The father of Sahil Wakode, a second-year student at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay who died by suicide, has alleged that a professor made casteist slurs against his son and that threats and harassment against the student continued for three months at the direction of Director Shireesh B. Kedare. The allegation, reported by NDTV, contradicts the institute's earlier account of the death as a consequence of examination misconduct.
The institute had said the student, from the Department of Energy Science and Engineering, uploaded an examination question paper to ChatGPT to seek answers. That account, also reported by NDTV, framed the suicide as a response to being caught during an exam and triggered protests on the Powai campus. According to the father's account to NDTV, the sequence was different: not a single disciplinary event but three months of caste abuse, threats, and harassment, directed by the institute's director.
Sahil's mother told India Today she believed her son was killed, alleging torture, and Mumbai police have registered a case. The mother's plea, reported by India Today, adds a police investigation to the institutional one. In a separate statement, the institute assured the student's career was safe and no disciplinary action awaited him. India Today reported that assurance. The contradiction between that assurance and the family's narrative of sustained abuse will define what comes next.
The Allegation Carries Constitutional Weight
The father's claim is not a private grievance. It invokes the constitutional structure governing access to education. Articles 15 and 17 of the Constitution prohibit discrimination on grounds of caste and abolish untouchability in all forms. If a professor at a centrally funded technical institute directed casteist slurs at a student, that act falls within the framework the state is obliged to prevent. The prevention of atrocities legislation exists to criminalise caste-based harassment in precisely such settings; its application to higher education has never been ambiguous. What is ambiguous is why an allegation this specific, involving a sitting director, has not yet produced a visibly independent inquiry.
The National Commission for Scheduled Castes has statutory jurisdiction over caste discrimination in educational institutions. It can compel documents, summon officials, and place its findings before Parliament. IIT Bombay's internal complaints committee is the first institutional layer, but it reports to the same directorate the father has named. That is the structural problem: an allegation against the director cannot be examined through a process the director controls. Independent scrutiny, whether by the Commission or a retired judge, is the only way to establish whether the complaint has substance.
The Institutional Response Is the Test
IIT Bombay has not publicly addressed the specific claim of casteist slurs or the alleged role of the director. In the absence of a statement, the risk is not procedural delay but the slow corrosion of trust among students from reserved categories. A complaint of this gravity cannot be resolved by internal reassurance about a student's career. It requires the suspension of the named professor and director pending an independent inquiry. That is not punishment before due process; it is the minimum condition for a credible investigation, because the alleged harasser currently holds administrative authority over the institution that would evaluate the claim.
Student groups that have organised around caste discrimination on IIT campuses will watch the inquiry closely. Their memory of past cases is long; the outcome of this one will become either a precedent for accountability or another reason for silence. The institute's global reputation suffers more if the allegation is buried than if it is investigated openly. India's premier technical institutes are engines of the country's rise; their credibility as equitable institutions is a national asset. An unresolved caste abuse allegation corrodes that asset.
There is a larger institutional lesson. Indian higher education has spent decades building an admissions system designed to correct historical exclusion; that system works only if the campus itself does not reproduce the exclusion once students arrive. A casteist slur is not an offhand remark; inside a residential institution it is a message about who belongs. When the message goes unchallenged for three months, the institution has already answered the question the Constitution asks it to answer.
Meritocracy After Caste
The ChatGPT allegation and the caste-abuse allegation are not mutually exclusive. A student can have committed examination misconduct and also have been harassed for caste. But the institute's decision to foreground the former while the family alleges the latter reveals an ordering of institutional concern. When an elite institution quickly explains a student's suicide as a response to academic dishonesty, it protects its own disciplinary frame. When it delays addressing an allegation of casteist slurs by a professor and directed harassment by its director, it fails the constitutional test that matters more than any examination regulation.
The promise of Indian technical education rests on the belief that a student from a reserved category enters IIT Bombay with the same right to dignity as any other. If three months of casteist abuse ended in suicide, that belief has been broken in the place it cannot afford to be broken. The incident also exposes the absence of adequate mental health support on campuses where academic pressure and social exclusion compound. No institution can guarantee that no student will die by suicide, but it can guarantee that an allegation of caste abuse is investigated without the person accused controlling the process. That guarantee is now the only thing that can restore the trust of the thousands of Dalit, Adivasi, and OBC students who see themselves in Sahil Wakode.
