California civil rights department dismisses caste case against two Indian-American Cisco engineers

Washington: The California Civil Rights Department (CRD) has dismissed a caste discrimination case against two Indian-origin Cisco engineers — Sundar Iyer and Ramana Kompella, while still keeping alive its litigation against the Silicon Valley tech giant.

A mediation conference between Cisco and the CRD is still scheduled to be held on 2 May.

What was the case?

The two Cisco supervisors were accused in the department’s lawsuit of discriminating and harassing an employee on the basis of caste – a division of people based on birth or descent.

Last week, the Santa Clara Superior Court had dismissed the case. The employee belonged to the Dalit community.

The CRD case, filed in July 2020, made headlines in the US and in India.

California’s lawsuit against Cisco, meanwhile, alleged that the Dalit engineer received less pay and fewer opportunities and that the defendants retaliated against him when he opposed “unlawful practices, contrary to the traditional order between the Dalit and higher castes”.

The engineer worked on a team at Cisco’s San Jose headquarters with Indians who all immigrated to the US as adults, and all of whom were of high caste, the lawsuit stated.

The lawsuit against Cisco and its engineers led to a start of a movement against caste discrimination led by groups such as Oakland, California-based Equality Labs.

The Civil Rights Department voluntarily dismissing its case against the two engineers is a vindication for activists who have held the position that “the state has no right to attribute wrongdoing to Hindu and Indian Americans simply because of their religion or ethnicity,” said Suhag Shukla, executive director of the Hindu American Foundation.

“Two Indian Americans endured a nearly three year nightmare of unending investigations, a brutal online witch hunt and a presumption of guilt in the media,” she said.

Thenmozhi Soundararajan, founder and executive director of Equality Labs, a Dalit-led advocacy group, last week said that the action “does not change anything” including the fact that the Cisco case “has given so many Dalits the courage to come forward with their stories about caste discrimination in education, the medical and tech industries.”

“This is not a loss, but progress,” she said. “The Dalit community owes (the engineer) and the Civil Rights Department gratitude for having the courage to bring such a historic case forward.”

With inputs from AP.

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