Foreign Concept

AN AMPLIFICATION OF the demand for correction to great social evils often happens when the phenomenon is already on the wane. You can see this with how racism has taken centrestage in the US at a point when no one can be overtly racist, and everyone is unanimous on it being wrong. Students there are now being taught about subconscious racism because conscious racism has long lost the war. Race is at the top of US’ politi­cal discourse because consciousness around its terrible history has peaked. Combine this with the other injustices against women, homosexuals and transgenders, and the arrival of social media as a force, and you have an um­brella agitation against all potential discriminations. Into this mix has now entered caste by way of a ban on it as per a law just passed by the city of Seattle.

Few will claim that caste is not a widespread phenomenon in India even today, especially in the rural hinterlands. Few will also disagree that the discrimination has enormously decreased as compared to the past. This was aided by exemplary legal punishments, and reservations in government jobs, employment and political positions. Part of it is not even conscious policy making, just the bur­geoning of cities and towns where it is difficult to mark out the caste of a per­son. Caste discrimination going down is one of the successes of independent India. Which is why it becomes some­what strange that it should now rear its head in a foreign soil among a wealthy literate subset of Indian origin people, a phenomenon most talked about in the information technology sector, because that is the one with the most Indians in the US.

Can it really be equated? India has for millennia had caste at its centre. Every nook and corner of society was complicit in it. In the US, Indians make a minuscule percentage of the workforce and even among them, what are the odds of widespread casteism? It is also a country with civil laws where any proven discrimination comes with enor­mous monetary damages. A law, like the one Seattle passed, is tokenism because there was nothing legal about caste discrimination for it to be made illegal.

Some Hindu groups in the US have opposed the law citing it as an instance of discrimination against Hinduism, turning it into an issue of race. Except that the person who moved the law was of Indian descent herself. Distancing Hinduism from caste, as the argument suggests, is just not possible. The idea that Hindus beyond India wouldn’t be able to get away behaving as in India, and so, they usually don’t, is a more rea­sonable position. If some are casteists in their hidden inner selves, then there is really nothing that can be done about it because you cannot police the mind. What matters is whether actions are discriminatory and, barring a few cases, there is little evidence of it. Caste as a reality among Hindus will be present for a long time but the end of its ability to discriminate is much closer, whether in India or abroad.

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