“Noncooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.”
-Mahatma Gandhi
The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (CDFEH) is the latest player in a series of negative actions being perpetrated by the State of California against a minority Hindu population in the state. Hindu Americans in California are overwhelmingly productive and lawful contributors to the state’s economy in a variety of industries and capacities, but yet they have unfortunately been singled out and targeted because of their religious beliefs through a barrage of negativity and hatefulness by various agencies and government officials within the State of California.
A state’s oppression of a minority community on the basis of their beliefs adversely impacts not only the Hindu American, as in this case, but also all Americans that believe in democratic values. The use of power to oppress is not only unlawful and unethical, but it is also a clear abuse of the processes laid out in the US Constitution by our founding fathers.
In a recently filed lawsuit by California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (CDFEH) against Cisco Systems (case number 5:20-cv-04374) under the pretext of discrimination of a Hindu ‘Dalit’ by other fellow Hindus, the complaint contains slurs against Hindu Americans while making false allegations about Hinduism, the religion followed by over 1.3 billion people world wide. This unfortunate approach by a government agency towards Hindus should not be judged in isolation. Instead, it is indicative of greater systemic discrimination being exhibited by the state’s governmental entities against a minority community. Below are simply a few recent examples of California’s rampant Hinduphobia.
CALIFORNIA TEXTBOOKS UNFAIRLY DEPICT HINDUISM NEGATIVELY RELATIVE TO ALL OTHER RELIGIONS
Over the past decade, there have been many instances of blatant discrimination against Hindus. For example, until recently, California textbooks have been blatantly unfair to Hindus in their description of Hinduism as a religion. Whereas words like ethics and moral teachings, unselfishness, compassion, righteousness, peace, love, law and justice are used for all other major religions including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, none of these words were used to describe Hinduism in school textbooks. Whereas Christianity from Judaism and Islam from Christianity are depicted as distinct religions that share common beliefs and history, Buddhism and Jainism are described as improvements or “civilizing forces” from Hinduism. In 2017, prominent Hindu organizations like the Hindu American Foundation and the Hindu Education Foundation worked hard to convince the California Department of Education of the need for basic fairness in their depiction of Hinduism. Comparing the strengths of a few groups with the weakness of another violates every rule of basic decency and fairness, and yet, based on a press release on the Hindu American Foundation website, it took “a broad coalition of more than 75 interfaith and community groups, 17 state and federal officials, and 38 leading academics” to convince the California agency to portray Hinduism in a fair and balanced manner compared to the portrayal of all other religions discussed.
To make matters worse, the Hindu children and their parents that patiently went through the process to share their feelings and thoughts with the CA Department of Education, were viciously attacked by the Director of the anti-India and anti-Hindu organization Equality Labs Thenmozhi Soundarajan. This group used abusive remarks towards Dalits and Hindus, while pretending to be the ‘savior’ of Dalits.
SAN FRANCISCO BOARD OF SUPERVISORS OPPOSES INDIA’S PROTECTION OF HINDU AND SIKH PERSECUTED MINORITIES
On July 22, 2020, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (SFBOS) passed an ill-conceived, ill-researched resolution, to express their displeasure at the Government of India’s humanitarian efforts. In December 2019, the Indian Government had taken steps to help persecuted Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, and other minorities by passing an act called the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). In response, the SFBOS passed Resolution 200771 which stated that it opposed India’s exclusionary National Register of Citizens and Citizenship Amendment Act. This is outrageous considering the Indian Government till date has not even passed (nor even considered passing) a National Register of Citizens nor does the CAA preclude any person of any religion from applying for citizenship using the proper channels. In fact, the United States in 1990 had enacted similar legislation called the “Lautenberg Amendment” which does the same thing; it expedited citizenship for certain persecuted religious minorities from the former Soviet Union. The US’ Lautenberg Amendment and India’s Citizenship Amendment Act were humanitarian gestures by secular democracies to protect minorities that were being badly hurt, tortured, or killed in their native countries. It is disgraceful that the SFBOS didn’t bother to do any due diligence prior to collectively wasting taxpayer money and passing this insulting and offensive resolution.
