A California lawmaker on Wednesday (March 22) has introduced a legislation that seeks to ban discrimination based on caste. If the bill introduced by Senator Aisha Wahab gets passed, California will be first state in the US to ban discrimination based on caste.
The bill from Wahab, an Afghan-American lawmaker has come just a month after Seattle became first country in the US to ban caste discrimination.
Caste system is a social evil found in South Asia, mainly India, that defines a social hierarchy based on old, worn-out criterion. It has been used as a justification by ‘upper’ castes to oppress those designated to ‘lower’ castes for centuries. There have been numerous reports of such caste-based discrimination among people of Indian heritage in the US.
California is home to major tech companies. The sector attracts large number of tech professionals from India. If the law gets passed, it will cover everyone in the state along with thousands of indoviduals with Indian heritage.
Senator Wahab herself represents a district in north California which has large number of South Asians. She was raised in San Francisco Bay area by a US couple after her parents passed away. She told BBC that she herself did not experience caste discrimination but she was aware of the social problem because of the the area she grew up in.
“I’ve had friends tell me that their parents immigrated to this country because they belong to different castes and [their] families weren’t accepting of that,” said Wahab, as quoted by the BBC.
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