The internet has increasingly become a space where political dissent can find an audience, build a community and, eventually, move from screens to the streets. The rise of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) showed how an Instagram page could evolve from a space for political discourse into a tool for mobilisation. Soon after, another online movement emerged with a very different demand: reforming India’s reservation system. The Reservation Hatao Andolan, an Instagram-based campaign opposing caste-based reservation, quickly gained millions of followers and called its supporters to a protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on 21 August.
I was there that day. And having spent several days on the ground covering the CJP protest, this gathering felt strikingly different. It was not just the slogans or the demands. What stood out to me most was the demographic diversity of the crowd, the different ways in which people understood caste, and the uncomfortable questions that their arguments raised for me.
From Instagram to Jantar Mantar
The Reservation Hatao Andolan had gathered a huge following online before taking its campaign offline. By late July, the Instagram page had crossed 5.5 million followers, making it one of the largest issue-based political campaigns on the platform. Its stated demands included changes to the existing reservation system, with supporters arguing that economic criteria should play a greater role in determining affirmative action.
On the day of the protest, hundreds of people gathered at Jantar Mantar, carrying banners, posters and raising slogans against caste-based reservation. The Delhi Police had said that permission had not been granted for the demonstration after 4 pm, and security was increased at the site.
For me, however, the most interesting part of being there was not simply what the protesters were demanding. It was who was making those demands and how they understood the issue of caste.
A very different crowd from the CJP protest
I had spent several days covering the CJP protest on the ground. There, what struck me was the diversity of the crowd-men and women, students and older people, people from different walks of life.
At the Reservation Hatao Andolan protest, the contrast was hard to miss.
The crowd I saw was overwhelmingly male. And unlike the CJP protest, where students were a prominent presence, many of the people I encountered here were adults.
But the demographic difference was only the beginning.
As I spoke to people, I found two distinct ways of looking at caste and reservation. One group questioned the very existence of caste discrimination. Some told me, essentially: “We have never experienced it, so where is caste discrimination?”
I found that argument deeply disconnected from the reality experienced by millions of Indians.
The latest NCRB data recorded 55,698 cases of crimes against Scheduled Castes in 2024.
These numbers are not an abstract ideological debate. Behind every case is a person, a family and an experience of caste that cannot simply be dismissed because someone else has never witnessed it.
There was an irony I could not ignore while standing at Jantar Mantar.
The last time I had been there, I had witnessed a protest against manual scavenging. People from the Valmiki community and other Scheduled Castes had gathered to demand justice for sanitation workers who had died while cleaning sewers and manholes.
And then, at the same place, I was listening to people argue that caste-based reservation in education and “respectable” government jobs should be removed.
It made me wonder: if we are arguing for an egalitarian society in which caste should have no bearing on opportunity, are we also ready to create an egalitarian society in every other sense?
Would we be equally comfortable seeing a Pandit, a Verma or someone from any traditionally privileged caste cleaning sewers and manholes?
Would we be willing to accept that kind of equality too?
Because reservation does not exist in isolation. It emerged in a society where caste historically shaped access to education, employment, social status and dignity.
If we want to imagine a society without caste-based advantages or disadvantages, then the question cannot simply be whether reservation should disappear. We also have to ask whether the social and economic structures that made reservation necessary have disappeared or not.
“Remove all castes”
There was another school of thought I encountered at the protest.
Some people did not simply want reservation removed. They wanted caste itself to disappear.
No General. No SC. No ST. No OBC.
Everyone should simply be one.
On paper, it sounds ideal.
But India's social fabric is far more complicated than that.
For caste to disappear from official categories, it would first have to disappear from society itself. Yet caste remains visible, that too with a lot of pride, in everything from matrimonial advertisements to surnames, social media bios and stickers on cars.
So while a caste-less society may be an ideal worth imagining, getting there cannot happen simply by removing the categories from government forms or reservation policies.
The categories exist because the social divisions exist.
What I realised at Jantar Mantar
Perhaps the biggest thing I took away from the protest was how much our understanding of reality depends on what we personally see.
If you have never experienced caste discrimination, it can be easy to believe that caste discrimination is exaggerated or does not exist.
If you have only ever seen reservation as something that took away an opportunity from you, it can be easy to see the system only as unfair.
But for someone who has experienced it from the moment they were born, the issue is not theoretical.
It is a very real, lived reality.
And this is where I think the reservation debate often becomes difficult. We tend to accept the reality we are exposed to. Everything outside that experience can begin to look like propaganda, a political narrative or an attempt by someone to further their own interests.
For people who bear the consequences of a caste system that existed long before they were born, caste is not an Instagram debate.
After spending the day at Jantar Mantar, I was left with a question that goes beyond reservation itself:
Can we really talk about removing caste-based systems before we confront the caste-based realities that still exist?
TL; DR | News At A Glance
What happened: The Reservation Hatao Andolan held a protest at Jantar Mantar in Delhi.
Who/what is involved: An Instagram-led movement demanding changes to India’s reservation system.
When: 21 August 2026.
Where: Jantar Mantar, New Delhi.
What stood out: The predominantly male crowd and sharply different views on caste, including among some protesters who questioned whether caste discrimination still exists.
Why it matters: The protest raises a larger question about whether reservation can be debated separately from the caste inequalities it was created to address.
