Eastern Scientist | www.easternscientist.in
Print ISSN: 2581-7884 | Volume I | Issue 34 | January-March 2026 |
Editorial
Date : 27 January 2026
Editor-in-Chief : Dr. R. Achal Pulastey
Indian university campuses are routinely presented as neutral spaces governed by reason, merit, and scientific temper. This representation is not merely inaccurate; it is ideological. Higher education in India has never existed outside structures of hierarchy. Rather, the university has functioned as a modern institutional space where caste, race, region, and minority identities are reorganised into apparently civil, procedural, and academically legitimate forms. What is described as institutional culture or academic discipline often carries the historical weight of exclusion refined into bureaucratic normalcy.
For centuries, access to formal knowledge in the subcontinent was regulated through caste codes that restricted learning to a narrow social elite. Education was not only denied to Shudras and Ati-Shudras; it was actively prohibited and socially punished. Colonial modern education did not dismantle this structure. Instead, it reassembled inherited privilege through new languages, credentials, and administrative hierarchies. Early universities relied heavily on socially dominant intermediaries, ensuring that modern knowledge systems remained exclusive even while claiming universality.
The post-Independence expansion of higher education marked the entry of historically marginalised communities into universities, but this entry was never accompanied by institutional transformation. Reservation policies, though constitutionally mandated, were treated as reluctant concessions rather than as instruments of structural justice. Campuses absorbed marginalised bodies without interrogating their own caste-coded and culture-coded norms of excellence, language, and authority. Inclusion remained numerical; democratisation remained deferred.
Alongside caste, Indian campuses have systematically racialised students from the North-East. Their bodies, accents, food practices, and cultural expressions are routinely marked as unfamiliar within institutions that otherwise claim national inclusiveness. Racial slurs, stereotyping, and everyday social isolation are frequently dismissed as interpersonal insensitivity rather than recognised as institutional failure. Casual yet persistent questioning of belonging functions as a reminder that citizenship within the campus is hierarchically distributed.
This racialisation intersects sharply with caste and minority identities. A Dalit student from the North-East, or a Christian or Muslim student marked by region and appearance, encounters layered forms of exclusion that institutional frameworks are poorly equipped to recognise. Administrative categories separate caste, region, religion, and race, while lived experience combines them. Universities manage discrimination in fragments, even as students endure it cumulatively.
Exclusion within campuses rarely appears as formal denial. It operates through routine institutional practices presented as objective and universal. Viva voce examinations reward cultural confidence mistaken for academic competence. Classroom participation privileges accent, language, and proximity to dominant norms. Informal academic networks remain socially homogeneous. Hostels, peer groups, and faculty mentorship spaces reproduce segregation without written rules. Psychological distress is individualised, while institutional responsibility remains diffuse.
Mechanisms meant to address discrimination mirror this fragmentation. SC/ST Cells, Equal Opportunity Offices, and grievance committees exist largely as compliance structures, constrained by limited authority and inadequate intersectional understanding. Complaints related to racial harassment of North-Eastern students or profiling of religious minorities are often redirected, minimised, or treated as law-and-order concerns rather than as academic responsibility. The burden of proof rests consistently on the complainant, while institutions prioritise reputational stability.
Institutional responses to student deaths, including those of Dalit scholars and students from the North-East, reveal a recurring pattern: denial, depoliticisation, and bureaucratic deflection. Structural questions are displaced by narratives of individual fragility or mental health, leaving institutional culture untouched. When exclusion is named explicitly, the institution responds defensively rather than reflectively.
Neoliberal restructuring has further intensified these exclusions. Privatisation of higher education, rising fees, contractual academic labour, and corporate governance models weaken affirmative frameworks and public accountability. Market-driven definitions of merit reward inherited linguistic fluency, cultural familiarity, and economic security—advantages systematically denied to marginalised castes, regional minorities, and racialised students. Neoliberal policy does not eliminate hierarchy; it renders it administratively invisible.
Contemporary policy initiatives continue this trajectory. While policy documents employ the language of inclusion, they dilute public funding, centralise regulatory authority, and weaken democratic governance within universities. Autonomy is emphasised without social-justice safeguards; flexibility is promoted without protection for vulnerable groups. Institutions with strong traditions of critical inquiry and minority representation increasingly face regulatory and financial pressure.
A defining feature of exclusion in Indian higher education is the absence of reliable public data. Caste-wise and region-wise dropout rates, incidents of racial harassment, mental-health crises, suicides, faculty diversity, and disciplinary actions remain inadequately documented. This absence is not accidental. Data invisibility functions as policy, ensuring that intersecting structures of inequality remain administratively unacknowledged.
The crisis of Indian higher education is often framed in terms of global rankings, innovation, or employability. Such narratives avoid a more fundamental question: who is able to inhabit the university without constant negotiation of dignity and belonging? Campuses that normalise caste hierarchy, racialisation of the North-East, and marginalisation of minorities do not merely fail in their educational mandate; they reproduce unequal citizenship through institutional routine.
To confront caste, race, and minority exclusion within the campus is not to politicise education. Education has always been political, either sustaining hierarchy or enabling justice. Universities that refuse to address these structures do not remain neutral; they become complicit. Silence, in this context, is not neutrality. It is institutional consent.
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