The Institution and the Quota. Caste, Accountability, and the Student Deaths of 2014 to 2026, Read Against a Global Constitutional Record

This article examines how constitutionally funded institutions of higher education respond when a family alleges that caste determines the treatment of a student inside a publicly funded campus. Taking the September 2026 death of Sahil Wakode at IIT Bombay as its occasion rather than its subject, the article applies Ambedkar's concept of constitutional morality to ask whether internal committees composed largely of an institution's own faculty can ever be the appropriate first forum for investigating allegations against that same institution. It reads India's constitutional and statutory framework, Articles 14, 15, 16, 17, 21 and 46, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act 1989, and the Central Educational Institutions Reservation in Teachers Cadre Act 2019, against a comparative record spanning the United States, South Africa, and Canada, and against India's own precedent in Rohith Vemula's death and the Kilvenmani massacre. It concludes that institutional legitimacy is renewed only through continued, visible fidelity to independent scrutiny, not banked once at an institution's founding.