In what is likely to be a precedent-setting case, California regulators filed a suit in the federal court on June 30 against Cisco Systems ...
In what is likely to be a precedent-setting case, California regulators filed a suit in the federal court on June 30 against Cisco Systems Inc, alleging that the company failed to prevent discrimination, harassment and retaliation against a Dalit engineer, anonymised as “John Doe” in the filing.
The Cisco case bears the burden of making anti-Dalit prejudice legible to American civil rights law as an extreme form of social disability attached to those formerly classified as “Untouchable.” Herein lies its key legal significance. The suit implicitly compares two systems of descent-based discrimination – caste and race – and translates between them to find points of convergence or family resemblance.
The charge of caste discrimination also challenges the myth of the South Asian diaspora as a monolithic community and a model minority, the “other one percent”. The case makes caste internationally visible as the practice of social exclusion that is materially consequential. A little historical background will assist in the comparative work of discerning the consequences of untouchability in a context geared to findings about the very different category of race.
Two unequal systems
Reservations are a unique form of civil rights law that defines caste as a system of historical discrimination resulting in enduring group disadvantage, or social...
