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“Hindu society is like a tower, each floor of which is allotted to one caste. The point worth remembering is that this tower has no staircase and therefore there is no way of climbing up or down from one floor to another. The floor on which one is born is also the floor on which one dies. No matter how meritorious a person from a lower floor might be, there is no avenue for him to climb up to the upper floor. Likewise, there is no means by which a person entirely devoid of merit can be relegated to a floor beneath the one to which he has been assigned” - Ambedkar
It looks like the culture of caste discrimination that emerged in India, and is still practiced in most societies in the country is slowly being echoed across the world, especially in Silicon Valley.
(Source: TRT World)
“The attitude was: He’s a Dalit, let him struggle.”
Before we jump into the discussion of what is happening, let’s try and understand the context. Since the 1950’s, educational institutions and government jobs have had a system of reservation for quotas, lowering the bar for entry for the marginalized communities in the country. The entire debate around the reservation system has been hotly debated, leading to elite institutions in the country creating caste-based resentment, particularly IIT’s due to the perceived “preferential treatment” given to these groups, making them victims of targeted hazing and ridicule.
(Source: Bloomberg)
Senior IIT students partake in a hazing ritual “kholna”, where first-year students are required to reveal their full names, hometowns, and rank in their entrance exam, a way of ascertaining their caste and if they secured a seat through the reservation policy. According to Ram Kumar, an IIT Delhi alum who has been working in the Silicon Valley for more than two decades said that the Silicon Valley is a “mini-India arranged by clusters of Indian hierarchy”.
Caste-based resentment at the IITs can run high. In one video posted on YouTube in 2018, a student poring over a pile of books is labeled “GEN,” for general pool, while the two students sleeping nearby are identified as “SC” and “ST.” In another post circulated widely among IIT groups last year, a student suggested Covid-19 should also give preferential treatment to the marginalized groups. “My dear Corona,” it said in Hindi. “In every sphere, SC/STs get first preference. So if you can, please look into the same.”
According to a 2017 study, While most IIT graduates get recruited for high-paying jobs, lower caste students are half as likely to get similar jobs.
“Caste and class run parallel at the IITs, which are a microcosm of Indian society. For Dalits, life on the campus is a daily reminder of who they are”
Even though India has several anti-discriminatory laws, penalizing those who discriminate on the basis of caste, race, or gender. The question is why is the practice still so prevalent?
(Source: MoneyControl)
In a 2016 survey of students at IIT (BHU) Varanasi, World Bank economist Priyanka Pandey and her brother, activist Sandeep Pandey, found that Dalits not only experience more discrimination and negativity than others, but their academic performance is also lower, even after controlling for different socioeconomic backgrounds.
Why Does it Matter?
In 2020, a Dalit graduate from IIT Bombay who works at Cisco Systems in Silicon Valley filed a lawsuit against two of his superiors alleging caste-based discrimination. Soon, this prompted hundreds of lower-caste Indian tech workers in Silicon Valley to report similar cases of harassment.
Cisco denied the charges, arguing "caste isn’t a protected category under US civil rights laws, the allegations are immaterial and should be stricken,".
(Source: The Wire)
While Cisco is fighting very hard to shut down the lawsuit, claiming that ‘caste’ isn’t a protected category under US civil rights laws, the anger and uproar caused by this lawsuit might lead to the US recognizing for the first time caste as a category for anti-discrimination law.
Caste in India speaks, as race does in America, to centuries of social, cultural, and economic divisions.
After the lawsuit was announced, Equality Labs, a nonprofit advocacy group for Dalit rights, received complaints about caste bias from nearly 260 U.S. tech workers in three weeks, reported through the group’s website or in emails to individual staffers. Allegations included caste-based slurs and jokes, bullying, discriminatory hiring practices, bias in peer reviews, and sexual harassment, said executive director Thenmozhi Soundararajan. The highest number of claims were from workers at Facebook (33), followed by Cisco (24), Google (20), Microsoft (18), IBM (17), and Amazon (14). The companies all said they don’t tolerate discrimination.
American law protects workers from disparate treatment based on a handful of characteristics, including race, sex, religion, and disability status. This was the first time, though, that anyone had argued those protections should extend to Dalits. The complaint said that the employee had faced discrimination by two upper-caste managers since 2015 and that he had reported them to human resources for outing him as a Dalit.
Advocacy groups in the U.S. have weighed in on both sides. The Hindu American Foundation filed a declaration in support of Cisco, saying that though it vehemently opposes “all forms of prejudice and discrimination,” the state’s case “blatantly violates the rights of Hindu Americans.” Meanwhile, the Ambedkar International Center, a Dalit advocacy group, filed a brief in support of the state, encouraging the court to acknowledge caste discrimination and set a precedent prohibiting it. “American civil rights law has little experience with the Indian caste system, but it is very familiar with the idea of caste: the notion that some people are born to low stations in life in which they are forced to remain,” the motion reads.
The industry has been criticized for doing too little to rectify a culture that is hostile to women, black people, and Latinos. Even though companies have taken up tokenistic steps like town-halls, public promises to do better, on caste they have largely pleaded ignorance.
“It would be naive for U.S. companies to assume that Indian hires leave their prejudices on the subcontinent,” says Sarit K. Das, a professor of mechanical engineering at IIT Madras who until February was director of IIT Ropar.
Government data showed that 15 of the 31 departments at IIT Delhi and 16 of 26 at IIT Bombay admitted zero students from the Scheduled Castes to their doctoral programs last year.
“I have chaired hundreds of faculty selection committees, and the discrimination against Dalits is never overt. It’s always about the attitude toward the candidates, the questions asked, and the judgment,” says Das. “We follow the rules in the letter but not in spirit.”
The question now is, have we really evolved as a society? What can we do as individuals and organizations to ensure that caste-based discrimination doesn’t take place? Are we still living in our upper-caste upper-class bubble ignoring the atrocities committed against minorities?