This article discusses three different university campuses in India and their political and social environments with a particular focus on Dalit student activism from March to June, 2013 and from January to March, 2014 when this ethnographic research was conducted. It questions what place the Dalit student activism, constituting the “counter public” (Fraser, 1990), occupied on the university campuses; how Dalit student activists interacted with other political groups on the campuses; what characteristic features the Dalit student activism had at the New Delhi and Hyderabad universities. This article discusses the changing power relations on Indian campuses and the role of “social space” (Bourdieu 2018, 1989) in negotiating social statuses. Dalit student activists actively engaged in appropriating social space by installing Dalit symbolic icons on the university campuses, bringing up caste issues to public attention and thus temporarily turning certain campuses into the “political strongholds” (Jaoul, 2012) of the Dalit movement. Contributing to the field of “the spatiality of contentious politics” (Leitner, Sheppard and Sziarto 2008) this article argues for the interactive relation between space and politics, showing how Dalit students changed the campus space through symbolic appropriation and, conversely, how historically constituted campus spaces affected the nature of Dalit student activism in each of the discussed locations.