Today, Explained - Caste away

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

A bill outlawing caste-based discrimination in California could become the first law of its kind in the US. Reporter Sonia Paul explains the backlash to the bill, and Georgetown University’s Ananya Chakravarti explains how India's ancient social hierarchy became a problem here. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah and Isabel Angell with an assist from Siona Peterous, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by David Herman, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Not long ago, reporter Sonia Paul was working on a story about caste discrimination in California. Caste is a tradition that comes from India. It's a hereditary identity where some people are at the top of society and some are at the bottom. Anyway, Sonia asked a source, have you ever experienced caste discrimination here in the U.S.? So it happens all the time. What's the one that like maybe is most outrageous or hurts the most? The handshake. What is the handshake? I run into this gentleman. We shake hands. He's holding a tissue in his hand right where he states his cast. Then he says, you have to hold a tissue. You never know who you're shaking hands with.

I said, really? I am that untouchable. I'm that untouchable. Now the state of California wants to make this caste discrimination illegal. That's coming up on Today Explained. This NFL season, get in on all the hard-hitting action with FanDuel, North America's number one sportsbook. You can bet on anything from money lines to spreads and player props, or combine your bets in a same-game parlay for a shot at an even bigger payout. Plus, with super-simple live betting, lightning-fast bet settlement, and instant withdrawals, FanDuel makes betting on the NFL easier than ever before. So make the most of this football season and download FanDuel today.

19-plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Reporter Sonia Paul has been covering cast in the United States for the past several years, and she recently reported and hosted a BBC documentary called The Hidden Caste Codes in Silicon Valley. We called Sonia to talk about this bill that California's Governor Gavin Newsom is about to sign into law. This law would ban caste discrimination in workplaces, houses, and schools. So I started by asking Sonia to explain what caste is. In its most basic sense, caste is a social identity that is determined by your family.

There are people at the top and there are people at the bottom. At the top of this system is a group of people known as Brahmins. And at the bottom, technically outside the caste system, they are outcast are the Dalits. What kind of jobs do Dalits have historically? Yes. Historically, they took on jobs like manual scavenging, which is basically cleaning human excrement or street sweeping. Basically, all the jobs that were deemed to be unclean or impure. I associate caste with India. Is this purely an Indian thing? basically all the jobs that were deemed to be unclean or impure. I associate caste with India. Is this purely an Indian thing? No, and this is a common misunderstanding. Caste was first mentioned in ancient Hindu scripture,

but over time it permeated other religions and it exists throughout South Asia. So you would also find it, say, in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and in parts of the world where you would have South Asian diasporas. You've spoken to a lot of people who have talked about experiencing caste discrimination in your reporting. What do they tell you? What does caste discrimination look like? So people can tell caste often based on last name or a person's ancestral village or what their families historically did for a living, right? So in the BBC documentary I reported, actually, there was a tech worker who, you know received very excellent performance evaluations throughout his time at a tech company which is a well-known tech company here in the united states and afterward he had a manager switch and the new manager also indian origin had asked about the pronunciation of his last name. Hey, your last name spelled P-I-L-L-I, Pillai.

And is it Pillai or Pili? Pillai in South India is an affluent caste last name. And Pili, in our native language, in Telugu, only the majority of Dalit communities have that last name. And afterward, he received the lowest performance appraisals he's ever received. I have been given a zero, putting me in not met category to my job's responsibility. And he actually went to his company, but they determined that no caste discrimination had occurred. Of course, at the time, there was

no policy in place about that. But if you were to think about that situation, it sounded like there was maybe unconscious bias or a perception that this person wasn't working up to par once you know their caste background. So another dimension of this is that many people who are from these Dalit communities or marginalized caste backgrounds actually hide their identities. So I spoke with a man, Dr. Singh, he's actually one of the most vocal supporters of the cast bill now. And he told me about when he was applying for residency, he actually had somebody who was in a position of power to help that process, literally ask him his cast background. He did ask me, oh, do you belong to this cast, upper cast?

