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A Washington Post story published on June 2, titled "Google’s plan to talk about caste bias led to ‘division and rancor’," documents the resistance put up by employees at Google identifying themselves as Hindu protesting the platforming of a pedagogy-based lecture by the dalit rights activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan.
What is powerful about the story is the complicity of the infrastructure of Google in de-platforming the event and in targeting the organizer of the event at Google, Tanuja Gupta, who worked as a senior manager at Google News.
The disinformation campaign organized by Hindu employees targeting Soundararajan called her “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu” in emails to the company’s leaders. I am very familiar with these tropes, rooted in disinformation, that are increasingly being deployed by Hindutva adherents to target critics of Hindutva.
Over the course of the past year, in response to my scholarship on Hindutva and the support of CARE, the center I direct for a conference titled "Dismantling Global Hindutva," I have experienced relentless attacks fuelled by a disinformation campaign labeling me Hinduphobic and accusing me of spreading "Hindu-misia" (both Hinduphobia and Hindumisia are terms concocted by Hindutva to silence critics). These attacks have taken the form of letter-writing campaigns directed at my employer, threats on Twitter, sexually violent emails, and death threats on digital platforms.
What is critical to this disinformation campaign is the role of formally recognized organizations such as Hindu Council and Hindu Youth here in Aotearoa, Hindu American Foundation in the US, as well as professionals and business owners in disseminating the disinformation. In the context of Google, the disinformation is seeded and disseminated by employees.
In doing so, Hindutva adherents draw on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, making the claim that the criticism of caste or Islamophobia in Hindutva violates the principles of DEI.
The Indian Institutes of Technologies that both the Google CEO Sundar Pichai (a Tamil Brahmin) and I attended (Pichai graduated a year ahead of me from IIT Kharagpur), and that boast of having trained the leaders of the global tech sector (IIT Bombay alumnus is Parag Agarwal is the Twitter CEO, the chairman and CEO of IBM is the IIT Kanpur B.Tech Arvind Krishna, among many other alums who lead the tech sector) were founded on the principle of cultivating the scientific temper and preparing the engineers that will build the newly independent postcolonial nation.
Inherent in the construction of the IITs then is a Brahminical structure that privileges specific forms of merit that draw upon the historic hierarchies of caste in India.
The very notion of merit is rooted in and intrinsically intertwined with caste.
That caste hierarchies and the accompanying oppressions have shaped access to learning resources and opportunities for learning are erased from the hegemonic caste formations that shape education, and certainly engineering education, in India.
These caste hierarchies are intensified in the IITs, with their projection of elite education based on hyper-competitive entrance examinations.
At IIT, Kharagpur, the Institution I attended, the caste structure played out in the largely Brahmin men, and the occasional Brahmin women, that formed the professorial ranks. The Mukherjees, Chatterjees, Banerjees, and the Bhattacharyas (Bengali Brahmins) made up the professorial ranks, replete with the taken-for-granted practices of inclusion and exclusion, rooted in caste supremacy. In the 1990s when I attended the IITs, it was rare to take a course from a dalit professor.
The Indian Institutes of Technologies that both the Google CEO Sundar Pichai (a Tamil Brahmin) and I attended (Pichai graduated a year ahead of me from IIT Kharagpur), and that boast of having trained the leaders of the global tech sector (IIT Bombay alumnus is Parag Agarwal is the Twitter CEO, the chairman and CEO of IBM is the IIT Kanpur B.Tech Arvind Krishna, among many other alums who lead the tech sector) were founded on the principle of cultivating the scientific temper and preparing the engineers that will build the newly independent postcolonial nation.
Inherent in the construction of the IITs then is a Brahminical structure that privileges specific forms of merit that draw upon the historic hierarchies of caste in India.
The very notion of merit is rooted in and intrinsically intertwined with caste.
That caste hierarchies and the accompanying oppressions have shaped access to learning resources and opportunities for learning are erased from the hegemonic caste formations that shape education, and certainly engineering education, in India.
These caste hierarchies are intensified in the IITs, with their projection of elite education based on hyper-competitive entrance examinations.
