[Thread] The efforts of Equality Labs & their allies in media & elsewhere are beginning to pay off. Tech giant Apple officially recognizes caste as a cause of potential discrimination by including it in its updated general employee conduct policy. indiatoday.in (1/19)
The update came after the much-hyped case of ‘caste discrimination’ in Cisco Systems when an employee from a so-called lower caste accused two higher-caste colleagues of blocking his career. (2/19)
An internal probe found no evidence of discrimination and some of the allegations as ‘baseless’. Eventually, The California Department of Fair Employment & Housing voluntarily dropped the federal lawsuit filed against Cisco Systems, intending to refile it in a state court. (3/19)
Meanwhile, Equality Labs had already created enough noise about caste discrimination in corporate America, and to make their case persuasive, they had conducted a survey on "Caste Apartheid" within the Indian diaspora. (4/19)
Although the survey claimed to be "comprehensive", its sample size was just 1500, which included respondents not just from India but also from Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Trinidad/Tobago, Guyana, Fiji, Tanzania, and even Kenya. (5/19)
The report had other gaping flaws too. It cited an instance of vegetarian dietary preference among Indians as a form of caste oppression. The anecdote involved the claim of a lower caste woman being discriminated against by upper caste Hindus. (6/19)
The basis of the claim is the refusal of upper caste Hindus to partake of a non-vegetarian dish prepared by the woman on Diwali, a Hindu festival, and labeling it 'non-vegetarian' in large font. (7/19)
That this amounts to discrimination is projected as self-evident truth when the fact is that vegetarianism is an ideal for a large number of communities in India irrespective of their caste, and even so for those who consume meat. (8/19)
It is common for non-vegetarian Hindus from different castes to abstain from eating meat on certain religious occasions like Diwali. It is clear as daylight to anyone familiar with Hindu cultural practices that the above simply cannot be construed as discrimination. (9/19)
Further, it says, “An overwhelming majority of all Muslim, Christian, & Sikh respondents in this survey reported being non-vegetarian. This is replicated in India where these same communities are also prominently associated with eating beef & working with cow products.” (10/19)
This claim is again based on half-truths, obscuring the fact that Amrit-dhari/'baptized' Sikhs religiously abstain from meat & that Sikhs have been historically against cow slaughter/beef consumption. In Sikh rule under Ranjit Singh, cow slaughter was punishable by death. (11/19)
While the report itself admits that the sample size of so-called tribals was just (handpicked?) twelve, it bolsters its claim of oppression using a trivial account of a tribal respondent who was supposedly harassed for his ‘animal-like’ look in school. (12/19)
Last we checked, school kids around the world mock each other by making comparisons with animals without bringing their caste into the equation. How this would amount to caste discrimination remains a mystery. (13/19)
There're other pointless anecdotes. Eg a Shetty respondent reports feeling discriminated against by Iyengars, ignoring reality of Shetty representing what MN Srinivas calls a dominant caste due to land ownership, income, & other socio-economic privileges over Iyengars. (14/19)
Notwithstanding the above, the hue and cry generated around the case served its purpose of shifting the Overton Window towards problematizing caste as a real cause of discrimination within the Indian-American community in corporate America. (15/19)
The blame for the above cannot be placed exclusively on the anti-Hindu agenda of Equality Labs. The unfortunate reality is that many Hindus themselves are oblivious of the functional role of caste in Indian socio-economic history. (16/19)
As the entire affirmative action policy of modern India rests on assumptions of "centuries of oppression" as opposed to circumstantial disadvantages spread across the caste spectrum, it legitimizes the false equivalence drawn between caste and race. (17/19)
The genesis of this insidious equivalence goes back to Colonial scholarship and pseudoscience. Yet the same tropes continue to haunt the modern discourse on caste and influence lawmakers and politicians to this day. More on it here: pragyata.com (18/19)
Action by Apple will be replicated across corp America. Unless there's a reassessment of colonial assumptions & reframing of debate on caste in India, it's futile to blame agenda-driven orgs like Equality Labs for castigating American Hindus for crimes they never committed. [End]
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