Who Does Your Silence Protect?

We begin here, on this campus, because this is the ground we share; and because the argument we want to make is not one that can be imported from somewhere else and applied to our situation, but one that has to be made from within it, from the specific circumstances that produced this student body, this institution, this particular form of political quietude that we are all, in our different ways, participants in.

What happened with the mess is a matter of public record in the sense that everyone experienced it, even if no one voted on it. A decision made above, communicated downward, and then managed: through the open house, the Ping! interview, the eventual acknowledgment of concerns that changed little, the slow dissipation of frustration into adaptation.

The student democracy series that Ping! ran put the structural diagnosis correctly: the mechanisms through which this institution makes decisions about the lives of the people who live inside it are not designed to produce accountability, and the primary obstacle to changing them is not a villain but our own accumulated resignation to the way things are. That is true. But it stops one step before the question that this document wants to ask, which is: where does the resignation come from? An apathy this consistent, this durable, this shared across an entire campus generation after generation, is not a personal failing that each of us independently arrives at — it is a condition that has been constructed, through specific institutions, specific incentives, and specific social formations that preceded our arrival here and that we have largely absorbed without examination.

Any honest account of who is at IIITH must begin with how people get here, because the admission system is the institution’s most consequential political act — the mechanism through which the campus population is produced, and the first site at which the question of access and equity is answered, or evaded.

IIIT Hyderabad has no caste-based reservation. This is usually discussed, when it is discussed at all, as a feature of the institution’s autonomy and its commitment to selecting on the basis of demonstrated ability alone. What it means in practice is that the structural advantages that caste and class have accumulated across generations are permitted to operate at the point of selection without any corrective mechanism whatsoever.

The fee structure that underlies all of this is itself a political statement. The tuition for B.Tech programmes runs to ₹4.5 lakhs per year, revised annually. Financial assistance exists: the SBI Scholar loan, guaranteed up to ₹40 lakhs, is a genuine resource, and the alumni fund provides tuition support for families below ₹8 lakhs per year. But a loan is not a subsidy. Debt-financed access is not the same as access. The student who arrives at IIITH having already incurred a substantial educational loan has had a specific relationship to risk instilled in them before they have attended a single class — a relationship that will shape, in ways we will return to, their subsequent political behaviour.

The ideology through which this admission system is understood by most of the people inside it is meritocracy, and meritocracy is performing a specific political function here that it is worth setting out with some precision.

Every real meritocracy distributes outcomes on the basis of demonstrated ability as measured by a specific instrument, at a specific moment, after a specific preparation — and the question of what that preparation required and who could afford it is systematically excluded from the verdict the meritocracy delivers. The rank list announces a result; the result becomes the person’s identity; and everything upstream of the result — the school, the city, the household income, the caste that structured access to all of the above — is laundered out of the picture.

This is not a peripheral feature of meritocratic ideology; it is its central political function. A dominant class that understands its position as deserved is qualitatively more stable than one that knows its position was assigned. The resentment of reservation, expressed almost invariably in the language of merit, is the assertion that the outcome of an unequal process should be treated as if the process were equal — and it is an argument that has always been convenient for those who benefited from the preceding inequality.

The events of the past two weeks are legible as a coherent method if you look at what each of them does to the infrastructure through which a democratic polity holds power accountable — and if you are willing to resist the trained reflex to treat each event as a separate and complicated policy question about which reasonable people disagree, which is what the pace and volume of events is designed to produce.

The Transgender Persons Amendment Bill does not prohibit trans identity. It bureaucratises it — and this distinction between prohibition and bureaucratisation is the key to understanding how rights are extinguished in systems that cannot afford to be seen extinguishing them. The administrative hurdles are calibrated, as administrative burdens always are, to be most costly for people with the least capacity to navigate official processes.

The new IT rules requiring platforms to remove unlawful content within three hours do not require active enforcement to be effective. The government writes the rule; the platform does the suppression; the government’s hands are clean; the chilling effect on political speech is achieved without a single prosecution. UAPA permits detention for up to 180 days without a charge sheet. The people detained under it — Umar Khalid, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira among them — are not held for violence. They are held for writing, for organising, for building political movements in communities the state has identified as threatening to its project.

