“I was feeling powerless,” Prem Pariyar said. It was the morning of October 9, 2023—the culmination of eight months of intense campaigning and fierce debate that divided California’s South Asian American community. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, had just vetoed a bill passed by the California state legislature that would have made the state the first in the nation to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on caste.
California State Senator Aisha Wahab introduced the legislation, Senate Bill 403, in February 2023. It would have added caste to the list of characteristics protected by California’s anti-discrimination laws. The bill ignited a firestorm of controversy as South Asian Californians grappled with questions over the pervasiveness of caste discrimination in the United States.
Pariyar, a mental health clinician who lives in the Bay Area, was at his home in Albany, California, when he received the news that the bill was dead. A Nepalese-American immigrant, Pariyar had advocated for the bill for months. “We did a lot of advocacy from day one,” he said. “We went to assembly members’ offices, we went to senators’ offices, we visited their staff multiple times.”
In South Asia, the social norms of the caste system have huge real-world impacts, affecting marriage arrangements, food habits, and religious rituals. Thousands of years old, the caste system became more rigid under British rule as the colonial government used the census to categorize people into different castes and incorporated this classification into imperial governance. Caste discrimination was outlawed in India after the country achieved independence in 1947. The ban was enshrined in the Indian constitution in 1950, with affirmative action programs established for government jobs and entrance to public universities. In Nepal, the caste system was legally abolished in 1963. Yet in both nations, laws banning caste have been ineffective because they are difficult to enforce, especially in rural areas where untouchability is most commonly practiced.
For Pariyar, the fight against caste discrimination is personal. Pariyar is a member of the Dalit caste, formerly known as “untouchables.” Dalits form the lowest level of the caste system on the Indian subcontinent, traditionally relegated to menial jobs such as cleaning toilets and sweeping streets. In the four-fold varna system of traditional Hindu society, Dalits make up a fifth, excluded class. Viewed by society as “impure,” they have often been denied employment and educational opportunities based on their caste identity.
Pariyar and his family fled Nepal in 2015, leaving after his family was brutally assaulted following an argument with a group from the dominant caste.
Pariyar says that Nepalese law enforcement failed to investigate. “The police refused to accept my complaint,” he said.
The attack was one of many memories Pariyar has of facing prejudice based on his caste identity in Nepal. In one instance, his elementary school teacher asked him to bring her some water, only to spit it out after his classmates outed him as a Dalit. Another time, Pariyar’s best friend in college invited Pariyar to his family’s home but suggested that Pariyar use a dominant caste surname to hide his identity or sit in a separate room to eat to ensure his parents were not uncomfortable due to his presence in the kitchen.
Pariyar and his family immigrated to the United States, hoping to leave caste discrimination behind. He has found himself disappointed by the presence of caste discrimination in the U.S.
“People have the same mindset, they practice the same caste system,” Pariyar said. “That was very, very shocking for me.” His first experience of discriminatory behavior in the United States occurred when Pariyar worked at a restaurant where the owner provided shared housing to many workers from Nepal. He explained that his coworkers refused to live with him due to his lower-caste background.
In 2019, four years after his move to the U.S., Pariyar pursued a Master of Social Work at California State University, East Bay. He described meeting another lower-caste student from Nepal. The student had changed his last name to an upper-caste surname for fear of not being accepted by his colleagues.
Another time, he met two fellow Nepali students in the university’s MBA program. They were initially friendly before they learned that his last name was “Pariyar,” a common name among the Nepali Dalit community.
After that, Pariyar says, “they looked at me very differently. They did not say anything… but [their] body expressions were saying… ‘How did you come here? You do not belong [here].’”
Pariyar’s experience reflects how, as with many forms of prejudice, caste discrimination is often invisible, propagated through unspoken expectations and subconscious biases. Caste’s invisibility is part of what makes it so difficult to measure, analyze, and address.
At CSU, Pariyar became motivated to start advocating against caste discrimination in the U.S. “In my social work classes, we have a lot of conversations on race, gender, ethnicity, and so many [other] issues… but I did not find myself [represented] there,” he said. “As a caste-oppressed student, my experience was different.”
Pariyar would go on to play a central role in the addition of caste to the California State University system’s non-discrimination policy. In 2022, a year after his graduation, Pariyar’s efforts were successful, but the addition continued to face resistance. Two Hindu professors even sued in an attempt to reverse the change, arguing that the policy would single out Hindu and Indian-origin staff and students. After graduating from CSU, Pariyar would continue to advocate against caste discrimination and would later campaign for SB 403.
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In South Asia, debates over dealing with caste have ranged from the portrayal of the caste system in cinema to whether India’s reservation system, an affirmative action program created to improve the representation of historically disadvantaged groups in governments and universities, should continue. One of the greatest indications of the endurance of the caste system in South Asia is that inter-caste marriage rates remain in the single digits.
