Moving past "personal mental health" narratives, this piece exposes how elite higher education uses the myth of "merit" to surveil, isolate, and systematically break Dalit, Bahujan, and marginalised scholars.
When word came out that Jason Arday died at 41, official statements immediately began framing his passing around individual strain. Headlines zeroed in on personal distress, mental exhaustion, and public pressure.
That framing serves a specific purpose. It places the entire burden of failure on the victim while absolving the university system of any wrongdoing. What unfolded around Jason Arday in the UK belongs to a structural pattern that operates daily across India’s central universities and technical institutes. The mechanism was once termed ‘Institutional Murder’.
Academic spaces wrap themselves in ideas of academic standards and excellence, using those concepts to create bad-faith oversight against scholars from marginalised backgrounds. The environment is engineered to isolate researchers, question their presence, and wear down their endurance until staying becomes unsustainable.
The administrative blueprint shows striking similarities across borders. In the UK, the pressure on Jason Arday — the youngest Black professor named to a chair at Cambridge — grew through organised hostility. Right-wing figures, online commentators, and media outlets targeted his academic journey; they picked apart his published research, examined his administrative records, and questioned his credentials.
Even after official reviews cleared his doctoral work of wrongdoing, public attacks continued. Dozens of published pieces questioned his status. The primary intent was clear: signalling that a Black scholar did not belong in senior academic positions. Concepts like academic rigour were deployed as weapons to construct an environment that forced his resignation shortly before his death.
In India, this atmosphere operates through caste dominance. Where Western universities use terms like ‘diversity hires’ to question someone's capability, Indian institutions use the word ‘reservation’ to dismiss scholar qualifications. Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi scholars entering spaces like the Indian Institutes of Technology, Jawaharlal Nehru University, or the University of Hyderabad enter an environment engineered for suspicion, where their basic right to occupy space is under constant debate.
Following Rohith Vemula’s death in 2016 at the University of Hyderabad — after officials cut off his stipend, removed him from his hostel room, and banned him from public grounds — his final note observed how human worth boils down to simple labels.
Student movements across the country insisted on identifying Rohith’s death as an institutional murder. Naming it this way changes where accountability sits. Treating a scholar's death as a mental health issue allows university administrations to issue sympathy notes, launch campus helplines, and continue normal operations. Identifying institutional murder forces attention onto official choices, targeted harassment, and structural hostility that push researchers toward desperate outcomes.
Even formal legal attempts to legislate against campus discrimination are systematically dismantled. When the mothers of Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi petitioned for binding anti-discrimination mechanisms, it resulted in the UGC Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions Regulations. Yet, following fierce pushback from dominant-category student groups alleging ‘misuse’, the Supreme Court placed the framework in abeyance — leaving campuses governed by toothless guidelines while the government reconsiders basic protections. The message from the administrative state is clear: institutional mechanisms to protect marginalised scholars are treated as suspect before they are even allowed to function.
The deaths of Darshan Solanki at IIT Bombay, Payal Tadvi in Mumbai, Fathima Latheef at IIT Madras, Anil Kumar and Ayush Ashna at IIT Delhi, and Jason Arday in London share a clear connection.
These institutions build living conditions where researchers must justify their presence every single day. Writing papers, presenting work, and submitting forms become continuous tests administered by a hostile majority.
Administrative procedures in higher education function as mechanisms of friction aimed at specific groups. The bureaucracy operates not as neutral management, but as an active gatekeeper.
At premier science and technology institutes, Dalit and Bahujan scholars describe a process of slow exclusion. Doctoral candidates repeatedly encounter stalled guide assignments, blocked lab permissions, held-up fellowships, and delayed dissertation reviews. A supervisor can stall a chapter for half a year by offering vague verbal notes about writing style; a department head can hold back stipend authorisations under the pretext of audit checks. When students organise groups like the Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle to challenge these conditions, campus authorities respond with bans, disciplinary notices, and physical surveillance.
These actions carry minimal official paper trails, creating a state of perpetual limbo. The researcher remains enrolled, yet academic progress stops completely while financial stress mounts.
When scholars seek redress through institutional grievance mechanisms, the process doubles as an added layer of surveillance. Internal committees composed of senior faculty members frequently protect the university's reputation over student safety. Anonymity is discouraged, complaints are dismissed for minor formatting errors, and students who voice concerns find themselves marked as disruptive elements.
