DEI created a new caste system in America and hurt economy

DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – is about destroying society and aggregating power in a few hands by promising an ideal world that does not exist outside a fantasy.

File photo of US President Donald Trump | Photo courtesy: Reuters

The retreat of DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – from large parts of corporate America and the federal government may or may not sustain. It may not sustain especially if Democratic-ruled states choose to retain them, and if a reverse in the 2026 elections changes the composition of the United States Senate and Congress in favour of Democrats.

This is, thus, as good a time as any to analyse the damage DEI was doing to the most dynamic economy in the world. While no one can deny the importance of diversity and inclusion, it cannot be forced down people’s throats without consequences. It’s like using antibiotics excessively till they start doing damage to the body.

If you look closely at what goes for DEI, what you will see is the invention of a new caste system, including both varna and jati, with virulent American characteristics. It is all driven by victimhood theory, and not organic growth as was the case in ancient India.

A few examples of the damage first.

Some years ago, a Cisco engineer, Sundar Iyer, was wrongly accused of caste-based discrimination by a fellow Dalit engineer, even though the latter was recruited by Iyer and given a huge amount of Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs). The alleged reason for bringing up the caste bias accusation was the denial of an increment, but this case could not ultimately stand scrutiny and had to be dropped. But not before Iyer was subject to years of mental agony.

Asian Americans, including Indians, were the worst affected by DEI in Ivy League institutions, where race was an important factor in selection. This ended only after the US Supreme Court banned race-based affirmative action in 2023.

Weaponising social justice

To understand how DEI and other social justice norms were impacting both corporate America and Indians specifically, you can do no better than to read two books, both by Indian Americans –  Vivek Ramaswamy, a US presidential candidate who ended up endorsing Donald Trump, and Rajiv Malhotra, a former entrepreneur-turned-Dharmic activist. Ramaswamy’s book Woke Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, and Rajiv Malhotra’s Snakes in the Ganga (co-authored with Vijaya Viswanathan), explain how social justice was weaponised to let Cultural Marxists dictate corporate policies. While Ramaswamy focuses on the phoney concerns of corporate America alone, he calls it a scam because the adoption of DEI allowed companies to make more money rather than less.

An example is Goldman Sachs, which has never in the past been known for pursuing moral concerns. It announced grandly at Davos some years ago that it would not pilot any Initial Public Offering (IPO) if the company involved does not follow DEI and other sustainability policies. Its profits rose as the commentariat and Leftists gave it the thumbs up. But a few weeks ago, after Trump took over, Goldman Sachs dropped DEI unceremoniously as there were ‘legal issues‘ involved.

Belief in DEI-ism is apparently only skin-deep.

Snakes in the Ganga establishes the role of Cultural Marxists in damaging real liberalism by creating a culture of fear in campuses and corporations, and how China (among others) indirectly supported social justice fads to weaken American society even while itself steering clear of it.

DEI also allowed a large and profitable business to develop around people who take diversity seminars and corporate classes on race, caste and minorities. An outfit with the pretentious title, Equality Labs, run by a Dalit and a key beneficiary of DEI-ism, raised hell when its boss Thenmozhi Soundararajan was denied an opportunity to speak to Google employees. The DEI-ists struck back when they forced Google to cancel a talk by Rajiv Malhotra, who opposed DEI.

Huge internal bureaucracies were created in institutions and companies with low accountability. The guiding lights of these motley groups of DEI-ists were tenured Left-liberal-Cultural Marxist academics.

DEI varna system

Now for my caste with American characteristics theory.

The difference between the Indian varna-jati complex and the one that has been invented in the US is this: while Indian jatis were real, varna in the Indian context was a theoretical construct, and attained rigid characteristics only in recent centuries, especially during the British colonial era, when jatis were arbitrarily stuffed into varna categories. Before that many jatis had no clue as to their place in the varna pecking order. In the US, both varna and jati are (or were before Trump) being cast in stone based on theoretical premises. DEI is Manusmriti Squared, without any of the latter’s redeeming features (contrary to popular belief, Manusmriti was not all about caste-based discrimination).

The US DEI-based caste system did not evolve naturally like Indian jatis, which were (and still largely are) endogamous social groups based on vocation or geographical location. Jatis probably became endogamous in the past for a reason: it was a way of preserving craft and skill knowledge within related groups and families. It was about building social capital for mutual support in difficult times. It gave the social group Intellectual Property Rights protection when neither access to capital nor IPR protection existed.

In contrast, the DEI caste system is totally inorganic, the product of academic invention and over-reach.

Let me first describe the DEI varna system as it appears to exist now.

