Asang Wankhede

Asang is a D.Phil (Law) candidate at the University of Oxford. His project undertakes doctrinal assessment of Indian constitutional law jurisprudence on the interaction of caste and poverty in Indian affirmative action policy, focusing on the proliferation of such policies in favour of dominant upper-castes and middle-castes grouos. 

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.

He is an Op-Ed contributor for the Guardian and has reviewed academic papers for peer-reviewed journals like the Journal of Political Economy (The University of Chicago Press).

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 at his undergraduate university (NLU,Delhi). As a student organiser he established various academic support programmes for students belonging to the marginalised 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.