According to Kanishka Elupula, a doctoral student at Harvard who has researched caste in South Asia, “it’s the same issues that have been shipped over to the U.S.” Elupula is from India, is a member of the Dalit caste, and has been frustrated by his interactions with other Indian students. “They don’t know my caste. They assume that I’m upper-caste because I’m going to Harvard, I’m doing a PhD,” he explained.
Elupula says that some Indian students fail to acknowledge the existence of caste in India today. In one experience at Harvard, he was sitting with a group of fellow Indian international students, and the question of whether caste is still present in India was posed. Many said that the caste system is no longer practiced.
“They’ve completely wiped the issue off the table,” Elupula asserted. “They live in this world where they don’t believe there is any casteism, even though they enjoy the advantages of it every day.”
While the majority of Indians identify with a caste, most Indian-Americans don’t. In a 2020 study by the Carnegie Institute, 53% of Hindu Indian-Americans said that they “do not personally identify with a caste group of any kind.” The number is even lower for Hindu Indian-Americans who were born in the United States, with only 34% identifying with a caste group.
Within the greater South Asian American community, sentiments toward adding caste as a protected category vary depending on immigration status and age. Young Americans of South Asian descent are more likely to support efforts against caste discrimination, whereas older South Asian Americans or South Asian immigrants are less likely to support such changes, the Washington Post has reported.
Caste discrimination laws in the United States are controversial due to the belief that such policies will malign the South Asian American community. Elupula doesn’t find this argument convincing. “I think it’s pretty shallow. It’s like saying [that] if we introduce laws against gender violence, it puts men in a bad light.”
But many South Asian Americans disagree. Pushpita Prasad is a member of the Board of Directors of the Coalition of Hindus of North America (COHNA). The organization is one of many interest groups that advocated against SB 403.
“They have no evidence that this is actually happening,” Prasad said of caste discrimination in the U.S. “When we asked for proof, the only proof that SB 403 provided when it was launched were three things. One was Cisco, the second was the Equality Labs survey, and the third was a case that Senator Wahab dug out from 1999,” she said.
“Cisco” refers to a case that the California Civil Rights Department (CRD) brought against two Cisco supervisors of Indian origin in 2020, accusing them of harassing a colleague due to his caste. The case against the two supervisors was voluntarily dismissed by the CRD in April, but litigation against the company is still ongoing.
Equality Labs is a Dalit advocacy organization that supports adding caste as a protected class in discrimination policies. In 2018, the group released a report on caste discrimination in the United States, a first-of-its-kind study. The report found that 41% of Dalits faced discrimination based on their caste in schools and 67% of Dalits faced discrimination based on their caste in the workplace. Critics, including COHNA, have said that the survey is flawed, arguing that a representative sample of South Asian Americans wasn’t used.
The third piece of evidence is a 1999 case in which an Indian-American real estate magnate in California was convicted of human trafficking. Federal prosecutors argued that he took advantage of the caste system to exploit Indian women.
There is a limited amount of research on caste discrimination in the United States, partly a reflection of the fact that the size of the group that caste prejudice affects – a subset of the South Asian American community – is so small. The Carnegie study found that only 5% of Indian-Americans reported experiencing caste discrimination. South Asian immigrants disproportionately come from upper-caste backgrounds.
“Who really comes to the U.S.? It’s not usually the lower caste who are fleeing discrimination. They don’t really have the money, the cultural, social, economic, or educational capital to make that journey or transition,” Elupula said.
Activists for SB 403 also argue that many people are reluctant to speak out about their experiences with discrimination. “They are hesitant because of their immigration status, because they feel powerless, because they [feel like] nobody is going to believe them,” Pariyar said.
Prasad contends, however, that the issue of caste in the South Asian diaspora is “a problem that has been manufactured,” that caste discrimination is covered under existing anti-discrimination law, and that laws explicitly banning caste discrimination based on limited evidence would “take the crime of one person and then tar the whole community with it.”
Interest group advocacy against caste discrimination laws highlights fears that such policies will stigmatize all people of South Asian descent in the U.S. There is some merit to these claims. While the concept of caste has been used to understand hierarchical social systems in many parts of the world, the caste system of South Asia is the most well-known. While caste self-identification is present in most of South Asia’s countries and major religions, the word “caste” is culturally associated with India and Hindus.
This association is exemplified by the appearance of caste on the national political stage last summer. In August, a Super PAC aligned with Ron DeSantis’ campaign in the 2024 Republican presidential primary posted hundreds of pages of debate advice, internal polling, and research memos online with recommendations for attacking the Indian-American candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. It’s illegal for Super PACs to privately strategize with campaigns, so they often discreetly post their work on the internet to circumvent the law. Unfortunately for DeSantis, these documents were discovered by The New York Times.
