NYT: The Specter of Caste in Silicon Valley

[Sharma Ji]

What special meritocracy has India managed to achieve ?

held back in part, by the jaat/paat based quota system, we have.

not at NASA/ESA or Musk level but isn't this still a marvel of technology ?

 

[Joe Shearer]

Good, so am I.

and so is the RSS, apparently.

Apparently. Ghalib has this sewn up.

Interesting, might look into it.

Deeply satisfying to see this happening.

 

[Sharma Ji]

The irony would not have occurred to her.

colourblind and blinded by her egalitarianism and humanity, that woman deserves all of our collective applause.

such "ironies" are best dumped in the garbage bin so humanity can progress.

 

[Joe Shearer]

what is with this Brahmin hate though ? I happen to be one lol.. never wore a janaeu, growing up, nobody ever mentioned caste anything to me.. only know mine through going to Tauji's funeral.. where that 'gotra' stuff was mentioned. Cousin married a muslim, i found me a christian girl.. nobody cares. (muslim thing didn't last, but that was for matters not related in any way to religion)

this caste thing is on it's way out, it'll be gone in the next couple decades max.. and gone organically.

irrational lest wing hatred seeds right wing entrenchment <- this is what's basically going on right now.

Sure I don't generally argue with Bongs on intellectual matters. You people exemplify the Argumentative Indian.

I do respect Amartya Sen:

Caste again. Pre-selection again. Who do you think on this thread is his caste, and his distant relative?

Thank you, all, for the privilege of allowing me into your discussion.

colourblind and blinded by her egalitarianism and humanity, that woman deserves all of our collective applause.

such "ironies" are best dumped in the garbage bin so humanity can progress.

Colourblind, right enough, and blinded by her egregious prejudice and bias. Such people are best dumped in the garbage bin so humanity can progress.

 

[Shantanu_Left]

Good, nobody should hate people based on where they were born.

What makes them the "best", though ? apart from being brahmins, of course ?

For starters, they're cleaner on average. Take a shower frequently!!!

Good, so am I.

and so is the RSS, apparently.

Ugh...all right, but let us agree to disagree. Don't want to derail the thread.

Interesting, might look into it.


the Hukou system ?

Not sure. I don't really read beyond the headlines, as Mr. Joe suggests. I did read Pearl S. Buck's "Good Earth", that tells you everything you need to know about pre-Revolutionary China.

read something on it the other day, a lot of SE Asian countries follow a version, or their own version of it, often titled similarly. It's all over the place, in Korea and Japan even.

I live in S'pore, and travel frequently to other SE Asian countries. They don't have India's version of a caste system. Yes, there's the rich and the poor. But nobody is treated like crap just because of the family they were born in, or forced to drink water from a different utensil. Or prevented from riding a horse (not that anyone rides horses in SE Asia).

They haven't, no society has. The Europeans, to an extent maybe.. as has their outpost, the USA. Advanced societies.. we'll get there eventually but it can't be forced.

India cannot have the Western model as India as a culture and society is not prepared for individualism.

what is with this Brahmin hate though ? I happen to be one lol.. never wore a janaeu, growing up, nobody ever mentioned caste anything to me..

I don't hate anyone. I'm part-Brahmin but an outcaste for the most part (don't have a gotra or whatever).

this caste thing is on it's way out, it'll be gone in the next couple decades max.. and gone organically.

Not under the most Hindutvadi government of India. They will reinforce and strengthen the caste system.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Bye bye.

Take care of yourselves, @jamahir, @xeuss.

 

[Vikram1]

The Specter of Caste in Silicon Valley
Indian immigrants from Dalit backgrounds are rising up against caste discrimination at their workplaces in the United States.

By Yashica Dutt

Ms. Dutt is the author of the memoir, “Coming Out as a Dalit.”

• July 14, 2020, 3:00 p.m. ET

Cisco Systems headquarters in San Jose, Calif.Credit...Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
On June 30, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing regulators sued Cisco Systems Inc., for discrimination. The cause was not, like most workplace discrimination lawsuits, based on race, gender, age or sexual orientation. It was based on caste.

The lawsuit accuses Cisco, a multibillion-dollar tech conglomerate basted in San Jose, Calif., of denying an engineer, who immigrated from India to the United States, professional opportunities, a raise and promotions because he was a from a low caste, or Dalit, background. The lawsuit states that his Indian-American managers, Sundar Iyer and Ramana Kompella, who are described as high-caste Brahmins, harassed the engineer because of their sense of superiority rooted in the Hindu caste system.

Many Indian-Americans reacted with disbelief that a giant corporation in Silicon Valley could be mired in caste discrimination. For Dalit Americans like me, it was just another Wednesday.

Dalit, which means “oppressed,” is a self-chosen identity for close to 25 percent of India’s population, and it refers to former “untouchables,” the people who suffer the greatest violence, discrimination and disenfranchisement under the centuries-old caste system that structures Hindu society.

Caste is the gear that turns every system in India. “If Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian Caste would become a world problem,” B.R. Ambedkar, the greatest Dalit leader and one of the architects of the India Constitution, wrote in 1916. He was prophetic.