At the top, the priesthood, is academia, the theoretical pushers of ideas such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), intersectionality, Cultural Marxism, and post-modernism – or what collectively goes under the name of “wokeism”. Post-modernism is about challenging all established narratives of modernism, whether it is the European Enlightenment or merit or Eurocentrism. What the priesthood says cannot be questioned, or you may be cancelled or targeted. This was the case with Roland Fryer, whose research suggested that there was no specific racial bias in police shootings. He also offered non-racial explanations for the Black-White achievement gap – which upset the ruling DEI cabal at Harvard where Fryer is a tenured professor. A secret Harvard panel barred him for two years from teaching or using university resources for alleged inappropriate behaviour with some women. They couldn’t fire him as he was tenured.

The next two varnas already existed before the DEI idea took hold. Only it is more powerful than in any ancient power structure.

At the second rung after the DEI priesthood is the kshatriya varna, which includes the powerful US military-industrial complex and the domestic gun lobby. The former supports the war in Ukraine and West Asia, and makes enormous profits from exporting arms and ammo in the name of defending Ukrainian democracy from the autocrat Vladimir Putin. The latter does the same at home, using the US Second Amendment, which debars the state from limiting people’s access to guns, again resulting in mass killing and mindless individual violence and murders. The kshatriya clan has no particular patience with DEI but accommodates some wishes of the priesthood in order to retain legitimacy.

The third rung is the Vaishya, who usually do not take sides in political confrontations and go along with the dominant ideology of the day in order to protect their businesses. This group adopted DEI when that was the reigning idea during Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s time, and has now changed its tune since Trump frowns on DEI. This category includes the big Tech Titans, which took to DEI in a big way under Obama and Biden, and is now easing itself out of the stranglehold.

It is the fourth category, aka shudras in the varna system, that is now being invented in multiple jatis. One example is the deliberately narrow classification of people with some gender and sexual differences into rigid sub-categories defined by the term LGBTQIA+. The plus sign indicates that the fourth layer of jatis will be expanded depending on what the priesthood thinks appropriate. Nobody is asking for discrimination against anyone who sees himself/herself as a part of LGBTQIA+, but the endless extensions suggest that this is an effort to create a new majority of the class.

What is different about the American varna-jati system from the Indian one is its inherent binary nature, a feature of Eurocentric Christianity and Islamic evolution, where it is necessary to belong to the “right” side. Either you are with us or against us. If you don’t believe in my God, you are a Satan worshipper, or a kafir (non-believer), someone deserving of lesser rights. The Christian binary starts from the separation of church from state and ends on the battlefield where those on the right side of God and Good must battle the rest. Ditto for Islamism. Marxism took this binary forward by separating the capitalist class and the bourgeoisie from the proletariat, and Cultural Marxism brought this binary conflict to culture.

This fourth category is artificially inflated by adding minority racial and other groups, ignoring the actual character of these groups. Cultural Marxism, as proposed by the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, decided that unless the culture underpinning a dominant ideology is destroyed by dividing the oppressor and oppressed into antagonist categories, true equality is not possible.

Thus Blacks and Muslims are automatically deemed to be part of the oppressed, and Whites, Jews and Hindus (except Dalits) are part of the oppressor class, the latter two categories being declared to be “White adjacent”. Hindus were lumped together with the oppressor class, even though they constitute a very tiny minority in the US, and subjected to various forms of racial abuse themselves. DEI draws its inspiration from Gramsci and post-modernist thought, and indirectly from the Christian concept of “original sin.” If you are born into the designated oppressor class, even if there is not a single racial bone in your body or bigoted thought in your mind, you still have to pay for the sin of being born White or Jew or Hindu. Cultural Marxism and American Islamism are in an unholy alliance to push DEI.

America and the world must call out DEI for what it really is. It is not necessarily about inclusion, but inclusion of the “chosen” jatis, and exclusion of the “dominant jatis”, often on the basis of artificial categorisations. This will lead to the destruction of social harmony, which will benefit only anarchists and autocrats.

As Thomas Sowell, an African-American public intellectual, would often say, social justice is often uneven because human beings are flawed. The pursuit of perfect diversity, equality, or inclusion by its most ardent backers is, on the other hand, the pursuit of “cosmic justice” – where justice is defined in terms of equality of outcomes rather than just better opportunity for those left behind. It ultimately prevents the emergence of genuine and achievable justice.

DEI is about destroying society and aggregating power in a few hands by promising an ideal world that does not exist outside a fantasy.

R Jagannathan is eminent editor and former editorial director of Swarajya magazine. Views are personal.

(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)