The tragic suicide of 22-year-old Dalit student Sahil Wakode at IIT Bombay last month ignited intense debate and widespread protests across the campus. The subsequent booking of faculty member Suryanarayana Doolla under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act for alleged caste abuse and abetment to suicide turned a localised tragedy into a national debate. Almost immediately, this real-world tragedy triggered a fierce ideological battleground on the internet’s most visited encyclopedia.
The Wikipedia page for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) saw a sudden and frantic surge in editorial activity. An entirely new section called ‘Caste discrimination in IITs’ was added to the Wiki page, with a highly skewed narrative that painted the prestigious institutions as hotbeds of systemic prejudice. Most importantly, almost all of the section was based on published works of just one person with woke ideology.
The exploitation of the IIT Wikipedia page to push a specific socio-political narrative is not a recent development. An analysis of the page’s history reveals a sustained effort over many years to firmly embed a caste angle into the institution’s public profile. The history of caste-related edits on the IIT Wikipedia page reveals two distinct, intense waves of activity long before the recent edits and controversies this year.
These earlier edit wars establish a pattern of ideological tug-of-war, alternating between framing caste as a matter of admission policy and asserting it as systemic discrimination.
The earliest significant activity focused heavily on the mechanics and politics of caste-based reservation policies. This phase began in March 2006 when editor Ambuj.Saxena created a “Reservation in IITs” section in the page. Over the next few months, the section grew as editors debated the framing of quotas, with users like Magicalsaumy and Iitmsriram clarifying terminology around Backward Classes and the Mandal Commission. By April, specific reservation percentages were detailed by user Taxman, and the section was subsequently anchored with activist literature, including a PUCL report titled “Dalits at the IITs” and 1989–1992 data from Viney Kirpal and Meenakshi Gupta’s Equality Through Reservations.
The text quickly became a battleground over the concept of merit, as editors introduced commentary on the UPA’s quota proposals, BJP’s opposition, and claims by user Akshaysrinivasan that reservations worsened the brain drain. By mid-2006, language was added stating that India practises “reverse discrimination,” while attempts by user Vmaroju to insert pro-reservation narratives alleging a “Brahminical dictatorship” were removed as unsourced point-of-view edits. After years of updates regarding the 27% OBC reservation mandate and periodic factual updates and page-blanking vandalism, the entire section was abruptly deleted in May 2013 by user Suresh 5 under the misleading edit summary “Admission”, and it was not restored.
After a decade of relative quiet on the topic, a second wave of edits began in 2022, shifting the focus entirely from admissions policy to outright accusations of institutional persecution and student suicides. In September 2023, an anonymous editor introduced a passage declaring that the failure to stop caste- based and religion-based discrimination had “become a plague for Dalits, tribals and minorities”. This narrative was supported by a stack of news features and opinion pieces from Outlook, The Hindu, Newslaundry, The Wire, ThePrint, and even a reader-submitted blog from The Times of India.
When various editors attempted to remove the passage or soften the language to remove direct links to student suicides, established editors like Materialscientist and GraziePrego swiftly reverted their changes, labelling them as vandalism or unexplained removals.
In early 2024, editor Spt24 attempted a major rewrite to introduce a more balanced perspective, retitling the section to “Reservation Policy and Accusations of Discrimination” and noting that many discrimination accusations are dismissed as politically motivated, citing Rajiv Malhotra’s book Snakes in the Ganga. However, this sparked a fierce edit war. Editors like GraziePrego and newly created accounts such as Originalversionunchanged repeatedly reverted Spt24’s contributions to reinstate the aggressive “plague” terminology and the reader blog citation. Despite Spt24’s later attempts to soften the text to state simply that IITs “have faced allegations,” the narrative was further escalated in August 2025.
Editor Beemer98455 inserted definitive claims into the Criticism section that caste discrimination and bullying of reserved-quota students are “widespread across IITs” and directly lead to suicides and dropouts, backing the sweeping statement with a book excerpt, an RTI report on dropout data, and an opinion piece.
The most aggressive and consequential ideological push on the IIT Wikipedia page materialised in the last few weeks, with the creation of a separate “Caste discrimination in IITs” section. The groundwork for this disruption was laid earlier in the year when, on April 24, 2026, a temporary account abruptly gutted nearly half of the entire article, including existing caste-related passages and their references, without leaving any edit summary. Though user Onorem restored the page an hour later, this chaotic incident set the stage for a much more calculated intervention following the September 18 suicide of IIT Bombay student Sahil Wakode. Notably, a large number of recent edits to the page were done by anonymous users, people who edit Wikipedia articles without logging in to the website.
