How an anti-reservation movement mimicking the CJP is branding entitlement as reform

The Reservation Hatao Andolan, which held a demonstration in Jantar Mantar last fortnight, has since rebranded itself the RHA Reservation Reforms Movement.

Its new charter demands a National Commission for the General Category, a rollback of the University Grants Commission’s 2026 caste equity rules and a dilution of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Atrocities Act through expanded provisions for preliminary inquiry and bail.

Its leaders have borrowed the language and street theatre of the Cockroach Janata Party movement that recently forced Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation.

But this second-hand vocabulary of public anger cannot disguise what this movement represents: a mobilisation of India’s already dominant castes seeking to dismantle the constitutional architecture built to correct centuries of exclusion, and echoes the campus agitation against the Mandal Commission in the 1990s that expanded quotas in educational institutions and government jobs for members of the Other Backward Classes.

The core claim of the RHA Reservation Reforms Movement is that quotas discriminate against the so-called general category – members of the dominant castes.

But this claim collapses the moment it meets evidence. Consider the higher judiciary, which has no caste reservations. Government data placed before Parliament this year showed that of 593 High Court judges appointed between January 2021 and January 2026, barely 4%...

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