subsequent reports.

The movement's public identity however remains largely digital. Its Instagram presence has become its most visible organising platform, while its own website now hosts policy material and research arguing for a shift from inherited categories towards what it describes as need-based assessment. That makes the protest more than a familiar argument over quotas: it is also an attempt to recast how disadvantage itself should be identified.

But the argument over who should receive an opportunity begins much earlier than the reservation system. In India, access to learning and education was historically shaped by social hierarchy, long before modern affirmative-action policies came in. To understand the demand for changing reservation today, it is therefore necessary to first look at how access to education—and, with it, opportunity—has been distributed across caste and social groups.

Unequal access

The reservation debate is a debate about access: who gets an opportunity, and on what basis. But equal access to education in India was never a level field to begin with.

The traditional Indian education system was far more varied than the familiar image of a gurukul open to every learner. Elite institutions often catered to particular religious, scholarly or administrative groups. An 8th-century school, for instance, had 95 seats divided among three Vedic lineages, while Lucknow’s Farangi Mahal, one of the prominent Indo-Persian madrasas, had 700 seats. At Nalanda, admission itself involved an oral examination in Buddhist and Vedic texts. The access to which was reserved.

Yet the history was not uniformly exclusionary. Colonial-era surveys recorded substantial networks of indigenous schools outside elite institutions. In Bengal, William Adam found 1,255 of 1,463 Hindu teachers to be non-Brahmin. By 1882, nearly 70,000 of the 85,000 government primary schools surveyed had originally been indigenous schools. At the same time, access to particular forms of learning remained sharply unequal: a 19th-century Malabar survey recorded 471 Brahmin boys and just three Brahmin girls in Veda and theology classes.

The expansion of education since Independence changed that landscape dramatically. But wider enrolment did not automatically erase differences in the conditions under which students study. Caste, class, language, location, private tuition and access to educational resources continue to shape educational experience and opportunity.

That distinction is important for the reservation debate. The question is not only who can enter an institution today, but what circumstances shape the journey before they arrive at the gates.

The expansion of education has therefore not meant an equal educational experience. Inequality now often begins with the school a child can access and continues through the resources available to them: private tuition, English-medium instruction, digital devices, learning material and the quality of teachers can vary sharply with family income and location. The divide is also social. Caste and class can shape who is encouraged to participate, whose language and cultural background are treated as the norm, and how students from marginalised communities experience the classroom. The result is a system in which two children may formally have the same right to education but arrive at an examination with very different academic resources and social realities.

They can also affect how students are treated — through stereotyping, social exclusion and the devaluation of a student's caste, language or background.

It is in these everyday encounters, the contemporary question of caste in education begins to take a more tangible form.

The reservation debate puts caste on an application form — a category to be filled in, a quota to be calculate. Outside that form, however, caste can enter decisions that have little to do with government recruitment or college admissions.

Marriage is one of them. In Kelambakkam, Tamil Nadu, 23-year-old Praveen Kumar, a Dalit man, was attacked with machetes on August 16 and died four days later in a Chennai hospital. Police arrested four people and were looking for another accused. Praveen had been in a relationship with Ashwathi, whose father and other relatives were among those accused. But the case does not fit neatly into a simple inter-caste narrative: both Praveen and Ashwathi's family were from the Adi Dravidar community, according to people cited, while activists pointed to class, gender and family control alongside caste.

In Kalyan, Maharashtra, 25-year-old Gayatri was allegedly killed by her father after marrying a man from another caste; in Greater Noida, 23-year-old Neha Rathor was allegedly strangled the day after marrying a Jat man, with police arresting her father and brother. Both cases were investigated as suspected honour killings linked to opposition to the women's relationships.

The legal position is clearer than the social one. The Supreme Court has held that consenting adults have the right to choose their partners and has directed states to prevent interference by khap or community bodies. Yet inter-caste marriages are still estimated to account for only about 5–6% of marriage in India.

Caste does not stop at marriage. At Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University in Kerala, Dalit PhD scholar Anagha Shashi has alleged that after joining the university in March 2024, she was denied research opportunities, had her doctoral committee delayed and was assigned cleaning and clerical work instead. She says she was made to clean laboratories and classrooms, denied a chair in the PhD students' cabin and told that she had received a research fellowship because she belonged to the Scheduled Caste. The university has disputed the allegations; its Syndicate has sought a judicial inquiry.

The same question appears at work. On August 19, Udaipur-based independent journalist Lakhan Salvi, 42, alleged that he was abused with caste slurs and assaulted while reporting at the Gogunda SDM office. An FIR was registered under provisions of the BNS and the SC/ST Act. The accused, Gopal Lodha, has denied caste abuse and alleged that Salvi initiated the altercation; a second FIR was filed against Salvi.

Even access to water can become a marker of caste. Reports have documented children being assaulted or humiliated for drinking from water vessels or sources considered off-limits to them; research cited by Dialogue Earth has also linked caste and the physical geography of settlements to unequal exposure to water insecurity.