On September 28, 2026, just days after the tragic event at IIT Bombay, a new temporary account launched a highly coordinated editorial offensive. This anonymous editor introduced a sweeping, standalone section titled “Caste discrimination in IITs,” dedicated entirely to framing the IITs as engines of caste oppression. The text relied almost exclusively on the claims of Professor Ajantha Subramanian, initially inserting a JSTOR link to her 2015 journal article, Making Merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Social Life of Caste. The narrative drawn from Subramanian’s work argued that the “general category” in IIT admissions had merely become a proxy for “upper-caste merit,” functionally erasing systemic privileges while stigmatising reserved category students. Within minutes, the same temporary account seamlessly deleted an older “Discrimination” passage, claiming it was “added already,” and immediately padded the new section with a subsection detailing the 2021 resignation of IIT Madras assistant professor Vipin Puthiyedathveetil over alleged caste discrimination.
The section was rapidly expanded by other editors who stacked the text with overwhelmingly left-leaning media sources and unverified opinion pieces. Ultimately, the section was mainly based on Subramanian’s journal article and a book excerpt from ThePrint, accompanied by news features and reports from Outlook, The Hindu, Newslaundry, The Wire, Onmanorama, and even a reader-submitted blog from The Times of India, which does not qualify as journalistic reporting.
The narrative was further weaponised on October 4, when editor Beemer98455 inserted a paragraph explicitly detailing the Sahil Wakode case, with the allegation that Professor Doolla had used caste slurs against the student who subsequently died by suicide. This was a blatant violation of Wikipedia policies, as this allegation has not been proved and the matter is still under active police investigation. But the editor added this unverified claim as encyclopaedic fact under the “Curriculum” section. Later that day, editor Fleedre stepped in to clean up the citations, formalising the JSTOR link for Subramanian’s paper and properly formatting the Wakode references using an article from Frontline.
This sudden, highly skewed structural overhaul triggered fierce resistance and a rapid-fire edit war. On October 6, a temporary account slashed a large portion of the newly created section, labelling the sweeping claims as “Misinformation”. Barely a minute later, editor Sakura emad rolled back the deletion, calling the removal a massive gutting of “well-sourced material”. As the conflict escalated, editor Linkin Prankster intervened to move the entire contested block from the top level into the “Criticism” section. The following day, on October 7, another temporary account attempted to delete the entire section outright, stating in the edit summary that they had “Removed propaganda”. Linkin Prankster immediately undid this blanking, condemning it as disruptive behaviour and restoring the full text.
Despite fiercely defending the section’s existence on the page, Linkin Prankster was forced to acknowledge its fundamental flaws behind the scenes. Opening a new thread on the article’s talk page titled “Caste discrimination in IITs,” the Wikipedia editor admitted that they had moved the section to Criticism precisely because its foundational arguments leaned almost entirely on Ajantha Subramanian’s Making Merit, arguing that such a single-source perspective necessitated a major rewrite for neutrality. A note was also added to the top of the section, saying “This section relies on a single source”, and asking others to improve the section by adding citations to reliable sources.
This ongoing tug-of-war highlights how temporary accounts and ideological editors weaponise singular academic theories to dominate the narrative of India’s premier institutions on a global platform.
The complete section, as it appeared on 7 October 2026, has been reproduced below:
Caste discrimination in IITs
This section relies on a single source. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: “Indian Institutes of Technology” – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR(October 2026) (Learn how and when to remove this message)IITs practice affirmative action as part of India’s constitutional framework for addressing historical social and educational disadvantage, with reservation policies applying to Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST), Other Backward Classes (OBC), and, under subsequent policy developments, other categories such as Economically Weaker Section (EWS) and Persons with Disabilities (PwD). However, the history of the IITs shows that the relationship between caste, reservation and the idea of academic “merit” has been contested since the institutions were established. Ajantha Subramanian, in her study Making Merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Social Life of Caste, argues that the IITs were originally granted a distinctive institutional status partly through their exemption from reservation policies, with admission presented as being based on merit and the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) becoming the principal symbol of that meritocratic ideal. Reservation for SCs and STs was extended to the IITs in 1973, when 22.5% of seats were reserved for these groups, followed by the introduction of 27% reservation for OBCs in 2006.