At IIT, Kharagpur, the Institution I attended, the caste structure played out in the largely Brahmin men, and the occasional Brahmin women, that formed the professorial ranks. The Mukherjees, Chatterjees, Banerjees, and the Bhattacharyas (Bengali Brahmins) made up the professorial ranks, replete with the taken-for-granted practices of inclusion and exclusion, rooted in caste supremacy. In the 1990s when I attended the IITs, it was rare to take a course from a dalit professor.
It would be worthwhile to examine the caste composition of the Professoriate in the IITs in 2022.
Caste practices played out in the oppressive treatment meted out to oppressed caste students.
Marked as "quota students," they were subjected to racialized slurs challenging their intelligence and their right to be in the IITs. These racialized slurs were often uttered by peers, and reinforced by Professors. For one of these Brahmin professors that oversaw the student body government, the election of an oppressed caste student to a leadership role was enough for him to initiate a campaign to disenfranchise the elected representative.
The power of the caste infrastructure is held up through communication, through gossip networks that undermine, through racialized slurs, and through practices of touch and body that exclude.
In 2021, an IIT Professor was video recorded using casteist slurs targeting students. This recording offered an account of practices of casteist violence that are deep-seated in the institutions.
Caste practices played out in the oppressive treatment meted out to oppressed caste students.
Marked as "quota students," they were subjected to racialized slurs challenging their intelligence and their right to be in the IITs. These racialized slurs were often uttered by peers, and reinforced by Professors. For one of these Brahmin professors that oversaw the student body government, the election of an oppressed caste student to a leadership role was enough for him to initiate a campaign to disenfranchise the elected representative.
The power of the caste infrastructure is held up through communication, through gossip networks that undermine, through racialized slurs, and through practices of touch and body that exclude.
In 2021, an IIT Professor was video recorded using casteist slurs targeting students. This recording offered an account of practices of casteist violence that are deep-seated in the institutions.
The toxicity of the caste structure is manifest in the negotiations of mental health among dalit students, reflected in the disproportionate suicide rate among dalit students.
Caste-based inequality flows from education into the technology sectors, with discriminatory practices around touch, racialized verbal and emotional abuse, and denial of opportunities to dalits built into organizational structures.
Global technology organizations such as Google have large representation of south asians, including Indians.
For Indians in such tech organizations, DEI forms a key resource in addressing the challenges of organizational bias and structural racism.
Hindutva-espousing professionals within organizations such as Google then communicatively invert caste, on one hand, erasing the presence of caste, and on the other hand, claiming that any discussion of caste in Hinduism is Hinduphobic and will result in discrimination of Hindus. The erasure of caste oppression then is incorporated into the discursive architecture, denying caste oppression while perpetuating it.
Salient in the farewell note of Tanuja Gupta to Google is the following account:
"Of all the organizing I have done at this company, I think many are surprised that fighting for
caste equity was the lightning rod issue that took me down. But I have an Indian CEO and SVP who both know exactly what’s going on and tacitly approve of everything that’s happened. I know this because multiple VPs and Directors confirmed that in Sundar’s Leads meeting, they discussed the need for a new universal vetting process of speakers to ensure this doesn't happen again. So my hope is that Googlers start to understand the magnitude of this issue, and the threat that their greater understanding poses to the South Asians in power."
The discussion of caste in global tech organizations threatens the power consolidated by upper caste Indians within these organizations. The discussion of caste disrupts the carefully crafted model minority narrative that is essential to upward mobility. The discussion of caste threatens to reveal the misogyny, violence, and racism that forms the communicative infrastructure of a large cross-section of Hindu society.
Claims to DEI serve as tools for shutting down this discussion.
The silencing of the voices of dalits within organizational structures is violence that perpetuates Hindutva.
References
Bapuji, H., & Chrispal, S. (2020). Understanding economic inequality through the lens of caste. Journal of Business Ethics, 162(3), 533-551.
Fernandez, M. (2017). The new frontier: Merit vs. caste in the Indian IT sector. Oxford University Press.
Gupta, A. (2008). Caste, Class, and Quality at the Indian Institutes of Technology. International Higher Education, (53).
Subramanian, A. (2015). Making merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the social life of caste. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 57(2), 291-322.