The case of Indian-origin women  fighting caste discrimination in the US

On April 25th, when California’s Senate approved SB403 – a bill that makes it illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of caste – the Dalit South Asian community, in the US, took a sigh of relief.

On the hierarchy of India’s controversial caste system, the Dalits occupy the lowest rungs. The legislation makes caste-related bias illegal by adding it as a protected category alongside race and sex in the state’s anti-discrimination laws. Seattle also passed a similar law in February.

Behind this growing momentum of the anti-caste movement in the US, there has notably been a significant role played by women.

Despite facing roadblocks, especially from the Hindu American Foundation, their efforts have pushed for a change and increased public awareness of the problem.

Goodbye, Google!

Tanuja Jain Gupta made headlines when she left a senior manager’s job, which many techies dream of: working at Google. It all began two years ago when she decided to organise an event on diversity and inclusion, which top management took issue with–particularly the speakers scheduled to speak at it.

“It was in September 2021 when two Google employees approached me confidentially and discussed the caste discrimination they had faced at the organisation,” Gupta tells TRT World. “It was after this that I decided to organise a talk on caste discrimination as part of the new diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) speaker series.”

Gupta says the event became a bone of contention, due to a handful of Google employees expressing concern about the event to the company’s human resource department. Subsequently the event was canceled. This led Gupta to resign from Google.

“One year later I'm still convinced that the C-suite's decision to disregard complaints of caste discrimination was part of a larger plan,” Gupta says.

“[This happened] not only because many Googlers contacted me after I left, stating that their own HR complaints about caste discrimination had been ignored, but also because the caste equity talk that was supposed to take place more than a year ago has still not occurred.”

Gupta has continued to advocate for caste equity through initiatives like legislation, including SB403, and the founding of the Caste Equity Legal Task Force–a nationwide coalition in the US. It is composed of litigators, law professors, legal advocates and law school students committed to ending caste-based discrimination.

Gupta believes, however, that the American society still struggles to see women in leadership positions, especially women of colour.

“While it [American society] may know that women are capable of taking a leadership position, they are always expected to find others to echo their message and lend it credibility,” she says

"There's a lot of talk about what allyship looks like in matters of equity,” she says. “Sometimes it's about stepping back ... and sometimes it's about getting loud. Right now, we need our allies to turn up the volume on their calls for caste equity."

Victory in Seattle

Kshama Sawant, a member of the Socialist Alternative and the only Indian-American on the Seattle City Council, is another well-known figure in the anti-caste movement in the US.

In February 2023, she introduced legislation that resulted in the landmark ban on caste discrimination in Seattle itself.

Specifically, the law prohibits caste-based discrimination in employment, housing and the use of public spaces.

The principal mechanism by which this law will be enforced is through the judicial system. Hence, if you are a tech worker, for example, in a company and you have experienced caste-based discrimination from your bosses or from your coworkers, then you have the right to take the company to court. This allows you to pursue legal recourse where it might otherwise be wholly absent.

Since the Seattle region is a tech-hub, the proliferation of Indian immigrants has resulted in more cases of caste discrimination, says Sawant.

“Though the caste system originated over 2000 years ago, even today, we see some of the most gruesome and horrendous examples of caste-based oppression.”

Sawant believes that though challenges faced by individuals of lower caste are compounded when such individuals are women. It is necessary to make a broader distinction between individuals within and outside positions of power, she adds.

A study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in September 2020, found that first-generation Indian immigrants in the US were more likely to identify with their caste compared to individuals born there. A significant majority of Hindu respondents who identified with their caste, specifically more than 80 percent, identified themselves as belonging to the upper caste. Additionally, first-generation immigrants tended to segregate themselves, leading to increasingly homogeneous communities based on religion and caste.

In another case of caste discrimination, in July 2020, Cisco Systems, a technology company, was sued by California regulators for alleged discrimination against an Indian engineer by his Indian colleagues while they were working in the state.

Following the announcement of the lawsuit, Equality Labs, a nonprofit organisation, which advocates for Dalit rights, received approximately 260 complaints of caste-based bias from US tech workers within a span of three weeks. Among the companies mentioned, Facebook received the highest number of claims (33), followed by Cisco (24), Google (20), Microsoft (18), IBM (17), and Amazon (14). All these tech giants claim they do not tolerate discrimination.

Sawant maintains women as a whole and on a mass scale have played a very important social and political role.

She especially underscored the importance of recognising and acknowledging the role of working class women who are committed to fighting for equality – women whose names will never be known and likely forgotten. These women are not taking on the struggle for fame or fortune but because they see it as a morally correct thing to do, says Sawant.

She is also of the opinion that while fighting against the political right, which often opposes legislation that prohibits caste discrimination, it is necessary to be on the offensive rather than defensive side.

“Initially the right-wing attacked our legislation by saying it is anti-Hindu and we should exclude Muslims (who were supporting us in the effort),” said Sawant. “But we told them that the law in Seattle already protects people from discrimination on the basis of religion.

“If you say ‘I'm against caste discrimination, but I'm against this legislation because it's anti-Hindu’, that's completely false. If you are against caste discrimination, then you will support this legislation. If you don't support this legislation, then you are for caste discrimination.”

As Sawant correctly points out, while a few women have drafted the legislation and have brought it to the forefront of the Seattle City Council, the passing of the bill, in reality, owes to the efforts of people who challenge and battle against discrimination on a daily basis.

Two-thirds of Dalit respondents in a 2016 national survey, conducted by the Oakland-based Equality Labs, reported experiencing prejudice at work. One-third claimed that they had encountered it while receiving their education while half of them said they were afraid of facing discrimination if they disclosed their identity.

To what extent things change after this legislation is brought into practice is something only time will tell. Now, it is vital that efforts are made to counter caste-based discriminatory practices, replacing them with those based on equality and inclusivity.