From India with love/hate: Tiny and atrophied brain
Pedro Mascarenhas
The divisive debate over California's anti-caste bill
A bill introduced to make caste discrimination illegal in California is set to come up for discussion in the state assembly this week. Savita Patel, a California-based independent journalist, speaks to those supporting and opposing the bill becoming a law.
Sukhjinder Kaur*, a nurse at a hospital in California, works long and tiring hours serving patients. But whenever it's break time, things become oppressive.
She is a Dalit (a community that is placed at the bottom of India's deeply discriminatory caste hierarchy) and says she often faces casteist insults from her South Asian colleagues.
Dalit rights activists say scores of caste-oppressed Californians face housing, educational, professional, and social discrimination.
In March, Senator Aisha Wahab, a lawmaker from the Democratic Party, authored and introduced the SB-403 bill - legislation that seeks to add caste as a protected category in the state's anti-discrimination laws alongside gender, race, religion and disability.
In February, Seattle became the first city in the US - and outside South Asia - to outlaw caste discrimination, generating momentum for the legislation in California. It is being propelled by the same broad multi-faith, inter-caste, multi-racial coalition of over 40 American and international Dalit and human rights activists and organisations, led by California-based Equality Labs.
California has a large South Asian diaspora and is home to some of the world's biggest tech companies.
Many businesses and Hindu temples under HinduPACT - an American Hindu grassroots advocacy initiative - have appealed to California lawmakers to reject the bill. Its convenor Ajay Shah says that the legislation is "deeply flawed, ill-intentioned and targets children and youth from the Indian subcontinent and those who follow the Hindu dharma [Hinduism]."
Suhag Shukla, co-founder and executive director of the Hindu American Foundation, says this bill is already creating an "undesirable" awareness about caste. She says she has been "hearing inappropriate queries from workers, especially in tech, who are being asked about their caste by non-South Asians". She says if this becomes a pattern, it can be grounds for ethnicity-based harassment.