Subramanian notes that the expansion of reservation altered the social meaning of the “general category”, which had previously been treated as an apparently universal and caste-neutral category associated with merit, but increasingly became understood in relation to an upper-caste identity. She argues that the apparent neutrality of the general category can obscure the historical accumulation of social, cultural and educational advantages available to sections of the upper castes. According to her analysis, many IIT students came from upper-caste professional families, including families of bureaucrats, teachers and academics, where educational capital had been accumulated across generations. This capital could take the form of familiarity with prestigious educational institutions, English-language competence, access to professional networks, urban social environments, and forms of cultural knowledge that were not necessarily visible in the examination score itself but could nevertheless contribute to the ability to prepare for and succeed in the highly competitive JEE.
Subramanian therefore questions the assumption that the IITian can be understood simply as an individually gifted and socially disembedded student whose success is entirely detached from caste and family background. Instead, she describes the process through which inherited “caste capital” and social and cultural capital can be converted into what is subsequently recognized as modern educational and professional merit.
The paper also examines how the language of merit could itself contribute to the continued invisibility of upper-caste privilege: because the general category was presented as “merit-based”, the students within it could be treated as individuals who had succeeded solely through their own ability, while students entering through reserved categories were more readily identified through their caste status. Subramanian argues that this distinction encouraged the perception of the general category as casteless and the reserved category as caste-marked, even though both groups were participating in an educational system shaped by historically unequal access to schooling, resources and social capital.
Her detailed case study of IIT Madras further illustrates how caste and educational background could intersect. She describes the historical overrepresentation of Tamil Brahmins in modern professions and notes that, in Tamil Nadu, Central Board schools and JEE preparation were particularly associated with sections of the professional middle class. Her interviews suggested that these educational institutions could function as important feeder environments for IIT admission, with Central Board students and JEE coaching providing forms of preparation that were treated as evidence of intellectual aptitude or “natural” suitability for the IIT system. She also records instances in which students admitted through the general category at IIT Madras were implicitly assumed to be Brahmin, illustrating how the supposedly caste-neutral category could itself become associated with upper-caste identity. In one account, a Backward Caste student from the general category was assumed by his Brahmin roommate to be Brahmin, demonstrating what Subramanian describes as a form of caste misrecognition in which entry into the IIT could itself carry an assumption of upper-caste status. At the same time, the paper describes the experience of students from reserved communities after admission and argues that formal access to the IITs did not necessarily eliminate caste distinctions within campus life.
Subramanian reports that SC and ST students who entered the IITs from the early 1980s onward often experienced difficulties integrating into campus communities. In interviews with former students and others familiar with the IITs, SC/ST students were described as a visibly distinct group and their academic performance, clothing and command of English were sometimes interpreted through assumptions about caste and intellectual ability. The paper gives the example of identical academic outcomes being interpreted differently depending on caste category: poor grades among general-category students could be attributed to leisure or other circumstances, whereas similar grades among SC/ST students were sometimes interpreted as evidence of intellectual inadequacy. Subramanian further states that students who entered through the SC/ST quota experienced routine slights and indignities and describes their alienation within institutional settings, linking these experiences to reported cases of suicides and attempted suicides involving SC/ST students at IIT campuses, while drawing on earlier studies and contemporary journalistic accounts for this part of the discussion.
