CoHNA urges North American companies, cities and universities to take corrective action and redress harm done through the adoption of “caste” policies.

New Jersey, November 29, 2024: A new academic study by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and the Social Perception Lab at Rutgers University released this week, found that exposure to caste discrimination narratives results in bias against Hindus as a whole. 

After reading a short description of “caste discrimination” from Equality Labs content, participants in the study were much more likely to endorse Hitler’s quotes (since the word ‘Brahmin’ replaced ‘Jew’). When DEI makes well-meaning people agree with debasing labels like ‘parasites’, ‘viruses’, and ‘the devil personified’, we know there is a problem.

In the experiment, a Hindu-sounding college admissions officer rejected a Hindu-sounding candidate. Study participants exposed to anti-caste rhetoric were more likely to assume that the admissions officer was upper caste and biased and feel the decision was unfair–despite no supporting evidence. Alarmingly, many exhibited a willingness to punish the admissions officer. And to view Hindus, in general, as racist.

Since 2021, CoHNA has battled the spread of this dangerous narrative and stands vindicated by the results of this research. 

Course correction needed in the US and Canada

“An immediate fallout from this study is that any future use of such materials is a clear effort to propagate hatred against Hindus”, said Nikunj Trivedi, President of CoHNA. “Organisations that have created caste policies should take a good hard look at their actions and start reversing some of the harm that they have already visited on Hindus in the US and Canada.”

Over the past few years, a number of taxpayer-funded institutions have endorsed and amplified the impact of dangerous caste narratives. It would be important to see corrective action, starting with California’s Civil Rights Department – the first institution to platform these problematic materials as well as cities like Seattle, WA and Fresno, CA.

Corporate behemoths like Apple, Cisco, IBM, and Salesforce; and American educational institutions like Brandeis University, UC–Davis, the Ethnic Studies Department at UC–San Diego, the California State University system, Brown, Harvard University’s graduate student union, Colby College all of whom have created policies that are building hate against a minority must also rethink. 

In Canada cities like Burnaby, public institutions like Calgary University and University of Toronto, the Toronto District School Board and Ontario Human Rights Commission have bought this flawed narrative wholesale with even the Federal Government’s Anti-Racism Strategy including misguided references. Canadian institutions must pursue evidence-based and inclusive policies instead.

Research validates recent incidents of Hinduphobia coded as social justice 

CoHNA’s leader of Government Relations, Sudha Jagannathan, herself a Bahujan, who had spearheaded the opposition to the malicious SB-403 Bill, feels validated by the report. “Shocking as they are, the results of the study do not surprise us. For many years now, groups have explicitly compared Hindus to Nazis. No wonder the experimental participants drew such vile comparisons about a group of folks they did not even know.”

The results of the research echo the “desire to punish” we saw play out in real life in the infamous Cisco caste debacle where California was forced to drop its own case without a single word spoken in an open court. The state’s Civil Rights Department not only built its case around the discredited report from Labs but also specifically tagged the defendants as ‘Brahmin’, even though Sundar Iyer, one of two former Cisco employees accused of caste-based discrimination, had described himself as an agnostic, decades earlier. 

Reacting to the glaring injustice highlighted by the NCRI report, tech worker and CoHNA Steering Committee member Aldrin Deepak said, “It is clear that ordinary Americans were willing to punish perceived ‘upper caste’ without any basis. As a Dalit and a practising Hindu, (it was deeply disappointing to see) voices like mine and that of the late Milind Makwana, who refuted claims of caste discrimination in America, disappear in the drumbeat to divide Hindu Americans into ‘oppressed’ and ‘oppressor’ without any evidence.”

This NCRI report also provides powerful evidence that exposure to problematic narratives and Hinduphobic words like caste can create bias against an entire category of people. This finding calls into question the basis on which a lawsuit against the California State University (CSU) caste discrimination policy was dismissed. Writing in the dismissal of that lawsuit, Judge RG Klausner opined that “the use of the word (caste) by itself does not evince any impermissible hostility against religion”. However, this report shows that the word caste, when used along with certain rhetoric (as was the situation at CSU) does exactly that: create hostility against Hindus. 

Methodology and Background

The caste study was designed by leading scientist Dr Lee Jussim at the Rutgers Social Perceptions Lab and conducted on a nationally representative sample of 876 individuals. Authors used a treatment-control approach to probe the impact of caste training on the perceptions of ordinary Americans about Hindus. 

A randomly selected experimental group within the sample was exposed to the language of Equality Labs, taken from their unscientific but widely used survey on “Caste Discrimination in the US”. The control group was presented with a neutral, academic view of the ancient social system. 

The NCRI research findings bolster the widespread concern in the Hindu American community that such initiatives result in targeting ordinary Hindu Americans for implicit and inherent bias. It also validates the argument that Hinduphobia is a real phenomenon, manifesting as explicit bias and is fanned by the evidence-free accusation of caste discrimination in America. 

Image source: CoHNA.org