Cal State banned caste discrimination. Two Hindu professors sued.
Hindu #Hindu
Two Hindu professors are suing the head of their university system to oppose the addition of caste to an anti-discrimination policy amid a broader battle over whether colleges should explicitly call out caste-based bias.
The California State University System professors argue that naming caste as a protected characteristic unfairly targets Hindus and wrongly suggests that oppression and discrimination are among Hinduism’s core tenets. Sunil Kumar and Praveen Sinha contend in the complaint, filed Monday, that Hinduism is about compassion and equanimity — principles directly opposed to a discriminatory caste system.
“We fully and vehemently oppose all forms of prejudice and discrimination,” Kumar said in a statement announcing the federal lawsuit, previously reported by Religion News Service. “But CSU’s Interim Policy singles out all Indian origin and Hindu staff and students solely because we are Indian and Hindu. This by its very definition is discrimination and a denial of our basic civil rights.”
Caste is a social hierarchy to which people are assigned at birth. Dalits, sometimes pejoratively called “untouchables,” face prejudice and violence in South Asian countries despite laws against caste discrimination. In India, the caste system originally applied to Hindus but now applies to people of various religions.
California State, the nation’s largest four-year public university system, announced in January that it had added caste to its anti-discrimination policy after years of activism from Dalits. The policy now identifies caste as a subcategory of race and ethnicity.
That university system followed the lead of several other colleges, including Brandeis University and Colby College, that have made caste a protected characteristic in recent years as younger Hindus increasingly advocate against caste-based bias. Lower-caste Hindus in the United States often report microaggressions aimed at revealing their caste status, said Dheepa Sundaram, a professor of Hindu studies at the University of Denver.
California State spokeswoman Toni Molle said adding caste to the anti-discrimination policy “reflects the university’s commitment to inclusivity and respect, making certain each and every one of our 23 CSU campuses always is a place of access, opportunity and equity for all.”
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Naming caste as a protected characteristic, however, is contentious among some Hindus. The D.C.-based Hindu American Foundation, which represents the California State professors, says the university system is unfairly targeting Hinduism and that it has no right to define the religion at all, much less as a discriminatory faith.
Suhag Shukla, the foundation’s executive director, said no other California State policy “demonizes” any other religion, ethnic group or race — a fact that means Hindu community members are being denied equal protection under the law.
“CSU has turned non-discrimination on its head by adding a category that it defines as inherent to an already minoritized community and exclusively polices only that community — Indian and Hindu students and faculty,” Shukla said in an email.
In their lawsuit, Kumar and Sinha point to times when California’s state government has referenced caste in conjunction with Hinduism; they say those instances bolster their argument that making caste a protected characteristic targets Hindus.
Kumar, an engineering professor at San Diego State University, and Sinha, an accounting professor at California State University at Long Beach, also said they do not identify as belonging to any caste. They said they worry that the university system will ascribe a caste to them for purposes of adjudicating discrimination cases.
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Opinions on naming caste as a protected characteristic tend to diverge along the lines of age and immigration status, Sundaram said, with immigrants less likely to support such a move than Hindus whose families have lived in the United States for generations. Nearly 9 in 10 U.S. Hindus are immigrants, according to the Pew Research Center. But Sundaram said many younger Hindus have formed alliances with other affinity groups, such as Black Lives Matter, and are more inclined to call out caste discrimination.
Sundaram, who supports making caste a protected characteristic, said critiquing Hinduism — even in a country where Hindus are a minority — is not akin to promoting Hinduphobia. She said most discrimination against Hindus is based on the fact that many are South Asian, rather than on their religion, and that Hinduphobia is not a widespread problem.
Most importantly, she said, she disagrees with the Hindu American Foundation’s argument that caste is not foundational to Hinduism.
“You absolutely can acknowledge this as part of the tradition and fight back against it, but to argue that it doesn’t exist in the tradition, it’s just false,” Sundaram said. “There’s just no way to really make that case.”
The Hindu American Foundation was among the advocacy groups that last year protested an online academic conference about Hindu nationalism, a right-wing political movement linked to India. Protesters sent nearly a million emails to universities, arguing that the event was Hinduphobic. The HAF said then that the conference promoted activists who support “extremist movements” and deny the “resulting genocides of Hindus.”
The foundation has also objected to a lawsuit filed by California regulators on behalf of an engineer at the technology company Cisco who alleged that his upper-caste supervisors did not promote him because he is a Dalit. The HAF argued that the discrimination claim falsely suggests that Hinduism is inherently discriminatory.