The hostility manufactured inside university gates does not exist in a vacuum. It is the refined academic arm of a nationwide structure that operates on streets, in courtrooms, and across residential colonies every day.
Caste in India is an all-encompassing social architecture. This dynamic is playing out across the broader national policy landscape today. As calls for a nationwide Caste Census grow to expose the actual distribution of institutional wealth and position, dominant groups push back by weaponising claims of ‘reverse discrimination’. From legal challenges against campus equity frameworks to executive workarounds like unreserved lateral entry in governance, the objective remains identical: masking historical monopolisation as ‘merit’ while resisting any structural audit of who holds power.
Outside the seminar rooms, this entitlement turns directly into physical and economic violence:
The Weaponisation of Stigma:
Public discourse continually attempts to weaken civil rights legislation like the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act, framing it as a tool for false claims. Meanwhile, ground reality shows Dalit journalists assaulted for reporting on local crime, families targeted for attempting inter-caste marriages, and workers subjected to public violence over basic water rights or wage demands.
Social Segregation and Physical Danger:
From housing discrimination in urban metro centres to physical segregation in rural housing and drinking water access, caste dictates daily boundaries. For Dalit women and young people, navigating these boundaries carries a constant threat of gendered violence and institutional neglect by law enforcement.
The university plainly mirror-images the village square and the corporate boardroom. The methods differ — the village relies on physical coercion, the corporate space relies on exclusionary hiring networks, and the university relies on administrative delays — but the objective remains unchanged: asserting dominance over who gets to occupy space, earn a living, and survive.
At the foundation of this setup lies the claim of total neutrality. Prominent universities present themselves as fair environments where merit alone dictates success. Yet, as recognised in legal jurisprudence like Neil Aurelio Nunes v. Union of India, performance in open competitive examinations cannot be isolated from historical privileges and social capital; true equality must be substantive rather than merely formal.
The entry of marginalised academics challenges the narrative that prestigious positions belong exclusively to dominant groups. University authorities react by claiming that overall standards are declining, framing reservation as a charity measure rather than a constitutional right.
Campus culture turns the policy meant to ensure access into a tool for daily humiliation. In laboratory settings and seminar rooms, caste operates through subtle queries about admission categories, entrance exam ranks, and hometowns, establishing a hierarchy where scholars admitted under reserved seats are presumed unprepared until proven otherwise.
This hostility extends directly into faculty recruitment and structural policy. Across premier technical and research institutes, administrations regularly leave reserved faculty positions vacant, claiming an "NFS" (None Found Suitable) status to justify exclusionary hiring. Concurrently, broader debates over the sub-classification of reserved categories and the exclusion of the ‘creamy layer’ are weaponised by institutional councils to shrink reserved seats from the inside, leaving incoming marginalised students without faculty mentors or structural advocates.
These conditions remain an active reality across campuses today. Task force findings and student surveys show how administrative indifference, language barriers, and biased oral evaluations continue to target scholars who dare to speak up.
Dalit and Bahujan scholars navigate spaces where asking for a new thesis advisor can end an academic path, political organising brings police intervention, and approaching campus support systems leads to reports sent back to the administrators causing the problem.
Recent legal battles over arbitrary student suspensions highlight how institutions use disciplinary measures to silence dissent. Scholars engaging in public discussions about campus equity face accusations of damaging institutional reputation or engaging in anti-national activities. The punishment is rarely just academic; it involves eviction from campus housing, withholding of monthly stipends, and continuous legal battles.
When an institution systematically deprives a scholar of the ability to research, write, and survive, it cannot claim detachment from the final outcome.
The death of Jason Arday and the ongoing losses within Indian academia demonstrate a clear reality. They call for an end to viewing these events as isolated personal tragedies, revealing them instead as the direct result of academic structures designed to preserve existing power at all costs.
When a system is engineered to isolate, basic survival becomes a collective act of refusal. We cannot keep waiting for universities to release polished statements of regret after a scholar is gone, nor rely on internal committees set up by the apparatus causing the harm.
Solidarity demands protecting people while they’re still here, standing alongside student collectives, citing marginalised researchers, and refusing to let administrative language sanitise structural cruelty. The fight for reservations and institutional dignity is a direct defense of human life. Surviving higher education should never be an individual endurance test; we owe each other the promise that no one has to fight alone just to justify their existence.
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