Suicide of Senior IPS Officer Reveals Caste Bias at the Heart of State Power

Officer’s 8-Page Note Accuses Top Officials of Harassment, Public Humiliation

October 9, 2025

A senior police officer in Haryana has died by suicide, leaving behind an eight‑page note directly accusing serving and retired senior officers of caste‑based discrimination, humiliation and harassment, naming them individually. The state, understood as the guarantor of rights and equality, appears not only unwilling but also incapable of confronting caste injustice, even within its highest institutions.

Y. Puran Kumar, a 52-year-old Haryana-cadre IPS officer belonging to the Scheduled Caste category, was found dead of a gunshot wound at his residence in Chandigarh on Oct. 7, as reported by The Logical Indian. At the time of his death, he was serving as Inspector General at the Police Training Centre in Sunaria, Rohtak. In the suicide note addressed as his “final note,” he alleged caste-based discrimination, mental harassment and administrative humiliation by the state’s senior IPS and IAS officers.

The officer wrote that he was punished for visiting a temple, denied leave which prevented him from seeing his dying father, assigned to non-existent posts and subjected to false and malicious proceedings. He said that his attempts to seek equal treatment as an IPS officer, including basic entitlements like leave, official accommodation and promotions under MHA rules, were ignored or used against him in a vindictive manner. Despite repeated complaints, he said, no action was taken. He accused specific IPS and IAS officers of deliberately humiliating him in public and trying to implicate him in false cases, and said these sustained actions had left him with no choice but to take his own life.

Sections of the leadership in the Haryana police department resemble a referee in a match, accused of purposely pushing a player to help the other team win. A referee’s role is to ensure fairness, so if he breaks the rules himself, there remains no possibility of justice.

French sociologist Louis Dumont described caste as a hierarchy based on ideas of purity and pollution. He saw caste as a cultural and religious system organised around fixed roles and ritual distance, determining how people interacted and where they stood in society. Political theorist Gopal Guru, by contrast, argues that caste is a system of layered inequality that penetrates institutions like the bureaucracy, police and judiciary. He bases this on the lived experiences of Dalits, who often face humiliation, denial of rights and exclusion even within elite professions. Guru points out that formal equality on paper does little to address everyday practices of bias and discrimination that remain embedded in institutional cultures.

Political scientist Max Weber defined bureaucracy as a rational‑legal authority, or a system that should work through clear rules, applied equally to everyone, without personal bias. But if senior officers use their power to block leave, create fake postings or target someone because of his caste, it shows the system breaking down. Weber called this breakdown “patrimonialism,” where decisions are driven by personal bias instead of rules. It’s like a bus that’s supposed to follow a fixed route, but the driver keeps changing direction to stop some passengers from reaching their destination.

Dalit students at premier institutions like IITs and AIIMS have also died by suicide after alleging caste‑based harassment. In 2016, the death of Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad became a flashpoint, as he accused university authorities of targeting him because of his caste background. In 2021, the death of Dr. Payal Tadvi, a medical resident in Mumbai, exposed similar harassment by colleagues.

Also relevant here is the political theory of the “social contract,” developed by thinkers like Rousseau, which holds that individuals agree to follow the authority of the government in return for protection and equal treatment under the law. If the state itself is accused of violating that equality through its officers, the contract becomes meaningless for the affected group.

For Scheduled Castes, who were promised protection through affirmative action and laws like the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, the allegations suggest that even legal safeguards cannot prevent humiliation when the alleged perpetrators are the guardians of law themselves.

Imagine a hospital where doctors are accused of deliberately infecting patients, or a bank where security guards are caught robbing the vault. The shock comes not just from the act itself, but from the betrayal by those meant to protect. In this case, the alleged harassment within the police and bureaucracy strikes at the core of trust in the state’s institutions.

The fact that Kumar’s wife refused to allow post‑mortem until a case is filed adds another layer, because it shows distrust of due process, a distrust that grows when citizens feel that powerful officials will “manage the situation in their favour.” That’s what American political scientist Samuel Huntington means when he uses the term “institutional decay,” or situations where institutions fail to adapt and are captured by personal networks or biases.

Studies in organisational sociology show that minority officers often face a “double bind,” where they are both part of the system and victims of its bias. In South Africa, even after apartheid, complaints arose from Black officers about racial bias within police services. These examples show that institutions do not automatically shed the prejudices of the societies in which they exist.

This case calls for an independent investigation with full legal powers to examine the caste-based abuse of authority within elite services. Beyond that, there must be structural reform to ensure that protections under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act apply meaningfully within government institutions, not just outside them. Equal access to entitlements, transparent redressal mechanisms and accountability for discriminatory conduct must become part of institutional culture. Without this, the promise of equality under the Constitution risks becoming mere performance for the public, while caste injustice continues unchecked within the state itself.

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