Caste issue being weaponised in US for anti-India push: Report

WASHINGTON: A new report has highlighted that an unlikely trio have joined together and are using “a bait and switch” to weaponize caste as an issue in the United States and that the narrative is “about an anti-India push” and not any real effort at addressing discrimination against Dalits in the United States.

The Coalition of Hindus of North America (CoHNA) discussed the new report ‘The Weaponization of Caste in America’ with its author, Dr. Salvatore Babones, Associate Professor at the University of Sydney.

The study calls out the overlap between the players pushing antisemitism and the ‘Caste in US’ narrative.

“This is about an anti-India push and not any real effort at addressing discrimination against Dalits in the United States,” according to the author.

Babones stated that a section of Muslims, Dalits and Khalistanis have joined together “and are using a bait and switch” to weaponize caste as an issue in the United States.

He said the study lays out evidence that players involved in the ‘CasteinUS’ narrative are the same ones pushing “antisemitc tropes”.

Prof Babones, a statistician, also dismissed the Equality Labs report, calling it a “biased poll of Dalit activists”.

“The conclusions in that report are just mathematically unlikely.”

In a strong repudiation, he said, “All evidence suggests that the 2016 Equality Labs survey should not be taken seriously”.

He called the report by The Equality Labs – which is based in the US – as “deeply flawed” statistically and not a reliable measure of the experience of Dalits in the United States given its “deep sampling bias and snowball methodology”.

Digging further into the numbers that have underlaid the whole narrative, Prof Babones embarked on a quest for the primary source behind the widely cited datapoint that “only 1.5 per cent of Indian immigrants in the United States were Dalits.”

Elaborating on the bait-and-switch at the core of the weaponization of caste, he said “Dalits in India are not the same as Dalits in America, 80 per cent of whom have post-graduate degrees”.

“The fact that there were only two sponsors of SB403, ever, suggests that the legislators were tricked into thinking–I don’t want to be the person who stood against saying no to caste-based discrimination, so I will vote for the bill. I don’t want to be the person who stood against saying no to caste-based discrimination, so I will vote for the bill. If I could speak to the legislators, I would say — don’t be a tool in someone else’s battle. Find out what is really going on,” Babones stated.

Earlier in February, Seattle became the first US city to ban caste-based discrimination by incorporating it into its anti-discrimination laws. The legislation, SB 403, originally sought to add caste as a new category under the state’s non-discrimination law, but it now enumerates caste as one protected class under the larger umbrella of “ancestry.”

In May, the California Senate passed a bill to ban caste-based discrimination in the state. Media reports said that the bill was later vetoed by the Governor.