On 18 September, Sahil Wakode, a second-year BTech student at IIT Bombay, was sent out of a mid-semester examination after the invigilator, Professor Suryanarayana Doolla, allegedly found him with a phone. CCTV footage from the hall, since aired on television, shows a professor approaching him and leading him out. Later that day Wakode was found dead in his hostel room.
The police first recorded the death as accidental. Then Wakode’s father alleged that his son had suffered months of caste-based harassment, and an FIR followed, naming Doolla among others, for abetment of suicide and under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. The director, Shireesh Kedare, has rejected the allegation and says caste details are kept confidential from teaching staff and administrators, and the president of the institute’s Faculty Forum says Wakode never approached its SC/ST cell. The institute has also apologised for statements in its first communication about his death, and its Faculty Forum has publicly backed Doolla, saying he followed prescribed procedure. Doolla, questioned by the police for nearly ten hours, denies the charges. No one has been arrested. The Mumbai Crime Branch is investigating.
Whether caste played any part in what happened to Sahil Wakode is for that investigation to establish, and his parents’ grief is not in question. What is already settled is what has happened to Doolla. On 21 September, after student protests, the director, Shireesh Kedare, removed him as Dean of Administrative Affairs in an official mail. Two days later the Board of Governors sent him on leave pending an inquiry. As of the latest reports, he remains on leave. No court has examined the complaint. Under the law as it stands, none had to.
The law was not always like this. In March 2018, in Dr Subhash Kashinath Mahajan v State of Maharashtra, the Supreme Court heard a Director of Technical Education in Maharashtra who had been booked under the Act after he refused sanction to prosecute two officers a storekeeper had complained against. To prevent the false implication of the innocent, the Court directed a preliminary inquiry by an officer of DSP rank before an FIR, and prior approval before an arrest. The backlash was immediate. Parliament answered within months with Section 18A: no preliminary inquiry, no prior approval, and a renewed bar on anticipatory bail. In 2019 the Court recalled its own directions on review, and in 2020, in Prathvi Raj Chauhan v Union of India, it upheld the amendment.
The case for Section 18A deserves to be stated at full strength. Article 17 abolished untouchability seven decades ago. In the 2019 review judgment that recalled Mahajan’s directions, Justice Arun Mishra asked whether it had vanished, and answered: “The clear answer is that untouchability, though intended to be abolished, has not vanished in the last 70 years.” He is right. The same judgment refused to presume that Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes misuse the law as a class, and put false complaints down to human failing. That is right too. A false complaint is a human failing, not a caste one.
But that is precisely the trouble. A law that cannot tell a true complaint from a false one at the door does not protect the true ones. It makes every complaint, true or false, punish at once, and leaves the sorting to a court years later. The cost of a false case lands on the accused. The discredit lands on every genuine complainant who comes after.
The Supreme Court disagrees. On 22 September, four days after Wakode’s death, a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana dismissed a fresh challenge to the 2018 amendment, declined to revisit its 2020 judgment, and held that sufficient safeguards against misuse already exist. Justice Bagchi said Section 35 of the BNSS, which in many cases requires the police to issue a notice rather than make an arrest, applies to the Act too, and that courts can still quash an FIR on the facts of a particular case. And under Prathvi Raj Chauhan, the bar on anticipatory bail does not apply where the complaint does not make out a prima facie case under the Act.
These safeguards are real. Every one of them operates after the FIR, and most of them in a courtroom. None of them stops the naming, the protests, the suspension or the institutional retreat. Doolla has not been arrested. He has still lost his post. The filter the Court relies on was never built to catch that kind of damage, because that kind of damage is done before anyone files for bail.
At the far end of the same process sits Vishnu Tiwari, accused in 2000 of rape and of offences under the Act, who spent 20 years in prison before the Allahabad High Court acquitted him in 2021. The system did correct itself. It took two decades.
The government’s own figures make the point without any help. According to NCRB data tabled in the Rajya Sabha on 30 July 2026, cases registered under the Act for crimes against Scheduled Castes rose from 45,995 in 2020 to 53,372 in 2023, before falling to 48,669 in 2024. By the end of 2024, 2,87,694 such cases were awaiting trial. In 2024, only about a third of the trials completed ended in conviction.
Some complaints never reach trial. In 2016, the Home Ministry told the Rajya Sabha, police found 5,344 of the 40,774 cases registered for crimes against Scheduled Castes to be false. That category is broader than it sounds: a police closure can cover malice, mistakes of fact or law, and true cases that could not be proved. A police finding of falsity is not a judicial finding of malice, and an acquittal is not proof that nothing happened.
Read honestly, the numbers do not show courts drowning in fabricated complaints. They show something worse for the accused: registration is instant, adjudication takes years, and two trials in three end without a conviction. That is either a law that convicts the guilty too rarely or one that charges the innocent too often, and probably both. Either way, the person named spends years as a defendant first.
None of this argues for repeal. It argues for a door. Indian criminal law already accepts one: in Lalita Kumari v Government of Uttar Pradesh (2014), the Supreme Court made FIR registration mandatory for cognisable offences, but allowed a short preliminary inquiry in a handful of categories, among them matrimonial disputes, commercial offences, medical negligence, corruption and long-delayed complaints. A preliminary check of the kind Mahajan ordered, held to the fifteen days Lalita Kumari allows, confined to complaints that arise from an official’s ordinary duties, such as an invigilator enforcing exam rules or a superior refusing sanction, would not gut the Act. It would let it tell the difference.
None of this requires believing that caste discrimination on Indian campuses is a myth. It requires believing that an accusation is not a verdict. The Supreme Court says the safeguards exist. Ask Professor Doolla when they arrive.
Editor’s note: This piece draws on Dr Subhash Kashinath Mahajan v State of Maharashtra (2018) 6 SCC 454; Union of India v State of Maharashtra (2020) 4 SCC 761; Prathvi Raj Chauhan v Union of India (2020) 4 SCC 727; Lalita Kumari v Government of Uttar Pradesh (2014) 2 SCC 1; the Supreme Court’s order of 22 September 2026 on a petition by Brijbhushan Saini (WP(C) 1211/2026); NCRB data tabled in the Rajya Sabha on 30 July 2026; the Home Ministry’s Rajya Sabha answer on false cases, March 2018; and the Act as amended in 2018.
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