New Delhi: Hinduism and Hindus are poorly understood in the United States and the Coalition of Hindus of North America (CoHNA) is trying to change that, the group’s chief of communications, Pushpita Prasad, said in an interview to ThePrint.
CoHNA is a grassroots faith-based organisation working on highlighting issues faced by the Hindu community across the US and Canada. Its mission, it says, is to lend a voice to Hindus across the continent, counter misinformation about them and educate people about Hindu heritage.
But it’s an uphill battle in a country where the Indian diaspora is one of the largest growing communities—in terms of influence, wealth and demographics.
“There’s a lot of conflation between Indian issues and diaspora Hindu issues. And while there can be some overlap, a lot of the issues we’ve been fighting are directly linked to the fact that Indian politics doesn’t have a direct overlap into our lives, and we resist attempts to do that,” said Prasad.
Some of these issues include navigating the conversation around caste in the US. Groups like CoHNA argue that including caste as a protected category in American workplaces unfairly discriminates against a certain population—Hindus in the US—because casteism is associated with just Hinduism as a religion.
The issue has been bubbling over since 2020, said Prasad, owing to two factors: the publication of American journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste, which essentially transposes the American experience of racism onto casteism, and the Cisco caste discrimination lawsuit.
Two Indian-American managers at Cisco were accused of discriminating and harassing an employee on the basis of caste in the first employment lawsuit about alleged casteism in the US that started the conversation about caste in the country.
The charges against them were dismissed in April 2023. Many in the Hindu American community celebrated the dismissal and claimed that the case tarnished an entire community.
“In the US, there is a strict First Amendment and a separation between church and state, which means that taxpayer-funded bodies should not be defining religion,” said Prasad. “Effectively, this lawsuit was defining religion and telling us what Hinduism is and isn’t—which isn’t their charter.”
Caste as a ‘protected category’
Most Hindu immigrant children in the US first learn about caste in the classroom, which is often at odds with their lived experience as Hindus, said Prasad.
“Put yourself in the shoes of a sixth or seventh grader,” said Prasad, adding that Hindu children are a minority in an average American school. “What you end up seeing is a very horrific presentation of your religion.”
The chapter on Hinduism is taught through the lens of “caste, conflict, cows”, said Prasad, and this simplistic understanding of caste bleeds into modern diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices.
But groups like CoHNA argue that laws already exist in the US to prevent discrimination, and introducing caste as a protected category in a country and culture that might not fully understand caste practices would adversely affect certain sections of the population.
Prasad said that while this seems like “feel-good, harmless activism”, it could actually damage the professional prospects of Hindu workers.
It’s why CoHNA opposes the SB-403 Bill passed by the California legislature in 2023. The anti-caste discrimination bill seeks to combat caste discrimination in the US and strengthen protection for marginalised communities across the state.
“We find that ‘caste’ is a word used to deny Hindus their rights to speak up effectively,” said Prasad. “It’s a label that shuts people down very quickly.”
She added that the understanding of caste and the conversation around it is not as mainstream in the US as it is elsewhere.
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Checking the DEI box
Prasad also cited a study on DEI by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) at Rutgers University in New Jersey. The study found that DEI training materials on caste created perceptional biases in a group that had never encountered the concept before—creating a “hostile attribution bias”.
“There’s no logic to this, but it doesn’t matter because you’re talking about a group that’s hardly known in the US,” said Prasad. “It’s unfair to simply apply the race construct to caste and draw the same equivalences.”
Prasad said that the study villainises Brahmins and could lead to a situation where Hindu managers could be misunderstood and penalised.
The US is a “completely different paradigm” for Indian students and workers, who tend to move to the US and retain their Indian lens on caste.
Her advice to Indians looking to move to the US and Canada is to get educated—major tech companies, like Apple, IBM, Cisco and Salesforce, have caste as a protected category in the workplace.
“So you, as a manager, might need to be very scared,” said Prasad, adding that the next time a manager does a review, the person they give a lower review to or have a conflict with could accuse them of casteism.
“Be aware of what you’re walking into, because this is policy at several places… You want to make sure that coming to the US or Canada does not mean you have to surrender your religious rights,” said Prasad.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)