No room for discrimination

Last week, an unexpected development swung the spotlight to a fact the Indian diaspora likes to avoid: we take our caste wherever we go. Seattle became the first city in the USA to explicitly ban caste discrimination. A measure adopted by the Seattle City Council enables any citizen to lodge a complaint if he or she suffers discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodation and other areas on account of caste.

This is a significant development for the Indian diaspora in the US as well as for Dalit rights activists. Not only is Seattle home to several tech companies employing thousands of NRIs, but this law is also likely to act as a precedent for other town halls to take up similar measures, not least because the progressive Left in the US is in a militant mood to conflate different forms of discrimination, be it caste, race or gender based, and push social justice legislations on all fora.

The PIOs don’t like it of course, used as they are to cohere unabashedly as caste, jati, and language groups. One Indian American state senator denounced the Seattle decree as “Hinduphobic” while the Hindu American Federation has taken a ‘why me’ attitude, as it “unfairly singles out and targets an entire community on the basis of their national origin and ancestry.”

Seattle may be the first American city to put caste on par with other systems of discrimination, but several events and developments in the past few years have signalled its arrival on the progressive agenda. The most important of these was the case of a former employee of Cisco Systems who accused two upper caste Indian supervisors of mistreating him because of his caste status and said the company retaliated against him when he complained. The case has attracted the attention of fair employment regulators in California and the state court’s verdict on the matter may have a bearing on the all-important question whether caste discrimination could be equated with race discrimination. If the court rules that it does, it could significantly change the international conversation on caste prejudice.

The Cisco case has already encouraged hundreds of tech workers to report cases of caste-based ill-treatment to a hotline set up by Equality Labs, a Dalit rights group in the US. A survey of caste in the US by Equality Labs came up with some notable, but not surprising, findings: Two out of three Dalits surveyed reported unfair treatment at their workplace; 40% of the respondents said they were made to feel unwelcome at their place of worship; 40% per cent reported romantic rejections; one out of every two Dalit respondents said they lived in fear of being ‘outed’.

Seattle must count as an interesting milestone. It is the result of very effective articulation by Dalit activists in the past decade or so. Ambedkar chapters have forged connections with civil rights groups in multiple locations to bring varna prejudice, especially that practiced on university campuses and tech workplaces, to the attention of academic and professional audiences. In recent years, several universities have launched studies to better understand how varna and jati work in modern India. Several media houses have commissioned radical new reportage on the matter.

As Dr Ambedkar said, “If Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem.”