What Does an Institution Owe the Grieving and What Does It Owe the Accused?

A Suspension That Satisfies Neither Obligation Fully

Imagine you are IIT Bombay's Director on the Monday after three days of candlelight vigils and an 18-point charter of student demands. A 20-year-old has died. His parents have filed an FIR alleging caste-based discrimination by name.

The professor named is also, separately, the person who caught that student allegedly cheating on an exam hours before his death. You have no completed inquiry. You have a campus that will not calm down until you act and a faculty body that will not accept an act framed as guilt.

What you actually owe each side is not the same thing and that is the discomfort worth sitting with before reaching for a resolution.

Two Real Duties, Not One Obvious Answer

The duty toward Wakode's grieving community is concrete: an institution that takes caste-discrimination allegations seriously cannot simply wait in silence while an FIR under the SC/ST Act names a sitting Dean. Silence itself would read as institutional indifference to exactly the kind of "systemic alienation" the historical pattern at elite institutes keeps producing.

But the duty toward Doolla is equally concrete, not abstract: he has not been found to have done anything wrong by any inquiry and IIT Delhi and IIT Madras's faculty forums specifically noted he was discharging an examination duty under Senate-approved procedure.

Suspending a professor's substantive standing on the strength of protest pressure alone would validate exactly the "mob-driven decision-making" IIT Delhi's faculty forum explicitly warned against.

What IIT Bombay Actually Chose The

Deanship suspension is the visible seam where these two duties were stitched together, imperfectly. It signals responsiveness without pronouncing guilt: Doolla is removed from an administrative post, not his professorship and "any further action will be taken after investigation." That is not indecision, it is an attempt to occupy the narrow space where both obligations survive, even though neither is fully honoured.

Students correctly noted it does not satisfy their demand for accountability commensurate with a discrimination allegation. Faculty forums correctly noted that even an administrative suspension, absent a concluded inquiry, sets a precedent that protest volume can move personnel decisions.

Why Neither Side Is Wrong to Feel Shortchanged This is

what makes it a genuine dilemma rather than a bureaucratic delay: there is no version of Monday's decision where IIT Bombay avoids sacrificing something real. Full deference to due process, doing nothing until the inquiry concludes, would have left a grieving, protesting student body facing an institution that looked unmoved by a caste-discrimination allegation.

Full deference to the protests, suspending Doolla's professorship outright, would have punished a named individual based on unproven allegations under public pressure, exactly what due process exists to prevent. For an aspirant, the exam-relevant insight is not which side IIT Bombay should have picked.

It is recognising that institutional crisis management under simultaneous pressure from grief, allegation and procedure rarely produces a clean resolution, only a defensible one and the test of an administrator's ethics is whether the choice can be defended honestly, sacrifice named plainly, rather than dressed up as satisfying everyone.