And the incidents do not end with isolated cases. A Centre for Justice and Peace compilation documented 40 reported attacks on Dalits and Adivasis across India between April 1 and June 17, 2025, including 19 in Uttar Pradesh and four in Rajasthan. Another CJP compilation recorded 113 caste atrocities across the country in the first six months of 2025. These are documented cases compiled by the organisation, not a substitute for official crime statistics.

The point is not that every inequality has a single caste explanation. It is that caste, till date, continue to shape relationships, institutions, work, resources and exposure to violence even where no reservation form exists. That is the social landscape against which the demand to remove caste from the allocation of opportunity is now being made.

The boundaries of caste, meanwhile, do not always disappear even inside institutions that claim to organise society around something else. An account of Dalit life within Kerala’s communist movement, for instance, describes how political inclusion did not necessarily translate into equal cultural or organisational space. And beyond caste altogether, India's marginalised communities can face another set of exclusions shaped by land, livelihood and mobility: the Van Gujjars documented by live through a seasonal migration between forests and plains, with their pastoral livelihood tied to access to land and forests. These distinctions matter when the reservation debate is reduced to a question of who deserves a quota. The harder question is what kind of disadvantages the state is actually trying to correct — and whether a single measure of disadvantage can capture all of them.

That is where the argument over reservation needs to be examined against the evidence: who benefits and who remains excluded?

At Jantar Mantar, the argument was framed in familiar terms: reservation, protesters said, should not determine opportunity by caste; economic disadvantage and merit should matter more. The demand included a review of the reservation framework, a creamy-layer provision and greater weight for economic criteria.

On paper, India's system already contains an economic route. The present central framework provides 15% reservation for Scheduled Castes, 7.5% for Scheduled Tribes, 27% for OBCs and 10% for Economically Weaker Sections. But the distinction is that EWS was introduced as an additional category, while SC, ST and OBC reservations address forms of social and educational backwardness and inadequate representation.

Recent data makes that distinction harder to dismiss as merely historical. Telangana's 2024 Socio-Economic, Educational, Employment, Political and Caste survey, covering 3.55 crore people across 242 castes, found SCs and STs to be three times as backward as the general category and BCs 2.7 times as backward. More than 45% of SCs were daily-wage workers, compared with 10.9% among Other Castes; only 9.6% of SC children attended private schools, against 30% among Other Castes.

Reservation has nevertheless altered representation. A 2026 UNU-MERIT analysis notes that SC/ST representation in government employment rose from 12.2% in 1990 to 21.9% in 2019, while SC and ST students together accounted for 21.6% of higher-education enrolment in 2022. Yet SC workers remain heavily concentrated in low-status employment: 63% were wage labourers in the cited 2011–12 NSSO data, with 32% in casual labour.

And the need for a protective framework is not simply historical. NCRB data show 48,669 cases registered under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act in 2024, while pending trials reached 2,87,694. The Centre's own task force has now recommended increasing the relief and rehabilitation amounts for victims—currently ₹85,000 to ₹8.25 lakh, unchanged since 2016—and introducing counselling and dedicated relief and rehabilitation mechanisms.

The numbers do not settle the reservation debate. They do, however, complicate one of its central premises: that caste can simply be replaced by income as a measure of disadvantage.

And that brings the protest back into focus. If reservation is to be reviewed, the question is not merely whether the system should change, but what evidence should determine what replaces it.

The paradox within the quota

The Reservation Hatao Andolan's strongest argument is not necessarily that disadvantage does not exist, but that the state may be measuring it imperfectly. Its policy material argues that the creamy-layer mechanism does not adequately identify relatively better-off beneficiaries and proposes tighter income verification and a verified need index.

There is a real question here. Reservation has produced measurable representation: SC employees accounted for 14.2% of Group A and 16.2% of Group B Central government posts in 2024, while ST representation stood at 6.54% and 7.63% respectively. OBC representation was 19.14% in Group A against a 27% reservation benchmark. In higher education, SC, ST and OBC students accounted for 15.5%, 6.4% and 39% respectively of enrollment in 2022–23. These figures suggest both substantial inclusion and continuing gaps.

But economic mobility does not necessarily close the caste question. A Dalit journalist, Meena Kotwal, alleged that caste discrimination affected her work and contract at BBC Hindi; the BBC denied the allegations. In another case, Dalit graduate Prem Birhade alleged that caste bias at his Pune college cost him a UK employment opportunity; the college denied caste discrimination and said the verification had been sent.

That is the paradox at the heart of the creamy-layer debate: a beneficiary can become economically mobile without necessarily becoming socially insulated from caste.

The question, then, is not simply whether reservation should continue.That is also where the Jantar Mantar argument leaves its most difficult question: if reservation is to be reformed, what should replace caste as the measure of disadvantage—and what evidence will tell us that the replacement is fairer?