IIT humanities expansion fuels identity politics debate after Bombay student death
The death of second-year IIT Bombay student Sahil Wakode has sparked fresh debate over the expanding role of humanities and identity politics in India's premier technology institutions. Wakode died hours after allegedly being caught using ChatGPT during an exam. His family alleged caste-based harassment by a professor, triggering SC/ST Act cases and protests, though subsequent evidence and faculty statements complicated the narrative.
The broader issue traces how humanities and social sciences departments have shifted from studying society to actively seeking its transformation, drawing on Marxist, postcolonial, critical race and queer theories centred on power and structural discrimination. Western universities like Yale, Harvard and Stanford have witnessed major controversies over such identity-focused institutional activism and DEI policies.
IIT Bombay now offers postgraduate and doctoral programmes across multiple humanities disciplines, while IIT Madras launched an integrated MA programme in 2006. What began as broadening engineering education has expanded considerably, raising questions about how these frameworks are shaping India's elite tech campuses.
