20/03/2026
Condemning institutional murder of Dalit Student Ratan Kumar Meghwal
YET another Dalit life has been erased, this time, Ratan Kumar Meghwal at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Rajkot. We refuse to call it a 'su***de', but an institutional murder. As B. R. Ambedkar wrote, “The outcaste is a by-product of the caste system. There will be outcastes as long as there are castes.” What we have witnessed in the horrific death of Ratan Meghwal is precisely this brutal truth that is the making of an ‘outcaste’ within an institution that should have guaranteed him dignity, but instead mirrored the exclusion and cruelty of social hierarchies. Ratan Kumar Meghwal, a final year MBBS student at AIIMS Rajkot, was found to have come under a train near Ghanteshwar on Jamnagar Road in the early hours of 14 March 2026. The railway police recovered his bag which had a 17 page long note where he pen-ed down the sustained harassment he has been experiencing since January, including a specific incident where the accused physically assaults him on 27 January that he asked be treated as his “dying declaration.” Following a complaint lodged by his father, Mohanlal Meghwal, Gandhigram police arrested Pranav Paliwal, Asmit Sharma, Ayush Yadav, Nirvighnam Noor and Yuvraj Chaudhary under SC&ST act 1989. In the investigation it has been found that this is not the first time Ratan sought for help, In Jan 2026 he attempted su***de after naming the same students in a note yet no action was taken.
We are told that the arrests have been made under the Sec.108 of BNS and Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. The arrests ring hollow when the institution itself normalises hostility. What authority does the law retain when its moral force is nullified by institutional indifference. The law arrives when the dead body arrives the home, after the mind has been cornered, after the bramhanical dehumanisation has done its work.
We must question, where were the authorities of institution in January when Ratan first attempted to take his life and explicitly named the harassers in a note? Where were the grievance redressal mechanisms? Where were the committees that exists probably only on the papers? The very attempt to take his life only echoes the helplessness he has experienced in the institution.
This is not an aberration. This is a systemic pattern across the campuses from the institutional murder of Rohith Vemula to countless unnamed lives that never made to headlines.
Ratan Meghwal’s death is not an isolated incident; it is an outcome of this accumulated violence. The alleged harassment, the physical assault, the moral policing all of which is not incidental. This is how caste polices intimacy, mobility, and belonging. This is how institutions become complicit not always through overt action, but by refusing to intervene, a reluctance to confront dominant caste aggression and a preference for “maintaining Brahmanical hegemonic order” over jusctice. Here by, what only emerges is a dilapidated standard of accountability, where institutions decay ethically while ‘righfully’ claiming for procedural correctness.
This is why the demand for the Rohith Act is no longer negotiable, it is urgent, it is necessary, it is overdue. The Rohith Act must institutionalize the real accountability that current frameworks refuse to deliver. It must replace token panels and reforms with autonomous, powerful mechanisms that marginalized students can trust. It should acknowledge that caste harassment as systemic within universities and confront the whole structure of oppression, not tinker at the edges.
We stand in uncompromising solidarity with his family, and with all students who continue to suffer the quiet brutality of caste on campuses.
Enact Rohith Act now !
