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Sahil Wakode, a student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, was reported dead in his hostel room on 18th September, hours after allegedly being caught using ChatGPT on his phone during an exam. It was less than a few days before the case had progressed beyond a disciplinary issue. His parents had filed a case under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act against a professor, which was then transferred to the Mumbai Crime Branch and the dean of IIT Bombay was suspended till a probe was conducted. That series of events should be not take as a given, but studied in detail. The big question is not if there is any caste discrimination in Indian higher education, there is of course, all over the institutions. The question is more circumscribed: is it caste-based violence to catch a student caught doing something wrong on an exam, and punish him for it? It’s quite a jump and the upshot of it has already been made before the Crime Branch has come to any conclusions. Unauthorized use of a cell phone during an exam is a common occurrence at any academic institute that takes the test of good standing, IIT Bombay being one of them. On the surface, it is a caste-blind mechanism of a single instance of rule-breaking. In order for the claim to be substantiated, there would have to be evidence of more than just the imposition of the penalty; that is, evidence of differential treatment in comparison with other students who were caught in similar situations, of discriminatory acts or remarks by the professor in question, and/or of a documented pattern of discrimination against the student before the incident. That has yet to be made public. The reports in this regard are that the director of IIT Bombay told that the student is performing well academically, his CGPA is more than 7 and the institute has found nothing wrong with his academic performance, which will actually weaken the notion that the student is being targeted for failure. The suspension of the professor at IIT Bombay while the case is being looked into by the institution has been interpreted by many as an admission of guilt by the institution. It need not be. It is a precaution, not a judgment on whether something actually took place, to remove someone from a position of authority during the pendancy of a serious allegation. The merging of the two does a disservice to due process, both in the professor’s favour and the Crime Branch’s.It’s doing a disservice to the due process of both sides to conflate the two: it assumes the professor is guilty before the investigation has been completed, and it precludes the possibility that the investigation could bring him vindication. This is not to say that it is a myth that caste bias exists in Indian campuses. The Supreme Court set up a task force to investigate student suicides at IIT Delhi, the NHRC held a university responsible for the death of a student in KIIT last year, and an RTI query, which queried the universities on the student death rate, revealed that between 2021 and 2025, there were 65 student deaths by suicide across the IITs, a number which any university would not like to have. The death of Wakode is also the third suicide reported at the IIT Bombay in seven months, and 10 or more have been reported across the various IITs this year. That pattern is real and needs to be examined from the pressure of academia, the infrastructure of mental health, and, yes, the dynamic of caste, when it actually exists. Naming an incident as caste violence, however, is a very different, clear statement of fact, rather than an automatic assumption that follows from the fact that caste bias exists elsewhere in the system. If every punitive action against a Dalit/Adivasi student is presumed to be discriminatory in line with the “presumptions of prejudice” against Dalits and Adivasis, unless such prejudice is substantiated, then two things are happening: first, it undermines the credibility of actual substantiated claims of caste discrimination, and second, it makes regular upholding of academic discipline politically impracticable. The only place that’s comfortable right now is the one that’s known as the honest one: No one outside the Crime Branch’s investigation knows what really happened in that examination hall, or why. IIT Bombay has expressed its remorse over the way it communicated the details of the circumstances surrounding Wakode’s death and says there has been a “communication failure” — but it’s not necessarily a case of institutional missteps. The both the family loss and the professor’s innocence are to be treated with seriousness until the facts are known. It is too early for either to have a verdict imposed on them under public pressure.
Sources: ThePrint — IIT student suicide: Parents claim caste discrimination · ThePrint — Sahil Wakode was the 10th IIT student suicide of 2026
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