The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) and Fox Rothschild filed a civil rights lawsuit Monday against the chancellor and trustees of California State University in the California Central District Court.
The HAF alleged that the anti-discrimination policy of the campus targets members of Hindu community by including ‘caste’ as a protected category in its interim policy.
Hindu professors Sunil Kumar and Praveen Sinha from the California State University system claiming to represent members of the community have initiated the court action against Jolene Koester, who is the chancellor of California State University.
“CSU is constitutionally barred from dictating the beliefs of any religion. Yet in responding to and relying upon, among other things, resolutions passed by the California Faculty Association and Cal State Student Association, CSU takes the position that caste is integral to the Hindu religion. No religion other than Hinduism is treated in this manner by the CSU Interim Policy,” the Hindu American said in its statement on its website.
“Their characterization is incorrect that Hinduism mandates a racist and discriminatory ‘caste system’,” the HAF said in its lawsuit.
In 2022, the California State University system passed a resolution to add caste as a category of discrimination in order to ensure that students and faculty report anti-Dalit bias.
Allegations of Anti-Dalit Bias in US
The issue was first highlighted when an Indian-origin CISCO employee alleged that his Indian-origin superiors belonging from the dominant caste harassed him and discriminated against him.
The state of California then filed a lawsuit against IT conglomerate Cisco and those two employees in 2020. Dalit rights organisation Equality Labs told US media outlets that Americans of Indian-origin who belong to the Dalit community in Google, Facebook, Apple and several other companies in Silicon Valley faced harassment and caste-based discrimination. More than 250 complainants came forward.
There has been myriad of experiences by Indian-origin workers belonging to the Dalit community. While some like Pranay Patil, a Dalit student at the Harvard Kennedy School, told the Harvard Crimson that he has not personally experienced caste hostility at Harvard but Kanishka Elupula, a Dalit Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology told the Harvard Crimson that there might not be specific instances but the debates on reservation sometimes displayed the attitudes other Indian-origin academics from dominant castes have towards people from the Dalit community.
The US has seen the rise of several Dalit civil rights groups in recent times like the Ambedkar International Center, Ambedkar Association of North America (AANA) and Equality Labs.
The move by the California State University system was also supported by the worker’s unions who felt it was also a worker’s rights issue.
The HAF, however, said the California State University system ran afoul of the Constitution of the United States by singling out ‘certain faculty, staff and students on the basis of their religion and ethnicity’. It further added that it falsely casts caste as a Hindu tenet.
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