California sues Cisco over discrimination against Dalit employee

The US' California state has filed a lawsuit against Cisco System Inc for alleged discrimination against a Dalit Indian-American employee. The lawsuit was filed by California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing in a federal court in San Jose, for alleged caste-based discrimination. 

According to media reports, California authorities have accused Cisco of "discriminating against an Indian-American employee and allowing him to be harassed by two managers because he was from a lower caste."

It is said that the victim has been working as a principal engineer at Cisco’s San Jose headquarters since October 2015.

According to the lawsuit, former Cisco engineering managers Sundar Iyer and Ramana Kompella “harassed, discriminated, and retaliated against an engineer.”

The complainant was “expected to accept a caste hierarchy within the workplace where he held the lowest status within a team of higher-caste colleagues, receiving less pay, fewer opportunities, and other inferior terms and conditions of employment because of his religion, ancestry, national origin/ethnicity, and race/colour.”

The lawsuit stated that this is not a new phenomenon and a 2018 survey of South Asians in the US found that 67% of Dalits reported being treated unfairly at their American workplaces.

Cisco's reponse regarding the lawsuit filed against the company is awaited.

Last month, tech major Infosys by a former diversity head of the company in the US. Davina Linguist, the former employee of the company alleged that the company had retaliated against her for testifying in 2016 against the company in the earlier class action suit.