By The Vanguard
SACRAMENTO, CA – Legislation here at the Capitol to increase civil rights protections against caste discrimination was OK’d 55-3 by the California State Assembly this week, despite reported death threats against the bill’s author and advocates.
Senate Bill 403, because of opposition, de-emphasized “caste” in the bill’s language—but critics urged lawmakers to “remove the word or kill the bill in its entirety,” according to a Sacramento Bee story.
“California is still a state that stands for civil rights,” said Thenmozhi Soundararajan, executive director of Equality Labs, at a Capitol rally, noting “death threats reported by activists and the bill’s author, Senator Aisha Wahab D-Hayward,” said the Bee.
Soundararajan said, “I think the opponents lead with ‘caste doesn’t exist’ and then lead with political violence, and lead with insinuation and fear and bigotry. That won’t get you very far in California.”
The measure now goes back to the Senate for approval—the upper house approved it without amendments.
The Bee wrote, “Lawmakers chose to put aside arguments that the bill would unfairly target South Asian Americans due to stereotypes linking caste with India and Hinduism. Instead, they backed progressive legal scholars and Dalit civil rights group, Equality Labs. The word Dalit refers to those violently relegated to the bottom of the South Asian caste system, which has historically controlled people’s jobs and education across various religions.”
Supporters said “clarity in the law is needed for a state that is seeing a growing number of South Asian Americans in sectors like Bay Area tech, housing, and employment. They say there’s no point pretending that caste discrimination hasn’t made its way here, and naming ‘caste’ secures clarity in investigations and court rooms where officials are often unaware of what the system is,” wrote the Bee.
“I appreciate every Assembly member who voted in support of SB 403 today. I thank them for their courage in joining me on this journey of enshrining in our state laws protections against caste discrimination,” said Wahab in a statement.
Assemblymen Alex Lee and Evan Low of the Asian American Pacific Islander Caucus previously declined to take a position on the bill, and asked the Assembly Judiciary Committee to not use caste as a subcategory of ancestry or pause the bill for further study. The committee approved the change on July 5, after Wahab had stripped the bill’s background information on South Asia and the caste system.
However, Samir Kalra, HAF’s Managing Director and co-counsel, still opposes the measure, noting, “So long as caste is equated with India in the public imagination and the state of California requires public schools to teach caste as something unique and inherent to India and Hinduism, ‘caste’ will always be associated with South Asians. The specific inclusion of the word (caste) under ‘ancestry’ will be used to stigmatize and profile us as a matter of law.
“This is Asian hate. This is a civil rights issue. This is a women’s rights issue,” the bill’s author, Wahab told the Sacramento Bee back in July. “If the word caste is not in there. It’s not the caste bill, we’re not tackling caste.”