And he knew that person was from a dominant caste background. I was kind of dumbfounded at that time. What should I answer? Because if I say yes, then it might make him feel good. If I say it different, then his response might change. And so Dr. Singh basically lied and said he was of the same background as well because he didn't want to risk revealing his actual caste identity and that person not wanting to help him out in the same manner anymore. Where did the idea of legally outlawing caste discrimination come from? How did this get started?

This understanding of outlawing caste in legal terms has been going around for a long time, right? But the most prominent example, I think, came in 2020, in the summer of 2020, in the middle of the protests after the murder of George Floyd. News broke of a lawsuit against Cisco, which is a multinational company based in Silicon Valley. It's headquartered in San Jose. The state of California sued Cisco Systems on behalf of a Dalit engineer, just like Cornelius, on an all-Indian work team. The lawsuit claims that when the engineer's dominant caste bosses found out his caste, they discriminated against him and then retaliated when he complained

to HR. Alleging that two managers had discriminated against a person because he's Dillett. And so that lawsuit was against the managers, but also against Cisco, the company itself. And after the Cisco lawsuit, we saw kind of a wave of other colleges and universities adding caste as a protected category. The California Democratic Party added caste as a protected category. And then in February of this year, Seattle became the first American city to ban caste discrimination. This will be a systemic legal way to stop this from growing in Seattle. And just recently, Fresno became the second city and first city in California to do just the same. Fresno authorities officially marked caste and indigeneity

as two protected categories in Fresno Municipal Code on Friday after city council members unanimously voted to do so. The California bill has opponents. Who are the opponents? Who opposes this? So the most vocal opposition to the California bill comes from some Hindu groups and individuals who say that naming caste in the law, even if it's a subset of ancestry, just the fact that you're saying the word caste, it's basically going to malign Hindus because of the popular understanding between caste and Hinduism. And they are calling for Gavin Newsom to veto the bill. I would just ask, why is anybody supporting a racist law like SB 403, which presumes that a community is guilty until they can prove themselves innocent? So bottom line is we're stereotyped

over this term too much already, and then you add this law on top of it, it just, you know, amplifies that, and that's not fair. I would assume the people who are opposing this law to ban discrimination are upper caste. Is that fair? Yes, I think that's fair, especially because the vast majority of Indian Americans have historically come from these dominant caste communities. And that has to do with the fact that, you know, post-1965, the U.S. wanted a lot of skilled workers. The people who had the resources to make it over here and be selected by U.S. immigration policy were people from dominant caste backgrounds. So earlier this year, California had a bunch of hearings about the bill. And I spoke with a lot of the opposition,

many of whom just said like caste is not relevant. There are also people that I spoke with who blatantly feel that this is an attack on Hinduism and that there's no way that you can separate the definition of caste from Hinduism. And in the US also, no one asks each other which caste you are. None of us know which is the other Indian, which caste they belong to. And we don't care if you're Dalit or you're Brahmin.

We are all Indians and we all go to temple. Why do you think we're seeing these attempts at legislation concentrated on the West Coast and not in other places with big Indian American or South Asian populations like New York or Illinois? I think a lot of that has to do with how many of the initial complaints that came out about caste discrimination in the wake of the Cisco lawsuit came from tech companies. So Seattle is a major tech hub. California with Silicon Valley is a major tech hub. And it also has to do with where do you have the will of lawmakers to introduce such legislation? So in Seattle,

it was Shama Sawant, who is a socialist and Indian American, who introduced this bill. In California, it was Senator Ayesha Wahab, who is also progressive. So it's like, where are these people who are kind of making waves and talking about caste discrimination? A, where are their lawmakers paying attention and wanting to do something about it? You've talked to people who really want these anti-caste discrimination laws passed. What do they imagine will happen once this becomes law? What gets better for them? I mean, two things are happening simultaneously.

