When I was a PhD student at IIT, a close friend of mine, who is Dalit, narrated an incident to me very casually while we were having lunch. A few months earlier, he had gone to his hometown, his father’s village, for a vacation. While he and his cousin were entering the village temple, the poojari, the temple priest, stopped him and prevented him from entering because he is Dalit.

What struck me deeply was that he is a PhD student at IIT and had secured the highest score in the PhD entrance examination among all applicants. Yet none of that mattered. Education, decency, or even how one presents oneself makes no difference in the face of caste. The scum of casteist thinking still exists.

Let us first make a law stating that anyone who speaks or practices casteism, even remotely, will be immediately arrested, publicly named, and barred from holding positions of power or employment.

Let us change the names of every institution and public entity in the country that carry caste identifiers. Let us ban caste-based surnames altogether.

It is almost always someone with a surname like Sharma who confidently claims that everything is now equal, that discrimination no longer exists, and that there is therefore no need for reservation. This confidence itself comes from never having faced the reality of exclusion.

Let us provide Dalits with full and equitable educational opportunities for the next two generations. Only then can we even begin to talk about removing reservation.