Caste prejudice and discrimination is rife within the Indian communities in the United States and other countries. Its chains are even turning the work culture within multibillion-dollar American tech companies, and beyond. The Cisco engineer, whose complaint led to the lawsuit and who identifies himself as a Dalit, has not been named in the lawsuit.

From the mid-1990s, American companies, panicking at the feared “millennial meltdown’ of computer systems, were hiring close to 100,000 technology workers a year from India. An overwhelming majority of the Indian information technology professionals who moved to the United States were from “higher castes,” and only a handful were Dalits.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, I participated in a video call with about 30 Dalit Indian immigrants. A Dalit information technology professional on the video call spoke about moving to the United States in 2000 and working at Cisco between 2007 and 2013. “A large percentage of the work force was already Indian," he told us. “They openly discussed their caste and would ask questions to figure out my caste background.”

Higher caste Indians use the knowledge of a person’s caste to place him or her on the social hierarchy despite professional qualifications. “I usually ignored these conversations,” the Dalit worker added. “If they knew I was Dalit, it could ruin my career.”

According to the lawsuit, Mr. Iyer, one of the Brahmin engineers at Cisco, revealed to his other higher-caste colleagues that the complainant had joined a top engineering school in India through affirmative action. When the Dalit engineer, the lawsuit says, confronted Mr. Iyer and contacted Cisco’s human resources to file a complaint, Mr. Iyer retaliated by taking away the Dalit engineer’s role as lead on two technologies.

For two years, the lawsuit says, Mr. Iyer isolated the Dalit engineer, denied him bonuses and raises and stonewalled his promotions. Cisco’s human resources department responded by telling the Dalit engineer that “caste discrimination was not unlawful” and took no immediate corrective action. Mr. Kompella, the other Brahmin manager named in the lawsuit, replaced Mr. Iyer as the Dalit engineer’s manager, and according to the suit, “continued to discriminate, harass, and retaliate against” him.

In 2019, Cisco was ranked No. 2 on Fortune’s 100 Best Workplaces for Diversity. The technology giant got away with ignoring the persistent caste discrimination because American laws don’t yet recognize Hindu caste discrimination as a valid form of exclusion. Caste does not feature in Cisco’s diversity practices in its operations in India either. It reveals how the Indian information technology sector often operates in willful ignorance of the terrifying realities of caste.

In “The Other One Percent: Indians in America,” a 2016 study of people of Indian descent in the United States, the authors Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur and Nirvikar Singh estimated that “over 90 percent of migrants” came from high castes or dominant castes. According to a 2018 survey by Equality Labs, a Dalit-American led civil rights organization, 67 percent Dalits in the Indian diaspora admitted to facing caste based harassment at the workplace.

In the backdrop of caste supremacy in the Indian diaspora in the United States, when higher caste Hindus often describe and demonize Dalits as “inherently lazy/ opportunistic/ not talented,” even apparently innocuous practices like peer reviews for promotions (Cisco and several other tech companies operate on this model), can turn into minefields, ending in job losses and visa rejections for Dalits.

Almost every Dalit person I spoke to in the United States, after California filed the lawsuit against Cisco, requested to remain anonymous and feared that revealing their identity as a Dalit working in the American tech industry filled with higher-caste Indians would ruin their career.

Those words also governed my life till 2016, when I decided to publicly reveal my caste identity and “come out” as Dalit. Growing up “passing” as a dominant caste person in India while hiding my “untouchable,” caste I lived in the same fear that stops most Dalits from articulating their harassment and asserting their identity in India and the United States.

The overwhelmingly higher-caste Indian-American community is seen as a “model minority” with more than an average $100,000 median income and rising cultural and political visibility. But it has engendered a narrative that is as diabolical as it is in India: insisting that they live in a “post-caste world” while simultaneously upholding its hierarchical framework that benefits the higher-caste people.

Ranging from seemingly harmless calls for “vegetarian-only roommates” (an easy way to assert caste purity), caste-based temple networks that automatically exclude “impure” Dalits, and the more overt and dangerous arm twisting of American norms — right-wing Hindu activist organizations tried to remove any mention of caste from California’s textbooks in 2018 — caste supremacy is fiercely defended, almost as a core tenet of Indian Hindu culture.

Yet after decades of being silenced, Dalit Americans are finally finding a voice that cannot be ignored. I was able to come out as Dalit because after moving to New York and avoiding Indian-only communities, for the first time, I was not scared of someone finding out my caste. Finding comfort and inspiration in movements like Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name and the tragic institutional murder of a Dalit student activist in India, I was able to understand and acknowledge that my history was a tapestry of pride, not shame.

Most Dalits in America still live with the fear of being exposed. But the pending California vs. Cisco case is a major step in the right direction.

Yashica Dutt is an Indian journalist and the author of the memoir, “Coming Out as a Dalit.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/...crimination.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur

So Muslims giving gyan on Hinduism?
Just check the situation of Ahmadiyya and take care for your own religion first.
What happened last week in Bangladesh? fanatics 'dig up three-day-old girl's body from cemetery.