One is that people are talking about caste discrimination. Two is you actually see people from these marginalized caste backgrounds coming out and asserting themselves. You know, they're not hiding their identities anymore. And so a bill to ban caste discrimination only does so much in the workplace and housing and education and so on and so forth. But the hope is that once you put it into the law, A, you assert this exists. B, you assert that you're not going to tolerate it anymore. And so it trickles down from the law and that healing can begin when they feel comfortable asserting their identities in the public, right? So there's a lot going on here, especially given the fact that caste atrocities continue to this day in South Asia.

What can happen here in California that can sort of set the motion for the rest of the world to understand this pain. Sonia Paul is a journalist in California who covers CAST. Coming up, how CAST has shaped Indian politics, including entrenching the authoritarian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Thank you. card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp.

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So we called up Ananya Chakravarti, a professor of history at Georgetown, because she has this really interesting argument. She says caste is not a relic. It is affecting Indian politics bigly. Caste discrimination is illegal in India now. But when it was made illegal, there was a violent backlash. And that backlash, Ananya says, helped propel the authoritarian Narendra Modi into power. So the story starts when India outlaws caste discrimination, which was? So right after independence, actually, so it was banned in 1948, and then that impulse was then enshrined in our constitution.

I don't want to paint this kind of rosy picture of like, we became independent, we banned caste, and then everything was great. Caste, if anything, receded into the private sphere to some extent. We are actually Shudras, lower caste. To be specific, sir, we people... You can't mention that. We are not supposed to mention it. That applies to you, sir. Yes, but I can mention it, sir. Even though, you know, I come from a family that was politically progressive in many ways, caste was absolutely a background noise of our private life. Discussions of who in the family had married out of caste, you know,

and sort of being so young that it was the adults who were talking amongst themselves. But it's not that the attitudes or the social mores around caste disappeared, precisely because it's perpetuated through practices like marriage, you know, which is very much part of how family and social life is organized. He said that he wanted Brahmin, and I was shocked. He doesn't know anything about Brahmin, and he's not practicing. And why do he want a Brahmin girl? Caste in many ways, especially for families like mine, which were upper caste and urban, it receded into the realm of the private, but never died.

In the late 1970s, there was a really pivotal moment, which was the promulgation of a commission called the Mundell Commission that was tasked with studying what other communities beyond those already recognized in the Constitution should have access to some kind of legal redress for historical caste discrimination. And the Mandal Commission comes back and shows that actually many communities, which in legal parlance in India are referred to as other backward castes, have actually experienced the ill effects and the historical ill effects of being lower caste, even if they weren't technically, say, untouchable. Right. And this, of course, constitutes the majority of the country. of being lower caste, even if they weren't technically, say, untouchable, right?

And this, of course, constitutes the majority of the country. So if you are in a lower caste, the caste system has been bad for you. That seems pretty self-evident. What does it say about the upper castes? The Bundelkommission's findings were shocking. I mean, for example, Brahmins were massively overrepresented in India's parliament, in the higher education sector, in the higher reaches of business. All the 121 leadership positions in India's top newsrooms are held by dominant castes. 93% of board members of Indian corporates are upper caste.

41% of the country's total wealth is owned by upper caste Hindus. What happens after that, after the realization that Brahmins dominate everything? The government then puts aside a certain number of seats to government jobs and education for lower caste now. this is not just the untouchable, we're talking about lower caste. And this is the implementation that leads to this kind of violent backlash. So the lower castes are now getting better treatment, and there's a backlash from the upper castes. How does that affect Indian politics? There was an old party that represented the sort of Hindu nationalists that was part of the coalition of the ruling party that had been in charge of the government at the time that the Mondal Commission report was put together. And as part of the backlash