The author does not present these observations as evidence that every IIT student or every campus is uniformly discriminatory, but rather uses them to demonstrate how caste could continue to structure social interactions and perceptions even inside an institution that formally defined itself through merit and academic excellence. The introduction of OBC reservation in 2006 generated another major controversy. Subramanian describes strong protests by students and faculty against the extension of 27% OBC reservation to central educational institutions, with opponents characterizing the policy as a threat to “meritocracy” and associating reservation with “vote-bank politics”. The paper argues that these debates were significant because they increasingly transformed merit from a supposedly universal criterion into a category explicitly associated with upper-caste status. Following the OBC expansion, the reserved category came to constitute almost half of the student population in the author’s account, and the general category was correspondingly redefined in social terms as an upper-caste collective rather than simply a neutral category of students admitted without reservation. Subramanian also discusses the views of IIT Madras director P. V. Indiresan, who opposed aspects of reservation and contrasted the “socially-deprived” with the “talented”. She interprets this distinction as significant because those receiving the benefits of the general category were described through the language of talent and merit, rather than as socially advantaged groups. More broadly, her argument is that caste at the IITs should not be understood solely as overt exclusion or as formal discrimination in admissions. It can also operate through the social production of merit itself: through unequal access to educational resources, inherited cultural capital, professional networks, assumptions about intellectual ability, the social interpretation of reservation, and the tendency to regard upper-caste achievement as individual merit while treating historically disadvantaged students primarily through their caste category. In her conclusion, Subramanian argues that the apparent opposition between merit and reservation reflects two competing understandings of equality: one based on formal equal treatment and individual achievement, and another that takes account of historically accumulated advantages and disadvantages and therefore views compensatory measures as necessary to equalize opportunity. She concludes that the IIT experience demonstrates the difficulty of treating merit as completely separate from social history, because standardized measures of achievement can themselves operate within a society marked by unequal distributions of cultural and social capital.[146][147] [148][149][150][151][138]
As mentioned above, the majority of the content added in the Caste discrimination in IITs section is based on published works of Ajantha Subramanian, a Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She earlier worked as Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies and Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. Her primary academic focus centres on the political economy of caste, and she is best known for her 2019 book The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India, published by Harvard University Press.
It is notable that Subramanian’s ideological foundation is deeply rooted in Critical Social Justice, Marxist Critical Theory, and post-colonial Subalternism, and she does not believe in the concept of merit. Her central thesis asserts that the concept of “meritocracy” in institutions like the IITs is essentially a myth manufactured to mask upper-caste hegemony. She contends that while lower castes openly invoke their affiliations to claim state resources, upper castes weaponise the language of “merit” to discard caste identity and secure their own socioeconomic dominance.
Drawing explicit parallels to American racial politics, Subramanian aligns the Indian upper-caste claim to merit with white Americans endorsing colour-blindness or a “post-racial” society to obscure systemic racism. Her worldview fundamentally rejects objective entrance examinations as neutral arbiters of talent, and frames these tests as mechanisms that merely conceal entrenched caste privileges and cultural capital. Furthermore, she characterises the United States as a “settler colonial country” and links American Critical Race Theory (CRT) with Indian social structures, interpreting the global success of IIT alumni as a form of casteist kinship and “male-dominated capitalism”.
Subramanian’s anti-merit framework is a textbook manifestation of the “Abolition of Neutrality” feature of the Woke 2.0 movement. This ideology deliberately dismantles objective academic standards to reframe institutional excellence as systemic oppression, effectively replacing meritocracy with enforced equity.
Subramanian claims that Brahmins are the cultural capitalists and IITs are their mechanism for the production of more upper-caste engineers. She debunks meritocracy as a veneer behind which Brahmin privilege perpetuates its supremacy. It is interesting that she specifically targets IITs and their alumni, accusing the premier engineering institutions of conspiracy against lower castes in Silicon Valley. Even in cases where there is no evidence of any bias, she claims that by their very nature, IITs enshrine caste privileges even in situations where a Brahmin student is from an economically poor background, or where a low-caste student belongs to a financially rich and well-educated family.
Citing French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argued that prestigious examinations and elite higher education guarantee the reproduction of old social hierarchies, she claims that the IIT exam and curriculum are reproducing caste hierarchies in India. However, her work offers no concrete proof of casteism in the exam or curriculum in IITs. Subramanian advocates dismantling the IIT institutional structure and thereby liberating the underclasses that are exploited by this oppression.
Right-wing intellectuals and authors, notably Rajiv Malhotra in his book Snakes in the Ganga, have heavily criticised Subramanian’s work as a textbook example of ideological subversion. Malhotra identifies Subramanian as a key intellectual node in a sprawling Harvard-led network that actively exports American “Wokeism” and Critical Race Theory to Indian contexts. According to this critique, Subramanian’s thesis is not a genuine sociological inquiry, but rather a targeted activist attack designed to dismantle the reputation of India’s premier meritocratic institutions, such as the IITs, and undermine the achievements of the Indian diaspora in Silicon Valley. Her work is frequently weaponised by left-wing editors on propaganda platforms like Wikipedia as “objective” academic consensus, deliberately ignoring counter-perspectives that expose the flaws in applying rigid Western critical frameworks to ancient Indian societal structures.
The push to vandalise the IIT Wikipedia page around a singular caste narrative exposes the deeply entrenched networks of Wikipedia editors who weaponise the platform against Indian institutions. The groundwork for the current over-reliance on Ajantha Subramanian was actually laid years prior. On June 5, 2022, on the article’s talk page under a thread titled “A post-caste meritocracy,” an editor named TrangaBellam recommended Subramanian’s book for its data on caste at IIT Madras and stated they would add the material.