The relationship between how decisions are made at IIITH and how decisions are made by the Indian state is not a metaphor imposed from outside; it is a structural relationship, legible in the specific mechanisms through which institutional authority manages accountability at both scales.

When the mess policy changes without consultation and an open house follows after the fact — acknowledging concerns, taking notes, producing no substantial change — the mechanism is managed participation: the formal vocabulary of engagement maintained while the substance of it is withheld. When the student parliament sits on committees whose recommendations require administrative approval before they affect anything, the mechanism is representative delegation without representative power: the form of democracy without its function.

This is preparation — not deliberate, but effective — for citizenship in a country where elections continue to be held but their administration has become a matter of serious democratic concern; where courts continue to hear petitions but their willingness to find against the executive is structurally compromised; where the press continues to publish but editorial independence is the exception.

Every substantial technical system encodes political choices — about who the users of the system are assumed to be, whose failure modes are tested for, what kinds of error are acceptable and whom those errors fall upon. These choices are made in the design phase, frequently without being recognised as political choices at all, because the training in which the designers were formed did not equip them to recognise them as such.

CoWIN is the first example this campus should sit with. The technical problem of scale was solved elegantly. What was not asked, systematically, was: who dies while waiting for an OTP? The system was built under the assumption of the urban professional. During the deadliest waves of the pandemic, access to a life-saving vaccine was placed behind a digital paywall of structural privilege.

When an engineer tweaks a weight in a loss function to shave two minutes off a delivery estimate, they are making a political decision about the acceptable rate of physical injury for precarious workers in heavy traffic. The gig worker is subjected to a frictionless, automated tyranny where their manager is an API that cannot be reasoned with, appealed to, or organised against. This is what political ignorance looks like in technical practice: not the will to harm but the trained incapacity to ask the questions whose answers would reveal it.

The charge of apathy, when levelled at students at institutions like this one, usually arrives with an implicit moral judgment — of selfishness, or cowardice — and it is largely unproductive, not because the judgment is entirely wrong but because it explains nothing. What needs to be explained is not whether the apathy exists, which is obvious, but how it has been so effectively produced across an entire population of people who are, by any measure, intellectually serious.

Political solidarity requires making the abstract concrete. Without the relationships that would do that work, political engagement becomes a sustained act of moral imagination that institutions do not reward. The credential intensifies this. The student who has structured their entire educational trajectory toward the credential has not made a shameful calculation; they have made a rational one inside a framework of values and incentives that was handed to them, not chosen by them.

The result is not apathy in the simple sense of not caring. It is something more precisely described as invested non-participation: the active maintenance of a posture of political disengagement in a context where the costs of engagement have been structured to appear prohibitive. The manufacture of this posture is not incidental to the function of institutions like this one. It is one of their primary political outputs.

The position of political non-participation that is normative on this campus rests on a distinction — between the technical and the political, between one’s individual choices and their collective consequences — that does not survive examination.

Your skills are already in the market for political uses. Accepting a job offer is a political act. It has been normalised to the point where it does not feel like one, but normalisation is not the same as neutrality. There is a well-documented political economy of professional-class acquiescence in which the professional class of a contracting democracy accepts a narrowing political space in exchange for the maintenance of the economic arrangements that serve them — and then discovers that the stability they purchased was contingent on a continued obedience whose terms kept moving. This is the documented experience of the professional classes of Turkey, Hungary, and Venezuela, in living memory.

This is not a manifesto for a party or a programme. It does not end with a set of demands addressed to an authority that is expected to meet them. It ends with a demand addressed to you, which is the harder kind.

The demand is that you examine, honestly and without the protection of the complexity-as-excuse that the pace of events is designed to make available to you, whether what is happening in this country is acceptable, and what your specific position within it is — the admission pathway through which you arrived here, the fees that structured your access, the skills you are developing and the market that is waiting for them.

The refusal of that investment is what is being asked for. Not heroism, not the renunciation of professional ambition — but the specific, difficult act of refusing to perform the social function for which you have been trained: the technically excellent, politically inert professional who understands their work as purely technical, accepts what is handed to them, and processes their discomfort at the state of the world into private concern held at a safe distance from any consequence. That function is useful to the present arrangement. The arrangement has invested heavily in producing people who will perform it.