around this report, this party kind of splits off and becomes what is today known as the Parthiya Janata Party, which is the ruling party of India. The BJP. And it's Prime Minister Modi's party. We were nationalists, we are nationalists, and we will remain nationalists. The BJP is the political wing of the RSS, which stands for Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or the National Volunteer Organization, is an Indian Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization, which were fashioned along the lines of the Italian fascists and had strong ties to them. In 1992, in the city of Ayodhya,

when the RSS joined other right-wing Hindu groups to demolish the historic Babri Masjid. The mosque's destruction sparked Hindu-Muslim communal rioting that killed some 2,000 people. You see this kind of massive rise in the electoral popularity of the BJP. And a lot of that has to do with the consolidation of the upper caste in many ways as its real base. The RSS, its base has traditionally been the Brahmins. So what really ends up becoming the sort of real turning point after the Mandal Commission report is when it was finally implemented in 1990. And when it was implemented, there were mass protests.

Soon after the Mandal recommendations were implemented, Rajiv Goswami, a student of Delhi University, set himself on fire, sustaining 50% burns. Including, very famously, a case of one Brahmin student activist who tried to immolate himself. He survived the immolation bit, but the spark had been ignited. In cities and towns near Delhi, a number of youths set themselves on fire. This sort of backlash is kind of, you know, shown by a dramatic act of political activism. Throughout the 1990s, you see these various upper caste groups, I mean, and including really violent militias that organize as a way to kind of reinforce the caste system against what they would consider these uppity lower castes that are sort of agitating for greater access to education

and better jobs, etc. Hundreds of villages have been butchered by a private upper caste army. They're being killed not for what they've done, but for who they are. The report comes out. It says the lower castes have suffered as a result of caste discrimination. We're going to have to change some things. And then as a result of that report, the BJP, this political party, starts to get a lot of support. The BJP now leads India. This is Prime Minister Narendra Modi's party. Where does his government stand on caste? So the ruling party

in India has to kind of walk a fine line because, of course, the upper castes who form its base are demographically a minority. So this is really the sort of dilemma that caste poses to the ruling party. Because on the one hand, their ideologies and their practices are absolutely beholden to Brahmins and Brahminism, I would say. And on the other, the consolidation of their base and their vision of Indian nationalism requires the consolidation of the category of the Hindu, which of course means that they cannot allow the idea of caste to tear apart that category. Are people in India paying attention to these anti-caste discrimination bills in the U.S., which are aimed at protecting the historically marginalized lower castes? Oh, absolutely.

We shift our focus to Seattle, a city in the American state of Washington, a city which is being hailed for banning caste-based discrimination. The decision in Seattle is being called controversial, even Hindu-phobic. An Indian origin senator is complaining, and the Indian community is not happy. This is in many, many ways an absolutely globalized fight. And we're not just talking about sort of echoes of arguments that are made in India that show up here, right? But we're talking about like actual, you know, ties between different groups here as well as in India. Why do you think these bills are being introduced in the United States today?

Why do you think they're becoming law? The flows of Indian immigration since the 1990s, particularly in areas like tech, where you have had a big flow of highly educated Indians and where, frankly, from my own observations, having lived in some of these communities, I can absolutely say that, you know, they have retrenched and practiced caste. So, for example, you know, I have heard school children talk without, you know, any self-reflection about the fact that they're pure vegetarians because they're Brahmins. I see caste pride personalized license plates on cars everywhere, which, you know, to me at least looks like a public assertion of caste power, which is frightening. We're not going to be able to abolish caste in India, I think, without also thinking about what it means to abolish caste in the diaspora and vice versa. These are absolutely

connected movements. But I think so for the U.S. case, certainly, I think it's an absolutely welcome move, not just from the point of view of just the South Asian community or other minority communities where caste is practiced, but from the point of view of larger U.S. society, which is to recognize that there are vulnerable communities even within racialized minorities that require protection. That was Professor Ananya Chakravarti of Georgetown. Today's episode was produced by Halima Shah and Isabel Angel with an assist from Siona Petros. It was edited by Miranda Kennedy and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. Our engineer is David Herman. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.