It would take anyone by surprise today if a postman carried thousands of postcards, all signed by young students, typically aged between 18 and 24 — a tech-savvy generation, born in the age of telephones, smartphones, and the internet. So, in 2024, when over a thousand postcards reached the office of retired Justice K Chandru in Chennai, who at the time was shouldered the responsibility of studying caste-based discrimination in Tamil Nadu’s educational institutions by the then DMK-led state government, it astonished him.
“Today’s generation doesn’t have the habit of sending postcards,” he shares. “I opened it and there were 1,340 of them, each signed by a female student of Tirunelveli’s Government Arts and Science College.” Adding to his surprise was the fact that 700 of those postcards read the same, advocating for caste-based reservation to be abolished in order to overcome caste-based discrimination.
“It was clearly orchestrated by the principal, who actually didn’t respond to me herself,” Chandru notes, referring to the questionnaire he floated to several educationists affiliated with the state’s government and private institutions for bringing out his report. He then proceeds to walk into a room in his office, where he has stored the huge bundle secured by jute ropes, stored away inside a white polythene. “Many of these girls would have gotten admission thanks to reservation, but see how they are being brain-washed,” he worries.
Two years after the postcards arrived, today, the anti-reservation narrative is echoing in the country’s capital. Following the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) protest against the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) paper leaks, came another CJP-like social media mobilisation, with the agenda to abolish caste-based reservations. What began online quickly gathered followers, spilled out of social media, and took to the streets with demonstrations at Jantar Mantar this month.
On social media, it has been alleged that those who spoke out against the anti-reservation narrative were met with hate and abuse, including, reportedly, from previous years’ competitive-exam toppers — presumably among the country’s better educated young minds.
This raises an uncomfortable question: how are young Indian students coming to understand reservation? What are schools teaching or failing to teach about caste and social inequality? And why is the idea of reservation so gravely misunderstood by thousands of young people, who seem to reduce a Constitutionally designed mechanism to address social inequalities into a debate about merit and economic status?
Although educationists confirm that reservation is covered in schools’ Civics and Social Studies textbooks across syllabuses and boards, their concern lies not with whether the subject is present, but with how inextensive it is and how it is taught.
Yogarajan, an educationist, says, “NCERT and state board syllabus touch upon reservation but it is very fragmented across high school classes’ textbooks. It is not extensive.” But he notes that in the Tamil Nadu State Board Class 11 syllabus, a chapter (chapter 13) in Political Science, titled ‘Social Justice’ addresses the “philosophy of reservation deeply.” “The problem is that this textbook is only for those students who choose the Arts stream, not those who are choosing other groups like Biology, Computer Science, or Commerce. If they could include such an extensive chapter, say in class 10, where everyone studies the Constitution, it would be more beneficial,” Yogarajan recommends.
Expanding on the argument that school syllabuses reduce constitutional provisions as chapters and topics to be learnt for reproducing in exams, Prince Gajendra Babu, general secretary, State Platform for Common School System-Tamil Nadu (SPCSS-TN), elucidates with an example. He says that schools ask students to learn the Fundamental Rights but fail to introduce reservation policy with it. “Reservation and its Constitutional validity comes out in the Fundamental Rights itself, but students are not taught to study and interpret Article 15 and 16 with reference to Article 14 and 21… If socially backward classes and educationally backward classes are not provided with certain special provisions for their emancipation, then how can we ensure equality as mentioned in Articles 14, 15, 16?”
He further argues that while asking students to differentiate between the Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles of State Policy, the schools fail to help them understand that since reservation is primarily situated within the framework of Fundamental Rights and equality provisions, it should not be treated as an economic welfare measure flowing from the Directive Principles of State Policy. Without this constitutional context, students can easily misunderstand reservation as a scheme intended only to provide economic mobility. “Students should be taught to study everything together,” he urges.
Chandru opines that such an expectation cannot be placed upon the education system today, recalling how in addition to the principal of the Government Arts and Science College, a few other teachers and principals too had expressed anti-reservation sentiments to the committee. In his report which he published in 2024 titled ‘Nanguneri Never… Ever – Caste Violence in Educational Institutions’, he wrote, “Among the several hundred responses received by this Committee, 12 college teachers, 5 individual school teachers, 8 private college principals (out of 23), and about 31 individual respondents (out of 371) have suggested abolishing reservations to refuse caste differences.” He also wrote that 10 out of 39 government college principals, too, corroborated.
Although private institutions are not constitutionally mandated to uphold reservation, Justice Chandru recalls that most respondents who sought to abolish reservation belonged to private and self-financed schools and colleges.
Educationists say the reasons for this include privatisation of education, and the criminalisation of student politics in the country. Nedunchezhian, a social entrepreneur and educationist, recalls how before education became a private commodity, students across caste and class backgrounds studied together. Such an environment gave students the opportunity to encounter people from different social and economic backgrounds, to understand one another’s hardships, recognise their own privileges, and develop a greater sense of empathy. Students in private institutions today may be less likely to encounter the same diversity of experiences and perspectives, leaving some within social and economic echo chambers that can make it harder to understand realities beyond their own.
This, Yogarajan argues, along with the clamping down on student political movements since 1991, has brought down students’ ideological standards to an “all-time low”. “The state has made students apolitical by stopping them from unionising and understanding each others’ politics, the state has privatised education, and the state has failed its young minds,” he asserts.
Privatisation aside, Nedunchezhian says the onus is on the government to provide quality, free education. “If the government had invested in education, opened enough quality institutions, and overall made education its priority instead of alcohol sales and other things for money, who knows, maybe we could have done away with reservation in these last 75 years… The government, as per recent CAG reports has several lakh crores unspent towards education. Why isn’t anyone fighting for this, but are arguing about merit in a socially unequal society where birth is accidental?,” he questions.
The only way forward, these experts agree, is to upgrade school curriculums and mandate an orientation and training for teachers. These echo in Chandru’s committee report recommendations from 2024 to the state, where he advised for teachers’ training, a Social Justice Monitoring committee to suggest modifications to curriculums, imparting ‘Ara Neri’ (moral classes), and more. Although he listed these recommendations as those that require immediate action, two years have passed and the call for abolishing a Constitutional affirmative action seems to have only grown louder.