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STATEMENT OF CONDEMNATION
We, the students of the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, unequivocally condemn the demonstrations organised at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi on 21–22 August, 2026 under the banner of ‘Reservation Hatao Andolan’ against affirmative action policies guaranteed to members of marginalised caste backgrounds. The demonstration, as well as the actions of the attendees, contained numerous violations of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, and we call for appropriate action against the organisers and the errant participants who made casteist remarks.
The reservation system is an express constitutional mandate. Articles 15(4) and 15(5) permit the State to make special provisions for the advancement of socially and educationally backward classes, and for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, in matters of admission to educational institutions.
Articles 16(4), 16(4A), and 16(4B) extend the same principle to public employment, recognising that formal equality guaranteed under Articles 14 and 16(1) is insufficient where entire communities have been historically excluded from access to education, employment, and dignity. Moreover, the Supreme Court has time and again upheld the constitutional validity of reservation schemes.
However, we are very clear that Constitutional provisions will hardly suffice to explain the relevance of reservations for marginalised groups in the country since these protests, at their core, are anti-constitutional. It is, however, still pertinent to point out that these protests often seek to paint reservation as one of the primary hindrances to the ‘nation's development,’ the logic being that they somehow temper this country’s meritocracy. We do not seek to counter this flawed and casteist understanding of ‘merit’ through this statement. Scholarship on the same is quite accessible, and those who have convinced themselves otherwise are hardly going to change their minds after reading this statement.
Nevertheless, the complete lack of introspection bordering on hypocrisy on the part of groups and individuals who level such allegations against provisions reflect the hegemony of upper caste savarna individuals over almost all political, bureaucratic, academic, economic, and cultural spaces in this country and still having the short-sightedness to pin the blame of all of this on reservations which empirically affect only about five percent of educational and job opportunities in this country. This is the fundamental dishonesty at the heart of the Reservation Hatao Andolan. It treats reservation as though it were an aberration imposed on an otherwise level playing field, rather than a modest and partial correction to a playing field that remains tilted in ways its beneficiaries have simply stopped noticing because the tilt has always worked in their favour.
There is no introspection here, no willingness to ask why sectors with zero reservation, chiefly the private sector, continue to reproduce the same caste concentrations at the top that reservation was designed to address in the public sphere. The silence on this point is not an oversight. It is the entire strategy. Hence, we do not condone demands for dismantling reservations that refuse to reckon with the caste inequalities that necessitated such measures in the first place.
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