Whose Discrimination Counts? Regulation 3(c) of the UGC (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations 2026 and the Limits of Category-based AntiDiscrimination Law

The author highlights the constitutional question surrounding Regulation 3(c) of the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, which was raised in the Supreme Court of India in the case of Vineet Jindal v Union of India. The crux of Regulation 3(c) is that the concept of caste discrimination, according to law, only comes as a form of discrimination that is limited to hurting people of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes, thus excluding the protection offered in the regulation to regular students. On January 29, 2026, the Supreme Court put a stop to the Regulations, indicating that they were too vague and open to misuse, thus restoring the educational institutions to their position in 2012. The present essay maintains that making the interim decision based only on the argument of vagueness makes sense because we can distinguish between the situation in which a law has been affirmed to be good in general and the situation that relates to the particular case of the violation of Article 14 of the Indian Constitution in question. Furthermore, the problem of defining a group that is exempt from any grievance procedure should not be compared to the requirement of Article 14 of the Indian Constitution; that entails that classification must have a rational connection with the purpose of the law: in this case, to fight against discrimination on campuses. It is also important to point out that Sukhadeo Thorat himself, who created a report about discrimination on the basis of caste at AIIMS in 2007, challenges this interpretation of the Regulation at issue. The essay suggests drafting Regulation 3(c) again, but with emphasis on the balance between providing advantages to certain groups and establishing procedures for grievances for all the groups.