M. Nageswara Rao IPS (Retired) MNageswarRaoIPS CASTE AS SHIELD FOR CORRUPTION India's "steel frame", once an unyielding pillar of integrity, now crumbles under the weight of its own rot, ravaged by caste-based and gender-based reservations that breed insidious casteism and divisive feminism within the civil services, turning guardians of the law into fractured factions. But the latest tragedy exposes a far grimmer truth: the weaponisation of caste as a shield for corruption, claiming yet another innocent life in a grotesque chain of suicides. Consider the harrowing case of Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI) Sandeep Kumar, who on October 14, 2025, allegedly shot himself, leaving behind a three-page suicide note and a six-minute video that detonates the myth of victimhood peddled by the late IPS officer Y. Puran Kumar. Sandeep, part of the team that arrested Puran Kumar’s allegedly corrupt aide Sushil Kumar in an alleged extortion racket, where bribes allegedly flowed to the IPS officer himself, did not mince words: Puran was not a martyr to "caste discrimination" but allegedly a "very corrupt officer" who hijacked the system, handpicking cronies to orchestrate bribery and other malfeasance. He allegedly tormented subordinates, and when the noose was getting tightened with an FIR on October 6, he cynically recast his downfall as "atrocities" against Dalits to evade accountability, only to take his own life on October 7 in a final act of desperation. Sandeep's dying declaration shatters this facade: "This is not a caste issue. Truth must come out. He was corrupt... I am sacrificing my life for this truth." He praised the very officers Puran Kumar vilified, former Rohtak SP Narendra Bijarnia and Haryana DGP Shatrujeet Kapur, and demanded a probe into Puran Kumar’s family's assets, allegedly shielded by his IAS wife Amneet P. Kumar and AAP MLA brother-in-law Amit Rattan. Why did Sandeep, a man from a freedom fighter's lineage, feel compelled to end it all? Because Puran Kumar’s ghost, through his politicised narrative, continued to harass the upright, magnifying the probe into "caste warfare." And who fanned these flames? Rahul Gandhi and the Congress party, who, mere hours before Sandeep's death, rushed to meet Puran Kumar’s family in Chandigarh, thundering about "justice for Dalits" and weaponising the tragedy for votes, while ignoring the blood on their selective casteist outrage. If they possess even a shred of fair play or justice, they must now confront this second suicide: the harassment and caste-baiting unleashed by corrupt machinery. Politicising one death was cynical; ignoring this one is complicity. How many more lives must shatter before the vultures of division are called to account? The steel frame demands not rhetoric, but reckoning, before another bullet silences the truth.