TrangaBellam is a notorious figure within the Indian Wikipedia landscape, operating as part of a coordinated ideological cabal. As extensively documented in OpIndia articles and the comprehensive Wikipedia Dossier, TrangaBellam has an exhaustive history of vandalising pages related to India and Hindus. The editor’s strategy routinely involves citing heavily biased left-wing academics while suppressing any counter-narratives. Previous OpIndia investigations have exposed TrangaBellam for maliciously vandalising the Wikipedia page of historian Vikram Sampath, systematically removing positive reviews and adding negative critiques to the page for the film The Kashmir Files, and coordinating with other left-wing editors to hijack the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) page to establish a defamatory narrative.
The relentless ideological hijacking of the IIT Wikipedia page eventually met a wall of coordinated resistance. As the edit wars escalated, the “Caste discrimination in IITs” section, built almost entirely on Ajantha Subramanian’s critical theory and activist news portals, was completely removed from the Wiki page. In its place, a temporary account successfully enforced Wikipedia’s core policies on neutrality, replacing the highly charged propaganda with a structurally balanced, encyclopaedic section titled “Admission standards, reservation and the debate over merit”.
The most significant edit in this restructuring was the complete removal of Subramanian’s one-sided narrative, which had weaponised the concept of “merit” to allege upper-caste hegemony. Instead, the new text approaches affirmative action through a factual, multifaceted lens. It objectively contrasts the critics of category-based admissions, who argue that substantially different entrance thresholds bypass competitive selection, with the supporters of reservation, who point out that exam ranks do not account for historical disadvantages and unequal schooling. Furthermore, rather than relying on left-wing opinions, the debate is now grounded in legal precedent, specifically citing the Supreme Court of India’s 2019 B. K. Pavitra v. Union of India ruling regarding substantive equality.
The handling of the September 2026 Sahil Wakode tragedy was also corrected. Previously codified as a definitive caste-based atrocity by editors, the incident has been recontextualised under the “Curriculum and academic issues” subheading. The new edit restores crucial missing context, noting that Professor Suryanarayana Doolla faced outrage for “allegedly” using caste slurs, while also including his defence to the Mumbai Police, that Wakode was caught cheating during an exam, and Doolla was merely attempting to halt academic malpractice.
This restructuring shifted the article’s focus back to empirical data and the administrative mechanics of the IIT system. The new sections detail the JEE Advanced 2026 seat matrix, explicitly outlining the 40.5% OPEN category alongside specific quotas: 27% for OBC-NCL, 15% for SC, 10% for GEN-EWS, and 7.5% for ST candidates. The text explains the “Differences in qualifying thresholds,” noting that the 2025 Common Rank List required a minimum aggregate of 74, compared to 37 for SC and ST categories. It also breaks down the financial realities of affirmative action, explaining the ₹100,000 difference in academic fees at IIT Bombay due to SC, ST, and PwD tuition exemptions.
While the introduction of this balanced structure represents a crucial victory against leftist vandalism, Wikipedia edit wars on Indian institutional pages are rarely permanent. The ideological cartels that aggressively pushed the initial caste narrative frequently retreat during high-visibility skirmishes, only to slowly reintroduce their preferred framing over time. The current overhaul of the IIT page is a testament to the impact of vigilant editors pushing back against institutional defamation, but it also underscores the continuous battle required to keep the left-leaning online encyclopaedia from becoming an activist playground.
The ongoing conflict over the IIT page is a symbol of a much larger, systemic crisis regarding Wikipedia’s neutrality. The OpIndia Wikipedia Dossier highlights how the platform is aggressively curated by a small, ideologically aligned group of administrators and editors who act as gatekeepers.
This leftist cartel systematically targets, bans, or overrides Right-Wing (RW) editors who attempt to introduce balance or objective facts, framing any dissent as “vandalism.” By relying on heavily compromised sources, like activist portals and reader blogs, while simultaneously rejecting established Indian perspectives and non-left media, this network effectively turns global encyclopaedic entries into sophisticated propaganda tools. The tug-of-war over the IIT page stands as a definitive case study in how institutional reputation is manipulated to serve a singular ideological agenda, undermining the core tenets of an open encyclopaedia.
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