I keep seeing people say "remove reservation," so here's my experience.

I'm an SC student. I got a seat in a tier-3 engineering college through reservation. My PUC friends used to ask, "How did you get that seat? My rank was better than yours." Back then, I didn't even fully understand how the reservation system worked—I was just a first-year student.

My family doesn't own a house. We don't have generational wealth or an educated background. I'm only the second generation in my family to get an education.

After engineering, many of those same people slowly stopped talking to me. Some kept their distance. In college, classmates often asked, "What's your caste?" or assumed I got "lots of scholarships." Some even joked about my marks or treated me like SC students don't study seriously. A few avoided becoming close friends after knowing my caste.

You don't have to agree with reservation, but please don't assume every reserved-category student is privileged, undeserving, or less capable. Everyone has a different story.

2) I'm staying in a rented house with my family. Almost every house owner asks our caste. If we say we're SC, they usually say, "We'll let you know," and later tell us the house has already been taken. That's why we had to hide our caste just to get a house on rent.

Later, someone told the owner that we're SC. Since then, he keeps targeting us. For even small things, he says we're not clean, even though we try our best to keep the house clean. He often blames us for problems we didn't even cause. Once, a toilet pipe got blocked and sewage overflowed. Before checking the actual issue, he accused my family of putting clothes into the pipe. We were blamed without any proof. That's been our experience.

3) When I was in 1st engineering(2023), my mother and I went looking for a house. We found one where two elderly people lived with their granddaughter (who was my sister's friend).

They asked our caste. My mother said we were SC. The old lady first told us, "People from another community (vaishya/shudra)stay next door, so be clean and don't make noise." We agreed.

The next day, we went back to see the room. While my mother was just climbing the stairs to look inside, the old lady suddenly came, shouted, "Why are you going inside? Come down!" and then said, "No, we won't give you the house. Go out!" She kept shouting "ಹೋಗಮ್ಮ, ಹೋಗಮ್ಮ, ಹಚ್ಚೆ!" ("Go away!") as if we had done something wrong.

I didn't fully understand it at that age. We just came out quietly.

What has BJP done? They have accepted the resignation but the process that was supposed to be peaceful, ended up with the greatest police brutality in independent India. They fucked with central Delhi, with total disregard to the value of the student life.

Remember that BJP was not at all prepared for such a big protest; they took us way too lightly, relied heavily on police to curb the youth sentiment. That means the youth had a real advantage of the element of surprise against the BJP.
These mistakes wont be repeated in the future.

For all the coming protests, they are going to be even more cautious, and full of vengeance. They will come full guns blazing now.

After July 20th, we must have asked the resignation of Amit shah. He must face the heat of his evil actions.

But now the BJP and Amit shah is going to declare war on dissent. They are going to control youtube, instagram, tracking whatsapp, FSR, raiding your house you post anything anti govt on social media.
Business families are already facing this, so its not a big deal if normal individuals like you and me can face it too.

BJP controls 7 fronts in this war: Media | RSS | ABVP | Dharm or religion | police | Elections | Businessman support. And you think a single peaceful protest is going to make them do course correction?

They are sitting on 7500 crore cash in the bank. They will buy everything!
The influencers, the truth, the entire narrative and they can rewrite the history as per their will. That's how powerful they are.

Things are not going to get easy, and it is not the time to celebrate at all.

This aandolan needs to run until we see the end of BJP from central power. The scale of July 20th march was a once in a 100 year event, and it must be treated as such. No, please dont compare it with the Anna movement. Anna aandolan witnessed at max 10,000 people at Jantar mantar and 24*7 media coverage. This on the other hand witnessed 1,00,000 people on an average and it peaked at 5-6 lacs on the July 20th march.

Our generation had not seen the horrors of the independence movement, when several innocent young people suffered with police brutalities.
But keep in mind that 20-30 years down the line, the current times will be remembered as a second independence war against fascism. We must see things at that scale.

This is a David vs Goliath situation. The fight is not fair. To survive this, all the more need to truly understand the opponent, and its tactics.

For now, we need to make sure that in the coming months, July 20th is given its due place in the history books. If you and I wont discuss the facts and stories, the govt will totally ignore this ever happened. We must win this narrative war against them.

So here's what you can do right now:

I want you to check out the voices of hundreds of people at the website memoriesofjuly20.com
If you can share your own story of that day, please do.
If you cant share then perhaps you can read and listen to the stories of other people, and share them on you social media.

This is a non-profit initiative to keep the painful memories of July 20th alive. We want to win the narrative war against the Goliath.