Caste is among the world’s oldest forms of rigid social stratification. It dates back thousands of years and allows many privileges to upper castes in the South Asian diaspora by repressing lower castes. A bill was introduced in the California Assembly on August 28^th outlawing caste discrimination by adding one’s caste to the list of categories protected under the state’s anti-discrimination laws. This bill was introduced and authored by State Senator Aisha Wahab, an Afghan-American Democrat, in March 2023, and passed by a near-unanimous vote, 34-1, on May 11^th. That one vote against the bill is why we are still having a debate on casteism as we speak.

In 2021, nearly 1 million Californians self-identified as South Asian – from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka, according to an analysis by the University of Minnesota. Caste issues have surfaced prominently in Silicon Valley, where Indian workers made up 27% of tech workers in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties in 2021. As a representation of this footprint, the combat against casteism, as seen in SB 403, brings a global conflict to the California legislature.

Known as “untouchables,” Dalits occupy a place at the bottom of India’s 3,000-year-old system of social hierarchy. There are approximately 240 million Indian Dalits – which makes them nearly 25% of the population of the largest democracy in the world, and, naturally, a large percentage of the Indians who immigrate to the United States. According to a study by the University of Pennsylvania, over 1.5% of all Indian immigrants to the U.S. are Dalits. However, moving to a new country is not enough for these people to escape the stigma of their caste. Migrating communities intrinsically carry their beliefs within them to the new world they wish to inhabit. Even as far away as America, two-thirds of all Dalit respondents to a 2016 national survey by the Oakland-based activist group Equality Lands said that they had been mistreated at work. One out of three respondents said they had experienced discrimination during their educations, and one out of two said they feared being “outed” as Dalit.

This fear comes from that one dissenting vote, representing a powerful block on both sides.

“To tackle discrimination, we have very strong existing laws and existing protections under categories of ancestry and national origin,” argued Samir Kalra, managing director of the Hindu American Foundation. “[These laws] can, and should, be used to deal with any issue of caste-based discrimination as they arise – and they actually have been used. Creating an entire separate category and law that only applies to minority communities is inconsistent with our constitutional norms.” The Hindu American Foundation and many other Indian American groups have shown up in numbers to protest bills like SB 403, maintaining that there’s no reason to protect people in the U.S. born into lower castes and that doing so targets South Asians.

Naindeep Singh, executive director of a community organizing group for Sikh Californians, says that much of this opposition is in bad faith. “It is rather simple,” Singh said. “If you don’t discriminate against others based on caste, you have little to fear with SB 403’s passage.”

Caste-oppressed people in the United States have organized for over 20 years to pass this bill and emerge from the shadow of violence and discrimination. The cost has been a heavy one to shoulder: the National Crime Records Bureau of India records some 45,935 cases of caste-based violence each year. And this violence has followed the caste-oppressed across thousands of miles.

“Let’s face it, this is a difficult issue to discuss,” said Amar Shergill, former chairperson of the California Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus. Shergill, whose own family is from India, says politicians have hesitated to talk about caste. “Like so many issues of oppression within the community – whether it’s sex discrimination or child abuse or caste oppression – folks don’t want to talk about the pain in their own community. …thankfully, we are at that place [of discussion] now.”

Caste has now been formally mentioned and defined in legislation for the first time in California’s history, and the bill is now one step closer to becoming law. This is a huge result for the tireless efforts of 700 advocacy missions across the entire state, which pressed on despite “many attempts to just kill the bill and remove ‘caste’ entirely,” Thenmozhi Soundarajan, a caste equity activist and founder of the civil rights organization Equality Labs, told N.B.C. News. “For us to preserve it is an amazing win.”