The US has witnessed a slew of anti-caste discrimination bills targeting the American Hindu community over the course of the year. First, Seattle became the first city in the US to ban caste discrimination through a separate law, and then a similar bill was introduced in the US state of California. The bill, passed by the California State Assembly was vetoed by California Governor Gavin Newsom on the grounds that it was unnecessary since caste discrimination was already banned in the US constitution under laws covering the banning of discrimination based on ancestry.
The whole caste discrimination debate has become a contentious one in the US with the American Hindu organizations saying that the Hindus in the US are being unfairly targeted through such arbitrary laws that seek to do caste profiling of the Hindu community and harass them. Many Dalit voices in the US have also spearheaded the campaign against the targeting of American Hindus in the name of banning caste discrimination.
A new report published by Dr. Salvatore Babones, Associate Professor at the University of Sydney argues that caste has been weaponized in the American context to open a front against Bharat and Bharatiya diaspora in the US.
The report titled “Weaponization of Caste in America” says that the movement to ban caste discrimination in the US is being sponsored by a coalition of Muslim, Dalit and Khalistani groups. It further argues that this sudden overwhelming interest in addressing the issue of caste discrimination in the US is not some disinterested altruistic phenomenon, but rather is part of an orchestrated campaign to open an anti-Bharat front by non-state political actors that have some sort of score to settle with Bharat.
The report makes an apt distinction between the term” Dalits” and the term “Scheduled Castes” which is used to address caste discrimination in the Bharatiya context. The author says that Dalit is a politically and religiously loaded term in the south-Asian context whereas Scheduled Castes is a Bharatiya civil administrative category, when it comes to caste. So to conflate the politico-religious term Dalit with the civil category caste is a serious conceptual error since “(1) caste is already a protected category and (2) “Dalit” is not a caste”, according to the report.
The report further argues that the condition of Dalits in the US cannot be equated with the condition of Dalits in Bharat, by any stretch of imagination. When one talks about discrimination faced by Dalits in Bharat, one is referring to a highly disadvantaged group both in terms of education and employment. But the Dalits in the US face no such conditions, says the report. While talking about American Dalits, one is talking about a relatively privileged group that does cream white-collar jobs in America and is highly educated.
The report further says that the organization Equality Labs, the survey conducted by which to measure caste discrimination in the US is widely cited by all anti-caste discrimination bill sponsors, itself says that 80% of the Dalit rights activists interviewed in the survey were either graduate students or holders of postgraduate degrees.
Next, Dr Babones’s report puts to scrutiny the methodology of the survey conducted by Equality Labs. It says that the survey questionnaire was administered online to a self-selected group of Dalit activists, thus constituting a highly unrepresentative sample.
The report further highlights that there were biases in the distribution of the survey questionnaire itself. Ideally, a scientific survey should be carried out by actors or entities who have no direct stake in the issue. But the Equality Labs survey questionnaire was distributed mainly via activist network, says the report. “The Equality Labs survey relied on a “web based, self-reported, self-administered questionnaire” that was distributed mainly via activist networks, the report specifically mentions 8 Dalits rights organizations and a group of Sikh religious organizations as distributing the survey.
Coincidentally, the exact same Sikh organizations that campaigned for SB 403 through Californians for caste equity were those that distributed the Equality Labs survey. In short, Equality Labs surveyed a pool of Dalit rights activists about their views on caste-based oppression and found that those activists thought that such oppression was endemic and widespread”, states the report.
The caste narrative is being raked up not just in the US but throughout the west by anti-Bharat forces. The attacks on temples and Bharatiya consulates in western countries, the peddling of anti-Hindu propaganda through school curriculum, and the anti-Hindu narrative being aggressively pushed by the western academia, work together to directly attack the Bharatiya diaspora their aim is to indirectly attack and destabilize the Bharatiya democracy. Professor Babones’s report rightly concludes by saying that the narrative of caste being pushed forward in the US is just a pseudo front for the anti-Bharat forces to come together. The real motive is to step up pressure on Bharat vis-à-vis various issues – the Kashmir issue, Khalistan separatism, etc. The larger motive of this supposed anti-caste activism in the US, the report argues, is to create a negative perception of Hindus and their faith and by extension, legitimize anti-Bharat activism.
America is home to a number of indigenous groups and its very existence is based on the annihilation and oppression of those native groups. It’s rather strange that instead of addressing inequalities that stem from its own civilization, the US is so preoccupied with apparently settling the caste discrimination issue of a minority that constitutes less than 1 percent of the US population.
The report points out this contradiction by arguing that Dalits in the US would fall somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 people whereas the indigenous Latin American immigrants Aztec (583,981) and the Mayans (300,519) far outnumber the Dalits, but there seems to be no urgency in the need to form separate laws to address the gross discrimination and exploitation these groups face.
