Ambedkar's warning echoes in India's universities

India’s universities expose how liberty has outrun equality and fraternity in democracy

In modern India, few spaces reveal the persistence of caste as starkly as its leading universities and institutions of higher learning. These were expected to spearhead social transformation — spaces where inherited hierarchies would weaken under the force of education, mobility, and democratic citizenship.

Yet reports of caste-based discrimination, exclusion from peer networks, informal segregation in hostels and student groups, and repeated complaints of harassment continue to emerge from campuses across the country. The fact that the University Grants Commission (UGC) has repeatedly issued and revised anti-discrimination regulations is itself an acknowledgment that caste remains deeply embedded even in spaces meant to lead social change. This is not merely an institutional anomaly; it raises a deeper question central to public life, one that acquires particular significance on Ambedkar Jayanti: why does caste persist so stubbornly in modern India?

More than seven decades after the Constitution came into force, the expectation that modernity would erode caste has not materialised. Instead, caste has adapted to the language and institutions of modern life. It no longer always appears through overt exclusion; it often moves through subtler codes of merit, cultural fit, social networks, language, surnames, marriage patterns, housing preferences, and inherited access to institutions. Caste has not disappeared — it has become harder to name.

Part of the problem lies in how modernity itself has been understood. Across societies, modernity carried the promise that older collective hierarchies would weaken as people increasingly related to one another as citizens and individuals rather than as members of inherited communities. In India, this expectation was especially powerful. Education, urban migration, salaried employment, and constitutional democracy were supposed to loosen caste’s grip.

Yet modernity in practice has privileged only one part of the democratic promise: liberty. The values of equality and fraternity, which B R Ambedkar emphasised as foundational, have remained fragile. Liberty has been narrowly interpreted as individual mobility, choice, and advancement. This narrowing cannot be separated from the material foundations of modern life. The fossil-fuel economy, with its unprecedented abundance of concentrated energy, made possible the scale, speed, and mobility that defined modern aspirations. Urban expansion, professional migration, private transport, consumer choice, and the monetisation of time all became materially feasible through this energy order. Fossil modernity did not merely power institutions; it reshaped the imagination of the self. The modern individual came to be seen as mobile, self-making, and detached from collective structures.

This has enabled forms of aspiration and movement that were historically unavailable. As an unintended consequence, it has shifted attention away from the collective structures through which caste continues to reproduce itself.

Caste was never merely an individual experience. It was, and remains, deeply collective in the way it is lived, reproduced, and resisted. Experiences of exclusion, humiliation, and marginalisation are rarely borne in isolation; they are shared across communities, families, and generations. It is this collective memory and solidarity that allows individuals to articulate their experiences and feel empowered to name discrimination. Ambedkar was clear about this. The annihilation of caste could not be achieved just through access to institutions; it required the transformation of social relations within them.

The difficulty today is that modernity encourages individuals to detach from collective identities. Many from historically marginalised castes feel compelled to conceal, mute, or shed their caste identity to be socially legible within dominant institutional cultures. The unspoken pressure to appear ‘neutral’ erodes identity and solidarity.

This dynamic extends well beyond university spaces. In urban India, caste persists through quieter forms of exclusion: residential segregation, professional referrals, legacy educational advantages, linguistic codes, and matrimonial choices. Explicit discrimination has been replaced by silent filtering. Visible hierarchy has become institutional and cultural sorting.

Caste persists both materially and socio-psychologically. Materially, through unequal access to education, employment, housing, and authority. Socio-psychologically, through inherited notions of status, superiority, symbolic distance, and moral legitimacy. Those who experience discrimination are often pushed toward concealment rather than collective articulation, making caste harder to confront precisely because it survives in forms that appear socially neutral.

This is where Ambedkar’s emphasis on fraternity becomes relevant. Equality in law is indispensable, but law alone cannot dismantle structures that shape everyday recognition. Democracy requires more than rights; it requires the capacity to see one another as equals in the fullest moral sense. Fraternity is not sentimental language — it is the social condition that makes dialogue possible and sustains collective resistance. Without fraternity, equality remains formal and liberty risks becoming selectively available.

Caste persists because it erodes the possibility of equal dialogue. Where individuals do not approach one another as moral equals, public life becomes structurally unequal. The problem is not only exclusion from institutions but exclusion from equal standing within them.

This is why the question of caste cannot be reduced to whether India has modernised enough. The more difficult question is whether our version of modernity has allowed liberty to outrun equality and fraternity. Ambedkar’s warning was precisely about this imbalance. Democracy, he argued, is not merely a political arrangement but a mode of associated living.

That warning remains urgent. Caste survives not because modernity failed to arrive, but because it adapted itself to the very forms through which modern life is organised. To confront caste meaningfully, India must return to Ambedkar’s harder task: not merely expanding access, but transforming social relations and rebuilding fraternity as the moral basis of democratic life.

Soumyajit Bhar is senior Assistant Professor, School of Liberal Studies, BML Munjal University.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH