Asang Wankhede

Asang is a D.Phil (Law) candidate at the University of Oxford. His project looks at socio-economic/poverty discrimination in Indian legal policy and judicial adjudication with special reference to existing protected groups in India.

His 2022 monograph Affirmative Action for Economically Weaker Sections and Upper-Castes in Indian Constitutional LawContext, Judicial Discourse, and Critique (Routledge UK) provides first of its kind doctrinal analysis of the reservations for upper-castes and EWS groups in India. The book was notified by the Bar Council of India as a compulsory reference reading for Constitutional Law-I courses in Indian Law Schools. It builds on his MPhil (Law) at Oxford (awarded without corrections) project that critiques the affirmative action for upper-castes and general category in India and explores the theoretical and doctrinal challenges the interventions pose to the concept of substantive equality and core aims of discrimination law.

Asang is currently appointed as the Lead Research Consultant for the Australian Human Rights Commission's first-ever National Community Consultations on Caste Discrimination, 2024. It is a study that aims to capture the lived experiences of caste-oppressed communities in Australia by deploying qualitative empirical research, primarily using focus group interviews and in-depth individual interviews.

Prior to Oxford, Asang obtained his LLM degree in human rights, conflict, and justice from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, with a Distinction in 2018. He read the LLM as a Felix Scholar. He is an alumnus of National Law University, Delhi, and received B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) degree in 2016. He was also the recipient of the prestigious DAAD Scholarship and LLM-SJD Law Faculty Scholarship, University of Wisconsin Law School. He was shortlisted for the European Commission Blue Book Traineeship.

Asang has been actively involved in Dalit student politics to fight institutional caste-based discrimination. He has organized students to fight caste-based segregation of student accommodations, and in collaboration with the university, established various academic support programmes for students belonging to the Bahujan community to address the high dropout rates and discrimination on campus. He pioneered in establishing career support, peer-mentoring, and guidance programme for students. During his undergraduate years, he was the founding Director of Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle. At SOAS he was the founding President, Dr. Ambedkar Society where he organised and chaired academic lectures on the issue of caste discrimination in the UK and mob lynching in India and organised protests on the discrimination faced by Dalit, Adivasi, and Bahujan students in London. He continues to support students from marginalized backgrounds and has helped over 30 students to secure admission to foreign universities.