California govt dept says caste not essential part of Hinduism, amends 2020 complaint

Washington: A key California state government department has said caste and caste-based discrimination are not an essential part of Hinduism, and amended its 2020 complaint alleging discrimination at a Silicon Valley tech giant.

According to a statement issued by the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) on Tuesday, the California Civil Rights Department voluntarily filed a motion in the first week of December to amend their complaint against Cisco Systems alleging that caste discrimination occurred at the company.

In a victory for Hindu-Americans, the amended complaint removes the "erroneous and unconstitutional" assertion that caste and caste discrimination are essential part of Hindu religious teachings and practices, HAF said.

"We believe this is a significant step forward in protecting the First Amendment religious rights of Hindu Americans. As we argued in our Motion to Intervene, the California Civil Rights Department is constitutionally prohibited from defining Hinduism or any religion for that matter," HAF managing director Samir Kalra said.

HAF, however, said that several portions of the statement of California Civil Rights Department, remain problematic.

Foremost among these is the reliance on the fundamentally flawed and statistically invalid survey by activist group Equality Labs on the alleged high prevalence of caste discrimination in the United States, it said.

This survey has specifically been called into question by academic researchers at the Carnegie Endowment, Penn, and Johns Hopkins, whose work found that caste discrimination in the US was in fact very rare, HAF alleged.

HAF said the CRD's continues to pursue its case on the basis of many false and xenophobic claims about people of South Asian origin as well as the dubious implication that caste discrimination in India is tied to skin colour, in an obvious attempt to draw direct parallels with skin colour-based racism in the United States.

Furthermore, the CRD continues to assert what can only be described as counterfactual statements about the nature of what the plaintiff experienced at Cisco Systems, as evidenced by publicly available court documents that have been filed since the CRD filed its original case in October of 2020, it said.