This is a old dream of Communist of India and cast based partied to divide Hindus in India so that they can rule.
BJP/RSS with there resources are undoing all their dreams. Just wait for election of Uttar Pradesh you all will get your answers.

 

[Rakesh]

held back in part, by the jaat/paat based quota system, we have.

not at NASA/ESA or Musk level but isn't this still a marvel of technology ?

The arm like platforms which you see in this picture were designed/engineered by my colleague, HE IS DALIT.

 

[Sharma Ji]

For starters, they're cleaner on average. Take a shower frequently!!!

interesting

but "cleaner" as opposed to what average ?

name and shame these dirty "average" bitches too, would you ?

don't have a gotra or whatever

go to an uncle's funeral and you'll find out

not that I wish any sort of tragedy befalling you and your lot.

Not under the most Hindutvadi government of India. They will reinforce and strengthen the caste system.

I think you will be proven wrong, both on the government and those put them there

in the years and decades to come.

cause they ain't going anywhere

UCC and population regulation baaki hai, settle in for the long haul, you.

The arm like platforms which you see in this picture were designed/engineered by my colleague, HE IS DALIT.

that's great

I don't give a damn if your friend's a dalit or muslim or woman or any of that stuff though.

 

[Rakesh]

interesting

but "cleaner" as opposed to what average ?

name and shame these dirty "average" bitches too, would you ?


go to an uncle's funeral and you'll find out

not that I wish any sort of tragedy befalling you and your lot.


I think you will be proven wrong, both on the government and those put them there

in the years and decades to come.

cause they ain't going anywhere

UCC and population regulation baaki hai, settle in for the long haul, you.


that's great

I don't give a damn if your friend's a dalit or muslim or woman or any of that stuff though.

It matters !

 

[Sharma Ji]

It matters !

not to me.

 

[Rakesh]

not to me.

You are not the entire world, which a dalit faces .
(Anyway this is not the place to discuss genesis and mechanism of caste)

 

[Sharma Ji]

For example, some of the Telugu girls stink really bad. You have to literally hold your breath while boning them. Many are easy lay's in my experience but the smell alone makes you think 10 times.

tmi man, TMI !

why would you even get to the 'final destination' if the way to it was so fraught with such sensory unpleasantness ?

surely you weren't expecting a smooth landing and a nice stay

also, that's kinda racist.. not cool.

code ka kya hua ?

My ancestry is a bit "complicated". I don't want to discuss it here but I never got enrolled into the Hindu Varna system.

That's fine, me neither.. was never taught any of those caste things etc

just another person, just like anyone else

And cows will fly!

rapid urbanization is making it happen, it's eroding away quickly and in fact gone from most, or a lot of society already. Marriage, I suspect will remain a tricky thing for some but that levee too shall give way to enlightenment.

It'll come from within.. the whites ended slavery themselves, they didn't have a horde of angry communists yelling "racist !"

Indian lefties are only making matters worse for themselves and everyone involved when they rail against this so called "brahminical system"

There your fascist side just came out in the open. I was enjoying our little chat. Good bye.

one law for all is fascist ? but fine, I'll play along.

it'll benefit the poor the most, this cap on kids thing.

it'll also stop population jihad in it's tracks

but Sharma Ji s like me will always have the option of paying the fine and keep growing my Brahmin clan.. muahahahaha

Jai Siya Ram !

You are not the entire world, which a dalit faces .
(Anyway this is not the place to discuss genesis and mechanism of caste)

 

[jamahir]

None of us hate Brahmin human beings.

That is what Kanhaiya Kumar and comrades mean when they say they want azadi from. Not from Brahmins the human beings but that oppressive socio-economic structure unfortunately built by the Brahmin-led social hierarchy system.

Good, so am I.

Excellent !

and so is the RSS, apparently.

Then the RSS should have no objection to work with the Bhim Army and the progressive former students of JNU.

held back in part, by the jaat/paat based quota system, we have.

Then the neo, private IT industry of India which doesn't follow the Quota / Reservation system should have given an Indian operating system and microprocessor to the world, what with the hundreds of thousands of meritorious workers in it.

The simple reason that ISRO is behind is that it wasn't ambitious from the start, preferring to be happy with satellite launches. Contrast with SpaceX which from the start aimed to make humans multi-planetary with Mars as the first goal.

not at NASA/ESA or Musk level but isn't this still a marvel of technology ?

So two years from now is when three Indians will be launched into Low Earth Orbit. So far so good. What I would like are two things : (a). ISRO having a manned Mars program for the 2030s. Even a private program - Mars One - had this timeline. (b). An Indian SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace.

 

[alhindi]

Meritocracy bro

kisi ki shakal* dekh ke na job deni chahiye, na job deny karni chahiye... fairness.

and by shakal I mean all aspects, jaat, paat, dharm.. the lot of it.

A low caste unprivileged student can not compete equally with privileged high caste job seeker , that is why we have to give them some extra preference as reservation from the very beginning .