Man's Angry LinkedIn Post Over 'Lower Caste' Friend's IIM Admission Causes Outrage

A LinkedIn user is getting schooled on the platform after calling for caste-based reservation to be abolished in India. The user shared the photo of a house that allegedly belongs to “one of [his] friends who comes from a lower caste family". A Google search on the photo of the house gives a host of different results, including one that indicates that it could be a homestay in Kerala. This calls into question the veracity of the user’s story, which may or may not have been fabricated.

The user claimed that his friend got admission into the NITs on the basis of quota, despite scoring lesser than him. He claimed that the friend also got a job at a PSU and admission in IIM due to reservation.

Elaborating on how his friend completed his MBA from IIM and posted about hard work paying off, the user claimed that his friend was getting reservation because “his grandfather was poor 50 years ago".

The take not only completely ignores the systemic casteism in Indian society, but also fails spectacularly to take into account the social repercussions of casteism. “India is always going to be a developing poor country if it neglects merit and performance. Reservation is harming not only the general category people, but the entire country," he wrote in part of his post.

“It is your ego which is hurt… You are not able to digest that lower caste could achieve so much even when you had all the means but you couldn’t," one user commented. “And if the same friend was not educated and reached this level, you would still like him more and have pitty [sic] on him calling him a low caste. It’s actually not the reservation which disturbs you, it is his house and wealth that you are not able to digest being owned by a lower class," another said. There were a range of other comments calling out the post, although there were voices also supporting it.

Recently, another such row had broken out when a Twitter user going by @peeleraja shared photos of restaurants and cafes in Bengaluru using the prefix “Brahmin" in their names, available on food delivery platforms Zomato and Swiggy. Most Indian societies are deeply casteist and the branding of restaurants with a caste name started a debate on the microblogging platform, with opinions differing as to whether or not the tag for the restaurants was meant to be a caste signal.

Read the Latest News and Breaking News here