New Delhi: California may become the first state in the US to make caste discrimination illegal, if its Senate passes a Bill introduced by a lawmaker to this effect.
Some of the world’s biggest tech companies are based in California. Caste-based discrimination is a growing concern in these companies that employ a huge number of South Asians in their workforce.
Bill to outlaw casteism
On March 22, Senator Aisha Wahab, a lawmaker from the Democratic Party, introduced a Bill in the California Senate that aims to add caste as a protected category in the state’s anti-discrimination laws. It will provide protection to citizens from caste-based harassment at their workplaces, and in sectors such as housing and education as well.
“We want to ensure organisations and companies do not entrench caste discrimination in their practices or policies, and in order to do that, we need to make it plainly clear that discrimination based on caste is against the law,” a statement released by Equality Labs, a US-based Dalit civil rights organisation that aims to end caste discrimination, quoted Wahab as saying, per The Quint.
Wahab, an Afghan-American, represents the 10th district in California which is home to a large number of South Asians. Many have faced caste discrimination at work, Wahab told the BBC.
Casteism, a growing concern
Caste-based discrimination is a growing concern in the US. In 2020, a few weeks after the state of California filed a case against software networking company Cisco for caste-based discrimination at the company, 30 Dalit women working in the state in software companies called out their Indian bosses, accusing them of discriminating them based on caste.
Also read: California’s Legal Ground in Battling Caste Discrimination Takes Centre Stage in Historic Cisco Case
Caste equity activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan was scheduled to give a talk at Google in April for Dalit History Month last year, but it was cancelled when some Hindu employees felt they were being ‘targetted’ for their religion, US news media reported.
However, several companies including Dell, Apple, and Amazon now include caste-proficiency in some employee manuals and trainings, per a news report.
However, there is a long process for the Bill that Wahab introduced to become a law: it has to be passed by Senate committees, the Senate and the assembly, among others.
A month ago, Seattle became the first US city to ban caste discrimination. The states of Colorado and Michigan in the US recently declared April 14 as Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Equity Day, while Canada’s British Columbia province declared April as Dalit History Month.
