The company denies the allegations, and though a spokesperson did not respond to my requests for comment, Cisco has said in a statement that it will “vigorously defend itself.”

(India has banned caste discrimination but does hold a certain number of places at public universities for Dalit and other lower-caste applicants.) The lawsuit claims that Cisco did not sufficiently address the aggrieved employee’s concerns and in fact sidelined him, treatment that violates the Civil Rights Act and California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act. According to the complaint, the engineer’s co-workers, who are upper-caste Hindus, “outed” him in the workplace as a Dalit, pejoratively known as the “untouchable” caste, and argued that he had gained entry to the Indian Institute of Technology, one of India’s most prestigious universities, only as a result of affirmative action.

In July 2020, California regulators sued the tech company Cisco Systems over alleged discrimination toward an Indian engineer by his Indian colleagues while all of them were working in the state. The vocabulary may be unfamiliar to most Americans-Dalits, Brahmans, Adivasis, for example-but underlying it is a familiar, and corrosive, subject: discrimination. This group, so the narrative goes, exhibits the promise of the American dream.īut two lawsuits in the past year, as well as two surveys, have offered a clearer picture of this particular minority group, warts and all, finding evidence that many members of the community have imported the specifically Hindu Indian notion of casteism to America. They are well represented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics-the so-called STEM subjects-and more and more of them occupy roles of political and social influence, including Vice President Kamala Harris. Members of this community are more likely to be highly educated and to have health insurance, make more money, work in more senior positions, and have lower rates of poverty than both the average immigrant and the average American. Indians and Indian Americans are often held up as a “model minority” in the United States.

Caste System by Sachchidanand Sinha