‘Upper-caste Indians are Nazis’. ‘Hindu scriptures do nothing but bring violence and pain’. ‘Hindu texts give spiritual foundation for slavery’. These hateful comments aren’t anonymous diatribes on social media, but remarks made during public trainings and seminars by the founder and Executive Director of Equality Labs, Thenmozhi Soundararajan. Her organization was the primary supporter of California’s so-called anti-caste discrimination bill SB 403. Thankfully, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the ill-conceived bill on 7 October.
South Asians and Hindu Americans across California are breathing a sigh of relief, it’s the defeat of hate and the triumph of truth.
The introduction of SB 403 was just the latest and perhaps most dangerous missive in a disturbing trend of targeting South Asian-Americans, especially Hindus, under the guise of social justice.
The original language of SB 403 not only singled out specific South Asian nations, but also made ugly, unsubstantiated claims about South Asian Americans engaging in caste-motivated harassment and discrimination as well as human trafficking, rape, and violence.
Also read: Dismissal of Cisco case proves engineers were targetted because they were Indian
SB 403 and Hindu American rights
One would think that if a bill sought a striking departure from the well-established practice of enacting facially neutral laws, as SB 403 did, it would need some kind of official documentation—incident reports, arrests or convictions—to prove the cited caste-based crimes. At least, citing specific incidents would be seen as a better option than demonising an entire ethnic minority. But nothing of the sort was offered by California’s senator, Aisha Wahab, nor did the overwhelming majority of her colleagues in the senate demand any evidence. The bill was passed even after hundreds of South Asian Californians sent letters, made phone calls and held meetings with the senators to share concerns about SB 403’s impact on their civil rights.
The bill’s journey and passage through California’s Assembly brought some amendments, which removed the overtly racist language against South Asians. Such references to South Asians painted them as one of two things—explicitly oppressed or implicitly oppressors. The amendments also attempted to redefine the racially-charged term ‘caste’, change it to a clarification of ‘ancestry’ and reduced the 65 mentions of it to less than 10. Other more facially neutral terms like ‘lineal descent’, ‘parentage’, ‘heritage’ were added but ‘caste’ and a convoluted definition of it stayed in the bill.
While Wahab and her co-sponsor, California Assembly member Jasmeet Bains, continued to claim the worthy goal of non-discrimination, the Assembly Judiciary Committee’s analysis exposed the bill’s discriminatory intent. It revealed that virtually all of the background information and letters Senator Wahab and supporters of SB 403 provided to the Committee reinforced the notion that ‘caste’ was synonymous with South Asian.
The truth is caste or community-based discrimination is exceedingly rare. Neither the champions of SB 403 nor most of the journalists covering developments on the bill shared this fact.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in partnership with researchers from Johns Hopkins and University of Pennsylvania, conducted the only authoritative survey on the social realities of Indian-Americans in 2021. It found that experiences of alleged discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, colour and national origin by Indian Americans were common. Experiences with alleged caste-based discrimination were not. Among those claiming to have faced caste discrimination, a significant number said the alleged perpetrators were non-South Asians. This indicated to the researchers that caste may have been confused with some other basis.
The Carnegie survey also found that a majority of Hindu respondents do not identify with any caste group at all. And that caste or community identification diminishes with subsequent generations born outside of India.
The Hindu American Foundation, its supporters, and allies opposed SB 403 because we don’t condone intra-community discrimination in any form. We have maintained that discrimination is wrong; ‘caste’ as a category targets Hindu Americans and South Asians for disparate legal scrutiny and treatment. And the existing law already covers alleged intra-community discrimination.
This is a position with which Newsom agrees. So does the California Civil Rights Department (CRD) given that it filed the first and only case of alleged caste discrimination against Cisco Systems using existing laws.
Hateful activism
The CRD made errors, which is why we took them to court. It made a heavy-handed attempt to create a caste category through litigation rather than using the existing categories. It also disparaged Hinduism by defining caste as “a strict Hindu social and religious hierarchy” in which “untouchability” is a required practice. The CRD submitted declarations and documents, including statements from Equality Labs Executive Director and like-minded activists, containing false and hateful claims about Hindus and Hinduism.
It made racist and unsubstantiated claims about Indian origin workers, called them “upper” caste and accused them of bringing caste-discrimination to the US—without ever interviewing them. The CRD suppressed exculpatory evidence about the two Indian origin engineers it publicly targeted, including the fact that one of the defendants recruited CRD’s client, who claims to be Dalit, with a starting package of several million dollars in stocks as well as being hired at the highest grade among engineers in the group. The defendant also offered key leadership positions to another colleague, who also identifies as Dalit, at Cisco. All this happened before the state’s lawsuit.
SB 403 threatened to place a racist weapon in the hands of a state agency, which has demonstrated a racist animosity towards South Asians, and Hindus, in its claim of alleged caste discrimination. But thankfully, the bill is dead (though similar legislation could well be introduced in the future) and California’s Civil Rights Department faces a civil rights lawsuit in federal court.
Hopefully, the truth about the hateful activism driving legislation and litigation will come to light, ending at least a few pages in an ugly chapter of Indian and Hindu American history. But the stigma and harm that has come from State actors, activists, and the media targeting our communities on the basis of where we come from and the faith we follow has only begun.
Suhag A. Shukla is the co-founder and executive director of the Hindu American Foundation. She tweets @SuhagAShukla. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)