Instead, Supervisor Gordon Mar, the former Director of the Chinese Progressive Association and the main sponsor of this resolution, stated the following before the vote:
“India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the National Register of Citizens (NRC), and the National Population Register (NPR) is rooted in the far-right Hindu nationalist ideology of the Modi/Shah regime in his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Together they lay the legal foundation to denaturalize millions of Indian minorities to create the largest network of concentration camps in the world. Since the act was passed last December, and especially during COVID, Muslims and other vulnerable communities, including Dalits, queers, and trans people, women, and the poor are being profiled and treated as second-class citizens and imprisoned in massive detention centers being built in India. Last August, the Indian government required 33 million people to prove their citizenship in the state of Assam, denaturalizing almost 2 million mostly Muslim Indians, rendering them stateless.”
This statement is egregiously defamatory, blatantly false, irresponsible, and wrong on so many levels:
- the NPR and NCC have not even been discussed by the Indian parliament nor passed into law;
- the CAA does not discuss or affect the citizenship of any Indian citizen, including that of any Indian Muslim;
- there is no evidence of concentration camps being built across India; and
- the NRC that was conducted in Assam was done on the order of the Indian Supreme Court not on the orders of the BJP government.
Interestingly, Supervisor Mar then thanked the people who helped bring this resolution to the forefront, and among those, was Sharmin Hossain from Equality Labs.
CA DEPARTMENT OF FAIR EMPLOYMENT AND HOUSING (CDFEH) MAKES INFLAMMATORY AND FALSE STATEMENTS AGAINST HINDUS AND HINDU TRADITIONS
And now we witness yet one more example of blatant Hinduphobia by a California governmental department. On June 30, 2020, the CDFEH filed a lawsuit against Cisco Systems on behalf of a Cisco employee alleging workplace discrimination on the basis of caste. While the discrimination issue itself is a matter for the courts, it’s appalling to witness that the complaint as-drafted is blatantly offensive to Hindus by openly linking casteism to the Hindu faith. This claim linking the two, which has been debunked by many scholars world-wide, is as offensive as linking slavery to the tenets of Christianity. And, to make matters worse, the entire case is seemingly predicated on the poor research, false statements and superficial articles that have originated from the same two-person anti-Hindu organization Equality Labs mentioned repeatedly above.
For example, the complaint prominently utilizes a 2018 Caste “Survey” conducted by Equality Labs that neither follows accepted standards nor norms of statistical surveys. The survey purports to find evidence of caste-based discrimination in the United States. However, it is interesting to note that there is no evidence that the survey was ever disseminated among any Hindu temples or mainstream Hindu organizations. The Hindu community at large seems to have been excluded from a survey that purports to measure discrimination in the Hindu community. The details of data collection or the process followed are surprisingly not even mentioned in this “survey”, but yet it was used by a California governmental entity to insult a major contributor to the Silicon Valley economy: the Hindu population.
To make matters worse, the complaint is replete with racist anti-immigrant statements against a minority community that has been facing a growing level of discrimination and hate crimes in this country. In fact, since 2015, the FBI has recorded about a 300% increase in anti-Hindu hate crimes annually. And yet, this CDFEH complaint makes general statements devoid of context with the effect of further igniting flames against this community. For instance, the complaint states that Cisco has a significant “over representation” of Asian employees compared to other companies in this field. This is a blatantly deceptive statement. Cisco is a tech company headquartered in the Bay Area; its industry and its location would naturally lead to a higher percentage of Asian employees. The inclusion of this statement is baffling; it clearly had no relevance to the issues of the complaint.
CONCLUSION
There are many other examples of anti-Hindu/anti-India behavior being orchestrated by the progressive organizations and governmental agencies across California in recent years. Hindu Americans are and have always been positive, productive contributors to their families, their companies, their societies, and to the country. They are one of the most highly educated demographics in the United States. And they are not usually the community to claim the victim status.
However, some patterns of unethical and harmful behavior become too blatant to ignore, and any American who cherishes the values of democracy would be foolish to do so. It is simply a matter of time before the propaganda machinations come for them too.