“Ramaswamy — a Hindu who grew up visiting relatives in India and was very much ingrained in India’s caste system — supports this as a mechanism to preserve a meritocracy in America,” the document reads.
Ramaswamy was the only candidate whose national or religious background was brought up in the documents. The advice was notable because, as the Times pointed out, “highlighting a minority candidate’s ethnicity or faith is historically a dog whistle in politics, a way to signify the person is somehow different from other Americans.”
“Who are we kidding? Most Indians have authoritarian tendencies,” wrote one commenter on an article about the selection of Kamala Harris, an Indian-American, as Joe Biden’s running mate in the 2020 presidential election. “They admire strongmen (Modi) and there is rampant sexism and racism (disguised as casteism) in India. Even when Indians move to the West, they still have those tendencies.”
A central idea in the caste law debate is that immigrants transport beliefs from their home countries to their destinations, including bigotry. It’s easy to imagine how that conclusion can fuel stereotypes through oversimplified characterizations of immigrant groups. To many caste law opponents, caste discrimination may be one form of prejudice, but xenophobic portrayals of the entire South Asian, Indian, or Hindu American community as casteist are a rising example of prejudice too. Opponents believe that such stereotypes will inevitably increase with the introduction of caste policies.
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The question of whether anti-caste discrimination legislation would mitigate or amplify discrimination is nuanced. The caste system is a form of systemic discrimination while instances of stereotyping South Asians as casteist are more often instances of interpersonal racism. The main argument of caste law opponents is that such policies would inevitably create increased discrimination in the future whereas supporters argue that legislation such as SB 403 is necessary to curtail discrimination that is already happening. Many South Asian Americans oppose caste laws based on their minority experience in America, fearing that the actions of the few could be a referendum on the character of all South Asians. But caste law supporters claim that many upper caste opponents, blind to their own privilege and never having observed caste discrimination themselves, don’t see the importance of discussing caste inequality and fail to empathize with those who are caste-oppressed.
Many of the interest groups opposing caste discrimination laws have not only objected to the addition of caste as a protected class in anti-discrimination policies but to a range of cases that caste has been brought into. In 2020, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson published the book Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents, comparing systemic inequality in the United States with the caste system of India and the racial policies of Nazi Germany. It was accused by some Hindu interest groups of promoting false equivalence between caste and race and as a continuation of Western essentialization of Indian society. Prasad said that the book “created this framework within which all these fake allegations have been thrown at us” and emphasized that Wilkerson “herself says that she spent less than 60 days in [India]”.
Many Hindu interest groups also opposed the Cisco case, arguing that prosecutors were using a single instance of discrimination to make broad assumptions about the nature of caste. Broadly, interest groups have stated that Amercians’ understanding of caste is distorted. They have also accused supporters of caste legislation of perpetuating Hinduphobia.
The wide-ranging opposition of interest groups to caste-related activities has drawn accusations that interest groups’ efforts are not limited to fending off prejudice but also to prevent the very concept of caste discrimination from entering America’s public consciousness. That’s an argument that many progressive South Asian activists and commentators have made. Ironically, interest groups may have contributed to advancing the same perceptions and stereotypes that they sought to prevent: that caste prejudice is prevalent among South Asians.
With a rising number of initiatives to create caste policies, issues of caste are likely to be increasingly prevalent in public discourse in the years to come. According to Sangay Mishra, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Drew University and the author of Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans, new reports display the diversity of settings where caste prejudice is present in the United States. “There are all kinds of spaces in which we have seen examples of [caste] discrimination coming up. People have testified, people have written their stories, and they have given evidence,” he said.
The Cisco case seems to have opened the door to dozens of reports of caste discrimination in Silicon Valley, bringing tech giants such as Apple and Google into the controversy. Last February, Seattle became the first city in the United States to ban caste discrimination after an ordinance was introduced by Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, an immigrant raised in an upper-caste, Hindu household in India. An increasing number of student organizations have passed caste resolutions and more universities are adding caste as a protected class in nondiscrimination policies. Mishra says that more needs to be done. “The attempt should be [made] to find people who come from [lower-caste] communities and take their opinion, their sense of how they have gone through the process of settling in the U.S.”
The news of proposed caste laws in the United States has even caught the attention of media outlets in South Asia. Some, like Swarajya, a right-wing magazine, were critical, calling Governor Newsom’s veto of SB 403 “a victory for the U.S. Hindu community.” The Indian Express, one of India’s largest English-language newspapers, was more accepting and viewed the legislation through the lens of the efforts of Indian-Americans to achieve success in the U.S. More than just an anti-discriminatory law, the outlet framed the caste law as a fresh start for the Indian-American community, an opportunity to confront old wounds. “That there are enough Indian migrants in the U.S. with the means and courage to raise their voices against discrimination is to be welcomed,” wrote the article. “After all, if the Indian-American dream is merely financial, unwilling to confront its own demons, it is a fragile one.”